"I don't want to live in a country that will elect Sarah Palin."

Fragments of a conversation between two grey-blonde ladies, sitting a few rows down, drift above the racket of the unlit airport coach that bounces and grinds towards Manhattan on Halloween.

"And can you imagine: Cindy McCain, that Stepford wife?"

Sarah Palin scares people. John, and evidently Cindy McCain too, scare people. The drawing on the cover of the current New Yorker shows a group of terrified ghouls fleeing a pair of toddlers in McCain and Palin masks. Barack and Michelle Obama definitely scare people, too, although any shivers their names send down the spines of New Yorkers are mostly of a pleasurable kind. It's as if Halloween, a meaningless relic kept in our calendar for its commercial value alone, once again serves a ritual purpose ahead of the 4 November election. 

Just past midnight on 11 November, the Menin Gate of Ypres is quiet and still. Even the rain, a constant companion on any winter visit to Flanders, falls silently. The peace is disturbed only by an occasional passer-by trotting past, collar upturned against the weather, or a car slipping quickly through the gate, wipers working overtime.  

The heart of the night is a good time to arrive at one of the greatest memorials of the Great War. In a few hours, it will be impossible to get close as the town commemorates the 90th anniversary of the Armistice.
Although officially this is a gate, it is so broad many visitors consider it a tunnel. The reason the Menin Gate is so deep is to accommodate the names of 54,896 missing British and Commonwealth soldiers who lost their lives in the Ypres Salient, a Dantean hell of noise, mud, blood and slaughter from 1914-1918.