The AIF Project

Walter William LEONARD

Regimental number5361
Place of birthNorwood South Australia
ReligionMethodist
OccupationMachinist
AddressLurline Street, South Coast, West Adelaide, South Australia
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation25
Next of kinMother, Mrs Amelia Jane Leonard, Lurline Street, South Coast, West Adelaide, South Australia
Enlistment date8 February 1916
Rank on enlistmentSapper
Unit nameSeptember 1916 Reinforcements
AWM Embarkation Roll number16/14/1
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Melbourne, Victoria, on board HMAT A23 Suffolk on 29 September 1916
Rank from Nominal RollSapper
Unit from Nominal Roll3rd Tunnelling Company
FateKilled in Action 1 October 1917
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 7), Belgium

The Menin Gate Memorial (so named because the road led to the town of Menin) was constructed on the site of a gateway in the eastern walls of the old Flemish town of Ypres, Belgium, where hundreds of thousands of allied troops passed on their way to the front, the Ypres salient, the site from April 1915 to the end of the war of some of the fiercest fighting of the war.

The Memorial was conceived as a monument to the 350,000 men of the British Empire who fought in the campaign. Inside the arch, on tablets of Portland stone, are inscribed the names of 56,000 men, including 6,178 Australians, who served in the Ypres campaign and who have no known grave.

The opening of the Menin Gate Memorial on 24 July 1927 so moved the Australian artist Will Longstaff that he painted 'The Menin Gate at Midnight', which portrays a ghostly army of the dead marching past the Menin Gate. The painting now hangs in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, at the entrance of which are two medieval stone lions presented to the Memorial by the City of Ypres in 1936.

Since the 1930s, with the brief interval of the German occupation in the Second World War, the City of Ypres has conducted a ceremony at the Memorial at dusk each evening to commemorate those who died in the Ypres campaign.

Panel number, Roll of Honour,
  Australian War Memorial
27

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