The AIF Project

'He enlisted in Hobart, December 1915; gained his Commission in June 1916. Left for England with the 3rd Reinforcements of 40th Battalion, September 1916. In June 1917 he joined the 48th Battalion in France. His Colonel wrote "He had specialised in Musketry and was a very fine instructor: he had in consequences acted at Battalion Musketry Instructor ever since he joined us. The work he did in this directiuon was invaluable." Details from Mary F Sharland (sister), 72 Adelaide Street, Lanreath, Hobart, Tasmania.

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.

War service: Western Front