The AIF Project

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

Embarked Brisbane, 15 September 1916; disembarked Plymouth, England, 9 December 1916, and marched in to No 13 Camp, Codford.

Note, Red Cross File No 2620904N: 'No trace Germany[.] Cert. by Capt. Mills 10/10/19.'

Statement, 2690 Lance Corporal S. LANCASHIRE, C Compasny, 47th Bn (patient, 1st Australian Auxiliary Hospital, Harefield, England), 21 June 1918: 'I saw him wounded in the leg by a shell by a heavy barrage while in the reserve line, near Dernancourt, near Albert, about 8 a.m. on 5-4-18. I was wounded myself just after, and the Germans took the trench soon afterwards.'

Second statement by LANCASHIRE, No 1 Command Depot, Sutton Veny, England (undated): 'I saw No. 2502 Private Stevenson J.G. 47th Battalion, lying wounded through the leg in a trench on the morning of 5.4.18. Stretcher bearers were present at the time, but I am unable to state whether Private Stevenson was atended to. I myself waswounded on the same day, and up to the time of my leaving the line, he had not been removed. He seemed to be very badly wounded. I believe the enemy succeeded in taking some prisoners in that sector.'