Peter BRAND

Regimental number3744
Place of birthCharters Towers Queensland
ReligionRoman Catholic
OccupationMiner
Addressc/o Stationmaster, Lynbrook via Cairns, Queensland
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation18
Next of kinMother, Mrs A W Brand, Mount Surprise, Queensland
Enlistment date15 March 1915
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name11th Battalion, 12th Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/28/3
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Fremantle, Western Australia, on board RMS Mongolia on 22 November 1915
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll11th Battalion
Other details from Roll of Honour CircularEnlisted 15 March 1915 - 11th Bn, 12th Reinforcements. Taken on strength, 11th Bn, 2 March 1916. Wounded at Pozieres, France, July 1916.
FateKilled in Action 31 October 1917
Place of death or woundingPasschendaele, Ypres, Belgium
Age at death20
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 17), 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
61
Other details

War service: Egypt, Western Front

Medals: 1914-15 Star, British War Medal, Victory Medal