The AIF Project

Anton Adolf Constant COMMELIN

Regimental number2603
Place of birthUtrecht, Holland
ReligionDutch Reformed Church
OccupationStation hand
Addressc/o Mrs E E Boyle, Box Hill Werris Creek, New South Wales
Marital statusMarried
Age at embarkation28
Next of kinWife, Mrs V Commelin, 43 Watson Street, Newtown, Sydney, New South Wales
Enlistment date20 July 1915
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name17th Battalion, 6th Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/34/2
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Sydney, New South Wales, on board HMAT A14 Euripides on 2 November 1915
Rank from Nominal RollCorporal
Unit from Nominal Roll55th Battalion
Other details from Roll of Honour CircularEnlsited 20 July 1915 - 17th Bn 6th Reinforcements; taken on strength 55th Bn 16 February 1916; promoted Cpl 17 November 1916.
FateKilled in Action 26 September 1918
Place of death or woundingPolygon Wood, Belgium
Age at death28
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel ), 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
160

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