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: Egypt, Western Front

Statement, Red Cross File, 911 Pte E.J. CULLEN, C Company, 32nd Bn, 13 September 1918: 'These two men [DWYER and 1884 S.F. BATES] were killed by a pigeon bomb at Messines. They were taken out and buried half way from Messines Ridge at Fanny Street Sap.'

Second statement, 1352 Pte W. HORNBY, C Company, 32nd Bn (patient, 3rd Southern General Hospital, Oxford), 13 September 1918: I was not far from Paddy Dwyer (32.C.XI) when he was killed instantaneously by a Pigeon shell, while we were holding the front line, at Messines in March. He was buried in the Cemetery at Messines. I have seen his grave.' [Comment by interviewer: 'Quite intelligent'.]

Grave subsequently lost; ground captured by the enemy.