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 Melbourne, 23 October 1916; disembarked Plymouth, England, 29 January 1917.

Proceeded overseas to France, 19 April 1917; taken on strength, 6th Bn, in the field, 7 May 1917.

Wounded in action, Belgium, 4 October 1917; subsequently reported Killed in Action, 4 October 1917.

Handwritten note on Form B103: 'Buried'.

Additional typed entry: 'Buried in Bellwarden Ridge M.C. J.7.C. 66 Sheet 28 N.E.'.

Grave subsequently lost.

Statement, Red Cross File No 1330910H, 7075 Pte W.H. RUMBLE, A Company, 6th Bn (patient, 3rd Australian Auxiliary Hospital, Dartford, England), 4 April 1918: 'I saw him killed at Passchendaele. He was caught by pieces of shell, which knocked him about very badly, death being instantaneous. We were getting our tapes ready for mobilization purposes at the time. Several others were caught by thge same shell ... I was wounded the following morning and did not see his grave, but I was told he was buried at place of casualty.'