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 Adelaide, 12 July 1916; disembarked Plymouth, England, 9 September 1916.

Admitted to Fargo Military Hospital, 21 September 1916 (bronchitis); marched into 12th Training Bn, Codford, from hospital, 5 October 1916.

Admitted to hospital, 22 January 1917; discharged from hospital, 18 February 1917.

Proceeded overseas to France, 22 May 1917; taken on strength, 48th Bn, in the field, 11 June 1917.

Reported wounded and missing, 12 October 1917.

Court of Enquiry, April 1918, concluded: 'Killed in action, 12 October 1917.'

Note, Red Cross File No 1490911P: 'No trace Germany. Cert. by Capt. Mills 10-10-1919.'

Statement, 3112 Pte T. HARVEY, 48th Bn, 11 February 1918: 'Was in D Company, 16th Pltn, Lewis Gun Section, came from S. Australia. I saw him wounded by a sniper. the bullet went in the back of the ear, and came out the small of the back. It happened during the hop over at Ypres, on Oct. 12th. We had to retire owing to Fritz counter attacking, and he was left there, and would be taken prisoner, if he lived, which I think is doubtful. We "Went over" together, and were just getting into a shell hole when he got knocked.'