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, 20 June 1916; admitted to hospital, at sea, 24 July 1916 (measles); discharged from ship's hospital, 26 July 1916; disembarked Plymouth, England, 10 August 1916.

Admitted to Fargo Hospital, 3 November 1916 (appendicitis); discharged to duty, 6 December 1916; marched in to 10th Training Bn.

Proceeded overseas to France, 22 May 1917; joined 6th Bn, in the field, 12 June 1917.

Reported missing in action, Belgium, 4 October 1917.

Court of Enquiry, held 28 November 1917, declared fate to be 'Killed in Action, Belgium, 4. 10.17'.

Note on Red Cross File No 2780501N: 'No trace Germany. Cert. by Capt. Mills. 10.10.19.'

Statement, 854A Pte A.H. CROCKETT, C Company, 6th Bn, 23 November 1917: 'He came from Natimuk, Victoria. His home was in England. He was big, tall, fair. He was a stretcher bearer. Pte. Burns of the 6th Battalion Stretcher Bearers (now with the Battn.) said that he saw Triggs going out with a wound in the arm just prior to the hop over at Passchendaele on Oct. 4th. we were in a barrage for �?�½ an hour before we went over. I wrote to his people and told them what I knew. He was a pal of mine. He must have been blown up on his way to the Dressing Station, but nothing was ever found of him.'