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 Fremantle, 23 December 1916; disembarked Devonport, England, 16 February 1917.

Proceeded overseas to France, 19 June 1917; taken on strength, 48th Bn, in the field, 9 July 1917.By statutory declaration assumed true name of Edward STUBBS-MILLS.

Reported missing in action, 12 October 1917.

Court of Enquiry, 8 April 1918, concluded: 'Killed in action, 12 October 1917'.

Note, Red Cross File: 'No trace Germany. Cert. by Capt. Mills. 10.10.1919.'

Statement, 3116 Pte A.ALFORD, 48th Bn (patient, 57th General Hospital, Boulogne), 11 December 1917: 'I knew Mills (E. Stubbs) who came from W. Australia and who was about 20 years old. In build he was tall and slight and of dark complexion. He was single and an agriculturalist before joining up. We trained together at Blackboy Hill Camp and came over in the same boat. He was in my Pltn. and in the bayonet section and in the early morning of Oct 12th 1917 we went over for an attack on a part of Passchendaele Ridge and he was found to be missing on roll next morning. As before stated I saw all the confusion and enemy sniping that went on during out [?] set back and was not far from Mills but L/C Smith in charge of the gun team was closer and would be able to say something more than myself.'