The AIF Project

Leslie Gordon CAMPBELL

Regimental number29504
Place of birthAlbany, Western Australia
SchoolLeonora State School, Western Australia
ReligionPresbyterian
OccupationSaddler
Address272 Lord Street, East Perth, Western Australia
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation19
Next of kinFather, D M Campbell, 272 Lord Street, East Perth, Western Australia
Previous military service37th Battery Australian Field Artillery; Served in the Citizen Military Forces.
Enlistment date12 March 1916
Date of enlistment from Nominal Roll12 March 1916
Rank on enlistmentDriver
Unit nameHowitzer Brigade 118
AWM Embarkation Roll number13/136/1
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Melbourne, Victoria, on board HMAT A60 Aeneas on 3 October 1916
Rank from Nominal RollDriver
Unit from Nominal Roll13th Field Ambulance
FateKilled in Action 13 October 1917
Place of death or woundingMenin Road, Ypres, Belgium
Age at death20.5
Age at death from cemetery records20
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 7), Belgium

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.

Panel number, Roll of Honour,
  Australian War Memorial
17
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: Dugald and Amelia CAMPBELL, 272 Lord Street, Perth, Western Australia. Native of Albany, Western Australia
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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