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, 23 October 1916; disembarked Devonport, England, 28 December 1916.

Found guilty, 13th training Bn, Codford, 13 January 1917, of being absent without leave, 1am to 8pm, 12 January: admonished, and forfeited 1 day's pay under Royal Warrant.

Marched in to 13th Training Bn from hospital, 16 February 1917 (no further details recorded).

Proceeded overseas to France, 13 March 1917; taken on strength, 50th Bn, in the field, 18 March 1917.

Wounded in action, 18 October 1917; now, 28 November 1917, reported wounded and missing; now, 27 December 1917, reported killed in action, Belgium, 18 October 1917.

Red Cross File No 0901113F, Statement, 4321 Pte T.H. MARSHALL, D Company, 50th Bn (patient, Havre Hospital), 4 March 1918: 'He was in D. Company, 14th. Platoon. I knew him slightly; he was in a bombing section with me. About the 18th. October we came back from the line into supports near a big wood before you get to Passchendaele. I saw Deer carried out of the line by S/Bearers with a badly wounded leg. I never heard if he got to the D/Station. Light shelling was going on.'

Second statement, 733 Sergeant S. SAMPSON, D Company, 50th Bn (patient, 7th Canadian General Hospital, Etaples), 30 April 1918: 'Deer was in my pl. - XIV. Behind Passchendaele Ridge at Zonnebeke in October we had just got relieved and were back holding supports when the Germans started a bombardment. Deer was in a shallow dugout when he was killed instantly by a piece of shell. I saw him buried with 6 others in one grave. The names were marked on a wooden cross.'

Third statement, 4241 Pte F.D. O'NEILL, D Company, 50th Bn (on board HS 'Grantully Castle'), 4 May 1918: 'He was in D. Company, and the 14th. Platoon. We were at Ypres on October 18th in the trenches. Deer was wounded by a shell which broke his leg. I carried him out to the D/Station and left him there. That is the last I saw of him. He was about 5 feet 5, hair rather between dark and fair.'