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Day Four: Menin Gate, Ypres, Belgium
The Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing is one of four British and Commonwealth memorials to the missing in the battlefield area of the Ypres Salient in Belgian Flanders. The memorial bears the names of 54,389 officers and men from United Kingdom and Commonwealth Forces who fell in the Ypres Salient before 16th August 1917 and who have no known grave.
Every night at 8.00pm a moving ceremony takes place under the Menin Gate. The Last Post Ceremony has become part of the daily life in Ypres and the local people are proud of this simple but moving tribute to the courage and self-sacrifice of those who fell in defence of their town.
From 11th November, 1929 the Last Post has been sounded at the Menin Gate Memorial every night and in all weathers. The only exception to this was during the four years of the German occupation of Ypres from 20th May 1940 to 6th September 1944. On the very evening that Polish forces liberated Ypres the ceremony was resumed at the Menin Gate, in spite of the heavy fighting still going on in other parts of the town. Bullet marks can still be seen on the memorial from that time.
About the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing
From October 1914 British and Commonwealth troops began to march east through the town's eastern exit or gateway, known at the time by its French name of the Porte de Menin. This translates as the Menin Gate. In its Flemish translation, as it is now known, the gateway is called the Menenpoort. In 1914 there was no building or formal gate as such, it was simply a crossing point over the moat and through the ramparts of the old town fortifications.
Leaving the city of Ypres the troops marched through this location onto the roads leading eastwards into the battlefields of the Ypres Salient. Many of them would make their way along the road to Menin, which soon became known to the soldiers as “the Menin Road”.
For the next four years of the Great War soldiers from practically every British and Commonwealth regiment passed over this spot. Many thousands of them never returned.
Thousands of soldiers in the British Army and Commonwealth Forces lost their lives fighting in the Ypres Salient. The remains of over 90,000 of them have never been found or identified. They are, therefore, buried somewhere in the Ypres Salient with no known grave.
The site of the The Menin Gate Memorial was considered to be a fitting location to place a memorial to commemorate the missing British and Commonwealth soldiers.
Its large Hall of Memory contains names on stone panels of 54,896 Commonwealth soldiers who died in the Salient but whose bodies have never been identified or found. On completion of the memorial, it was discovered to be too small to contain all the names as originally planned. An arbitrary cut-off point of 15 August 1917 was chosen and the names of 34,984 UK missing after this date were inscribed on the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing instead. The Menin Gate Memorial does not list the names of the missing of New Zealand and Newfoundland soldiers, who are instead honoured on separate memorials.
The inscription inside the archway is similar to the one at Tyne Cot, with the addition of a prefatory Latin phrase: "Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam - Here are recorded names of officers and men who fell in Ypres Salient, but to whom the fortune of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death". The Latin phrase means 'To the greater glory of God'. Both this inscription, and the main overhead inscription on both the east- and west-facing facades of the arch, were composed by Rudyard Kipling.
On the opposite side of the archway to that inscription is the shorter dedication: "They shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away". There are also Latin inscriptions set in circular panels either side of the archway, on both the east and west sides: "Pro Patria" and "Pro Rege" ('For Country' and 'For King'). A French inscription mentions the citizens of Ypres: "Erigé par les nations de l'Empire Britannique en l'honneur de leurs morts ce monument est offert aux citoyens d'Ypres pour l'ornement de leur cité et en commémoration des jours où l'Armée Britannique l'a défendue contre l'envahisseur", which translated into English means: "Erected by the nations of the British Empire in honour of their dead this monument is offered to the citizens of Ypres for the ornament of their city and in commemoration of the days where the British Army defended it against the invader."
Read the full story at Wikipedia
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