On our trip to Belgium and the Netherlands last year we again visited Ypres and I took more photos of the Menin Gate.

Menin Gate from west, bathed in early evening sunlight:-

Menin Gate from Ypres ramparts:-

Menin Gate from street:-

Moat from Menin Gate:-

Relief Map of Ypres, situated right by the Menin Gate, on the west side:-

On approaching the Menin gate from the Menin Road I noticed two statues that had not been there the year before. It turned out these had originally been at the Gate but had been presented in 1936 to the Australian War Memorial in memory of the thousands of Australians who passed through the Gate during the Great War. They had been temporarily returned in April 2017 (till November 2017) to their original location.

Close up on one of the lions:-

Menin Gate Lions information board in four languages:-

The information in English:-

There is a stairway halfway along each internal wall of the Menin Gate leading to the upper level. Here are laid wreaths brought to the Gate by various organisations.

The evening we were there the representatives of several schools performed that duty during the nightly Last Post ceremony to which this flag bearer was the prelude:-

The Last Post is played every evening at 8pm by members of Ypres Fire Brigade, a ceremony only ever interrupted since its inception by the German Occupation in World War 2 when it was apparently conducted at Brookwood Military Cemetery, in Surrey, England. On the evening of liberation in 1944 the ceremony was resumed despite fighting still taking place elsewhere in the city. A photograph of the ceremony in 1964 in In Flanders Fields Museum had few onlookers in it. The Last Post now attracts large crowds no doubt due to the greater ease of travel to Ypres from Britain and the countries of the British Commonwealth:-

Click on the picture below to go to a short video I shot of part of the ceremony:-

Exterior Walls on upper level; all covered in names:-

As are the walls on the stairs down to the road level:-

In the upper garden area are two memorials to British colonial troops.

Nepalese Memorial by Menin Gate:-

India in Flanders Fields Memorial by Menin Gate:-

Individual Indian and Burmese soldiers’ names on the Gate:-

The Menin Gate is the impressive memorial to the missing soldiers of the British Empire who died in the Ypres Salient during the Great War up to 15th August 1917 but have no known grave.

The Gate from the east:-

From the west. Yes, it is a functioning roadway:-

The names of the missing are inscribed on the walls. At the Memorial’s dedication one of the speakers, in an attempt to lessen the grief of the bereaved with no grave to visit said, “He is not missing. He is here.”:-

A gentle slope leads up from the road level to a garden area. The Gate’s walls here are also covered in names of the missing. Menin Gate from south:-

The Memorial’s dedication:-

Menin Gate interior:-

Menin Gate Ceiling. The windows seem to allow all the names on the interior of the memorial to be illuminated sequentially as the sun travels across the sky:-

My most recent posts have been rather focused on photographs. This is because I’ve been away. Myself and the good lady have been in The Netherlands again and this time also in Belgium.

We drove down through England (and back up again) to and from the ferry and through the Netherlands and Belgium top to bottom and back. I’m a bit knackered.

But…… I have seen Ypres (nowadays spelled Ieper) and the Menin Gate where we witnessed the nightly Last Post. We walked along the Menin Road, a place I had only ever read about or seen in photographs in a shell shattered state, passing Hellfire Corner on the way.

The hotel we stayed in was right beside the Hooghe Crater and across the Menin Road from the Hooge Crater Commonwealth War Cemetery (note the British spelling.) Right by the hotel there was an open air Great War Museum which encompassed the crater and some trench remnants. The Front Line straddled that part of the Menin Road from 1915-1917. Hooghe was where the first use of flame throwers in a concerted action took place when the Germans made an attack on July 30^th 1915. The trenches were apparently only 4.5 metres (4.9 yards) apart there. The flamethrower’s maximum range was 18 metres (20 yards.)

Strange to think I slept only a few more metres away from the spot. It’s all so peaceful there now but reminders of that war are everywhere as the area is covered in War Cemeteries and Memorial sites – too many for us to visit them all.