It’s still Armistice Day in Britain; officially, Victoire 1918 in France, though it’s not a day of joy.
The Menin Gate at Ypres, a British Empire Commonwealth war memorial whose walls are densely packed with 54,000 names of dead soldiers whose bodies were not recovered identifiably from the Flanders mud. Many more lie in orderly war cemeteries nearby. There are plenty of flowers stuck to the walls at Menin; Ypres is far more accessible to British visitors than the other mega-monument lost in the Somme beetfields at Thiépval. A busy road with bus routes passes through the Menin Gate, so the memorial is pleasantly integrated in the life of the town.
Credit New Zealand War Graves Project
The memorial includes a miniature, four-foot bronze version of itself, explained in Braille. (I didn’t check if it includes a tiny self-referential model of the emodel.) Did it take the Great War for the disabled to start being treated as citizens?
At Menin, a bugler plays the Last Post (Taps) every evening at dusk. Here is his Aussie counterpart in Anzac hat at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
Keith_Humphreys says
For those of you in London, the poppies at the Tower of London are very much worth seeing…and don't listen to the writers at The Guardian: Honouring the dead and raising money for the care of living veterans are good things, not bad things.
NCGatSmFcts says
That's beautiful. It's hard to believe it's only been 100 years. I will google that so as not to reveal my total ignorance of why the memorial is at a gate. (My high school had I think just one semester of world history. In theory there may have been AP, but I don't think so. I'd have forgotten most of it by now anyway.) I don't think this day got much press coverage here.