This week marks the anniversary of two memorials in Europe that have attracted tens of thousands of Canadians over the decades since they were built.
The Menin Gate (Click here) in Ypres, Belgium, has been a destination for pilgrims of remembrance since it was inaugurated on July 24, 1927.
Hundreds of thousands of men passed through the Menin Gate on their way to five major First World War offensives fought on the Ypres Salient. After the war, it was turned into a memorial to the 200,000 Commonwealth soldiers killed nearby. The Menin Gate bears the name of more than 54,000 who have no known grave, including 6,940 Canadians.
Traffic through the gate is stopped for a Last Post ceremony held every evening at 8 p.m. Since 1928, the daily ceremony has been interrupted only during the German occupation of the Second World War, when it was observed instead in England.
It bears two inscriptions. One dedicates the memorial to the “armies of the British Empire who stood here from 1914 to 1918.” A second reads, “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.”
Canadian pilgrims have flocked to the Canadian National Vimy Memorial (Click here) in France since it was unveiled by King Edward VIII on July 26, 1936. More than 100,000 attended the event, including 6,000 veterans who travelled from Canada.
France ceded the adjacent land to Canada in 1922. It took 11 years to complete the memorial, which stands on the highest point of Vimy Ridge, seized by the four Canadian divisions attacking together for the first time in a fierce battle April 9-12, 1917.
Twenty symbolic figures grace the memorial, including the figure of Canada Bereft mourning her fallen sons (Click here). Carved into the walls are names of 11,285 Canadian soldiers killed in France who have no known graves.
Its inscription reads: “To the valour of their countrymen in the Great War and in memory of their sixty thousand dead this monument is raised by the people of Canada.”