AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM
[For the Greater Glory of God]
HERE ARE RECORDED THE NAMES
OF OFFICERS AND MEN WHO FELL
IN YPRES SALIENT BUT TO WHOM
THE FORTUNES OF WAR DENIED
THE KNOWN AND HONOURED BURIAL
GIVEN TO THEIR COMRADES IN DEATH
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| Peaceful Ypres Viewed Through the Menin Gate Before the War |
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| September 1919 |
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| Under Construction, Early 1920s |
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| 1927 Dedication (Australian War Memorial Photo) |
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| Since its dedication the Menin Gate has been the site of the most famous World War I commemoration, the playing of the "Last Post" every evening by the buglers of the Ypres Fire Brigade. |
This ceremony has taken place every night since 1927 with the exception of that time in WWII when the Germans occupied Ypres. Attendance ranges from a couple hundred to several thousands. An impressive monument and ceremony.
ReplyDeleteThe Menin Gate is a somber place to visit has it has the names of thousands of Commonwealth soldiers missing in action with yet even more names of the missing listed at the Tyne Cot Cemetery not too far away from Ypres. The evening ceremony is very moving and impressive!
ReplyDeleteThe ceremony is very moving. I saw it for the first time in 1963 on a school trip where the landscape still looked much as it did in 1914-18. last time was 1996. The gate is a very somber place; one can feel the ghosts of Ypres there.
ReplyDeleteI remember watching school children from Britain placing wreaths in the monument after the nightly ceremony. Very touching. DB
ReplyDeleteThe Last Post is certainly an impressive and moving experience.
ReplyDeleteBut I fail to see how the war or the memorial can be to the Greater Glory of God (as the inscription suggests). Many would have felt that way at the time. When Lutyens designed the Thiepval Memorial, the equivalent of the Menin Gate in the Somme area, he excluded all mention of God or Christianity.
The Menin Gate and Last Post ceremony are significant to me as this place is my uncle's memorial. He died on 12th October 1917 during the battle for Passchendaele. It is also a very significant memorial to Australians and New Zealanders as so many of their soldiers were lost in the Ypres Salient. I'll be back for the centennial memorial celebrations in October 2017.
ReplyDeleteNew Zealand missing are not on the gate, but at other memorials, exclusive to New Zealand, including those at Tyne Cot and Polygon Wood. This was at the wish of the New Zealand government.
DeleteBut do you know why not ALL the names are there? During the building the senior stone mason pointed out that the lettering would be so small that is would not be possible to read the highest names from the road. Field Marshal Herbert Plumer made the decision to exclude the names of those killed after 15th August 1917 (They are remembered on the back wall at Tyne Cot)so that every name would be visible from the ground.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Adrian Roberts: whatever laudable (or other) purpose was served by all the deaths commemorated on the Menin Gate, it's difficult to see how they enhanced the glory of any god on either side. "To the Greater Glory of Comradeship" might have been more apposite. Yet the inscription was widely employed (Br. Empire tablets placed in French churches, and the Merchant Navy & Fishing Fleet Memorial in London to name two rather disparate examples). This is slightly surprising, for the designs of the 'Cross of Sacrifice' and 'Stone of Remembrance' found in nearly all British WWI cemeteries were selected in part for their non-denominational, all-things-to-all-men character. Can anyone suggest what the authorities might have had in mind by invoking "God's Glory" - was it to deflect post-war recrimination against the Frocks or Generals by 'passing the buck' onto God? Was it just a conventional add-on, without much thought behind it? Was it to satisfy the godly relatives (avowed aetheists were few back then) of the missing that their pain served some Greater Purpose? Or ... ?
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, creating and building the Menin Gate was fraught with a welter of constructional and political crises - a whole story in itself.