Menin Gate 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." Reaction to the Menin Gate, the first of the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission's Memorials to the Missing, ranged from its condemnation by the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, to praise by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. Sassoon described the Menin Gate in his poem 'On Passing the New Menin Gate', saying that the dead of the Ypres Salient would "deride this sepulchre of crime". Zweig, in contrast, praised the simplicity of the
Urana Soldiers' Memorial Hall early photographs, honour boards, a large wooden table and crockery with insignia. The site also retains historic film projecting equipment from when the 1920s hall functioned as the town cinema. The building is substantially intact, both internally and externally. There is a memorial avenue of trees nearby in Stephen Street, mature date palms ("Phoenix canariensis") which were planted in the 1920s using seeds which soldiers brought back from the Middle East. As at 9 September 2015, the Urana Soldiers Memorial Hall, dating from 1884 and 1924, is of state aesthetic and rarity significance for its monumental scale within a modest