Menin Gate to the east of the city. The German army eventually surrounded the city on three sides, bombarding it throughout much of the war. The Second Battle of Ypres marked a second German attempt to take the city in April 1915. The third battle is more commonly referred to as Passchendaele, but this 1917 battle was a complex five-month engagement. The fourth and fifth battles occurred during 1918. British and Commonwealth soldiers often passed through the Menenpoort on their way to the front lines with some 300,000 of them being killed in the Ypres Salient. 90,000 of these soldiers have no
New Zealand Division died on the Western Front. The overwhelming majority of these fatalities, around 12,400, were men from the New Zealand Division. The memorials, designed by Samuel Hurst Seager, are located at Passchendaele, Messines, Le Quesnoy and the Somme. Each memorial includes the words "From the Uttermost Ends of the Earth". In contrast to other Dominions, the names of New Zealand soldiers with no known grave, of which there are about 4,180, are not listed on the Memorials to the Missing at Menin Gate and Thiepval. Instead, it was the policy of the New Zealand government to establish smaller Memorials to the