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
Will Longstaff Even after leaving the military, he remained in England, eventually settling in Sussex. Beginning the late 1920s, he made return trips to the battlefields of Belgium and France and painted haunting images in a spiritualist style. Among these later works is "Menin Gate at Midnight" (1927), arguably his most famous, which depicts the ghostly figures of soldiers marching past the monument. The painting toured Australia in 1928–29. It was viewed by record crowds. The painting is housed in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. In December 2000 "Menin Gate at Midnight" left the War Memorial on loan to the National Gallery