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
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