Every night at 8:00pm, a familar tune is played in the town of Ypres. Roads are closed, while crowds of people and sometimes none at all, gather under a marble archway to remember the dead from the First World War.

Menin Gate is a memorial to the 54,896 Commonwealth Soldiers who have no known grave. On completion of the memorial in 1927 it was discovered that it would be too small to hold all the names originally planned. A cut off date of August 15, 1917 was chosen and a further 34,984 names are inscribed on the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing. 7,000 of names on the Mein Gate are Canadians.

One of the most tragic features of the Great War was the number of casualties reported as 'Missing, believed killed'.  To their relatives there must have been added to their grief a tinge of bitterness and a feeling that everything possible had not been done to recover their loved ones' bodies and give them reverent burial.  That feeling no longer exists; it ceased to exist when the conditions under which the fighting was being carried out were realised.

But when peace came and the last ray of hope had been extinguished the void seemed deeper and the outlook more forlorn for those who had no grave to visit, no place where they could lay tokens of loving remembrance...

It was resolved that here at Ypres, where so many of the 'Missing' are known to have fallen, there should be erected a memorial worthy of them which should give expression to the nation's gratitude for their sacrifice and its sympathy with those who mourned them.

A memorial has been erected which, in its simple grandeur, fulfils this object, and now it can be said of each one in whose honour we are assembled here today: 'He is not missing; he is here'."

From Lord Plummer's speech on the unveiling of Menin Gate