He is not missing. He is here.

KT Lindsay

I took a walk under the immense Menin Gate. The memorial bears the names of 56,000 graveless British Empire soldiers who fell in the Ypres Salient between April 1914 and August 1917. Field Marshall Plumer opened the memorial with the title of this photograph. However, the memorial is not big enough to hold all the names of the missing and a further 35,000 are remembered at the Tyne Cot Cemetery Memorial at nearby Passchendale.

Not all thought a gate was good enough for the dead.

On Passing the new Menin Gate
by Siegfried Sassoon

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,—
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride
‘Their name liveth for ever,’ the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.


View Project:

Utata » Tribal Photography » Projects