Email Poem

Your IP Address: 216.73.216.229

Your Email Address:

To Email Address:

Subject

Personal Note:

Poem Title:

Poem

The Lions were an 1822 sculpture 
Placed at the Ieper Cloth Hall
And in 1862 they were moved to the Menin Gate
In the Great War Ieper was evacuated
Then used as the Depot town for the British Army
Ieper was destroyed by German shelling of the city
The Belgium Army then British Armies marched past the Lions
On their way to the front and to Passcendaele battles

At the end of the Great War Churchill wanted Ieper kept as a memorial
But instead it was rebuilt from German reparations
And the Menin Gate Memorial was built to the memory of these soldiers
The names of 50,000 soldiers with no known graves
6000 of them Australian most missing at Passchendaele were engraved
They said every 20 yards there was a body on these broken fields

In 1936 the Lions were gifted to Australia by Belgium 
For the new Australian War Memorial in 1936
Missing parts of the statues were reconstructed and replaced
And they stood proudly at the Memorial's heart
In 2017, 100 years since the war ended passed
Other conflicts were stamped on a troubled world
Now as a gift to Belgium the Lions will be loaned
To stand again on the Menin Road proudly
Remember them and remember the friendship of these two nations.

© Paul Warren Poetry

CAPTCHA Preview

Type the characters you see in the picture

Required