The Menin Gate Lions Return

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