Menin Gate
Hundreds of thousands of Commonwealth soldiers passed through Ypres on their way to the battlefields and it was soon decided that the missing should be commemorated on a memorial there. Not surprisingly, the citizens of Ypres, anxious to rebuild their homes and lives, were not keen on Churchill's grand scheme to turn their entire town into a memorial to the fallen, but the Belgium government agreed that the Menin Gate and Ramparts should be left in their ruined state until the British government formed a more feasible plan.
Belgium became independent from the Netherlands in 1830 and was occupied by Germany during World Wars I and II. It has prospered in the past half century as a modern, technologically advanced European state and member of NATO and the EU. Tensions bet... ... read more 
