Every evening of the year at 8pm the Last Post is sounded underneath the Menin Gate, making it one of the best known Commonwealth memorials anywhere in the world. Some evenings, more than a thousand people, most of them British, come to watch the ceremony and the buglers of the local Fire Brigade. The Gate sits astride the road along which hundreds of thousands of troops passed on their way to the front. The memorial commemorates 54,394 officers and men from Canada, Australia, undivided India and South Africa, and those from the United Kingdom who died before 16 August 1917. Their names are inscribed on 60 panels inside and around the Gate. To the north-east of Ypres, the Tyne Cot Memorial near Zonnebeke, commemorates a further 35,000 United Kingdom and New Zealand dead who died after that date. The Menin Gate was designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield, one of the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission's three principal architects. The panels containing the names are arranged with the odd-numbered ones on your left as you stand with your back to the town, and the even ones on the right.
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