Military History | Ploegsteert Memorial to the Missing — The Names That Were Destined for Lille

Cut into the outer wall of this rotunda, above one of the panels of names, are the words OUTTERSTEENE RIDGE. Seven more honours run round the drum: Armentières, Aubers Ridge, Loos, Fromelles, Estaires, Hazebrouck, Scherpenberg. Not one of them is a battle of the Ypres Salient. The Commission defines what this memorial covers not by an engagement but by a rectangle of map — from the line Caestre–Dranoutre–Warneton in the north to Haverskerque–Estaires–Fournes in the south, taking in Hazebrouck, Merville, Bailleul, Armentières, the Forest of Nieppe and Ploegsteert Wood.

Some of those names were not meant to be here. In 1926 the French government raised concern at the number of free-standing memorials the Imperial War Graves Commission proposed to build on French soil, and the Anglo-French Mixed Committee met in Paris that June. Several planned memorials were dropped, among them one for Lille. The Western Front Association records that extra land was obtained at Ploegsteert to take the names that had been destined for Lille. The Twentieth Century Society tells it differently, saying Harold Chalton Bradshaw's Lille design itself was moved here. The two accounts agree on the outcome and differ on what travelled.

Bradshaw gave it the form of a temple rather than a gate: a colonnaded drum about 21 m across and under 12 m high, with two couchant lions by Gilbert Ledward on the approach. The Commission's description counts 11,347 names; the Twentieth Century Society and firstworldwar.com print 11,447. Totals on this front are never settled.

The Duke of Brabant, later Leopold III, unveiled it on 7 June 1931. The Comité du Mémorial de Ploegsteert has the Last Post sounded here at seven in the evening on the first Friday of every month, 12.7 km from the Menenpoort at Ieper, where it is sounded every night.

📸 Cover: the rotunda and one of Ledward's lions, Berks Cemetery Extension, Karmakolle 2025, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the same lion close to, The Fabric Fairy 2014, CC BY-SA 3.0.