OTTAWA -- A pair of monumental stone lions that once flanked the Menin Gate in Ypres, Belgium, were unveiled Tuesday at the Canadian War Museum.
The Menin Gate Lions, along with Australian war artist William Frederick Longstaff's 1927 painting "Menin Gate at Midnight," are on loan from the Australian War Memorial in Canberra for the First World War exhibition "Fighting in Flanders -- Gas. Mud. Memory." which opens Nov. 7.
The lions and the painting "represent resilience, remembrance and the enduring bond between nations, like Canada and Australia, that stood together in Flanders," said museum director-general James Whitham.
Thousands of Allied soldiers passed through the Menin Gate during the war.
Believed to have been carved in the 17th century, the lions were recovered from rubble after the war and donated to the Australian War Memorial in 1936.
Menin Gate is the site of a memorial inscribed with the names of about 55,000 Allied soldiers.
Longstaff's painting depicts an army of ghostly soldiers marching across a field in front of the Menin Gate Memorial. The artist said he had a vision of spirits of the dead rising out of the ground around him.
