The Lions had been at the Menin Gate, guarding the entrance to Ypres, during the period of the First World War, when literally thousands of soldiers marched through the gate on their way to the battlefields. At the end of the war the lions, broken and scarred, were recovered from the rubble and, in 1936, the Burgomaster of Ypres presented them to the Australian government as a token of friendship and an acknowledgement of Australia’s sacrifice in the region during…