The Caribou of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment at Courtrai commemorates the Battalion's actions of the Hundred Days Campaign and specifically, the crossing of the Lys River in the closing months of the Great War.

By the conclusion of two days fighting, the Newfoundland Battalion had played an important part in breaking through German's "Flanders Position" and advanced fourteen and a half kilometres.

The Second Army continued its push eastward toward Ghent, with the Newfoundlanders directed to help establish a bridgehead across the Lys/Leie river at the north end of the city of Courtrai.

The Courtrai caribou stands as the sole monument to the Newfoundlanders actions in Belgium, with four more in France at Beaumont-Hamel, Gueudecourt, Masnières, and Monchy-le-Preux and one at Gallipoli in Turkey.

[6] The memorials are all centrally identical, featuring a bronze statue of the emblem of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, a caribou, designed by British sculptor Basil Gotto.