One of the 64 panels with names on the 16 blocks that support the arch of the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, Thiepval, France, 1932. A WWI memorial with the names of +70,000 missing British soldiers who died in the Somme 1915 and 1918 and vanished in no man’s land… [1280×853] [OC]

…This memorial was built to honor and remember over 70,000 young men that died and vanished in the few miles that comprised the front during the Battle of the Somme. Not the dead but the *disappeared*, the ones that died and whose bodies could not be recovered before the war vanished them. This is one of the saddest memorials one can find. The place to remember those who have no place to rest, for the ones their families will never visit. I can’t begin to imagine the fear all of them would feel at ending this way, or the pain of the families. And they are so many. All those names…

Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, it is the largest Commonwealth Memorial to the Missing in the world. It was inaugurated by the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) in the presence of Albert Lebrun, President of France, on 1 August 1932.

Standing where a German stronghold stood, the memorial dominates the rural scene and has 16 brick piers, faced with Portland stone. It is 140 feet high, a complex form of memorial arch, comprising interlocking arches of four sizes. Each side of the main arch is pierced by a smaller arch, orientated at a right angle to the main arch. Each side of each of these smaller arches is then pierced by a still smaller arch and so on. This design results in 16 piers, having 64 stone-paneled sides. Only 48 of these are inscribed, as the panels around the outside of the memorial are blank.

The memorial represents the names of over 72,000 officers and men. The inscription of names on the memorial is reserved for those missing, or unidentified, soldiers who have no known grave. Over 90% of these soldiers died in the first Battle of the Somme between 1 July and 18 November 1916.

A large inscription on an internal surface of the memorial reads:

“Here are recorded names of officers and men of the British Armies who fell on the Somme battlefields July 1915 February 1918 but to whom the fortune of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death.”

Over the years since its inauguration, bodies have been regularly discovered on the former battlefield and are sometimes identified through various means. The decision was taken, to protect the integrity of the memorial as one solely for those who are missing or unidentified, that if a body were found and identified the inscription of their name would be removed from the memorial by filling in the inscription with cement. For those who are found and identified, they are given a funeral with full military honors at a cemetery close to the location at which they were discovered. This practice has resulted in numerous gaps in the lists of names. One wishes the walls would end up blank…

My apologies for inaccuracies and mistakes.