ABSTRACT
On top of the ridge overlooking the valley of the River Ancre in Northern France stands a strange and lonely arch. The site of some of the fiercest fighting during the battle of the Somme in July to September 1916 is now the site of the largest British war memorial in the world. It commemorates the missing of the Somme: the 73,000 men whose bodies were never found. The memorial was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. It is stark. There are few carved wreaths, no helmets, no spears. The mathematics of the arches are such that each successive tier is a reduction of that below, reducing to nothing. The two flagpoles are slightly angled so that if their lines are extended, they intersect in the air, above the battlefield. Its eeriness was a source of comment at the time and has remained so. Some commentators have described it as being impossible to photograph; others, that into the vaults of its arches, from the four winds, march the spirits of the dead.1
