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|title=The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme

|sort=Memorial to the Missing of the Somme

|date=April 2007

|isbn=978-1861978967

}}

For Britain the defining moment of the First World War was on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. There were sixty thousand British casualties that day with twenty thousand dead. The memorial at Thiepval is dedicated to the 'Missing of the Somme' with the names of over seventy-three thousand men whose bodies were never identified out of the four hundred and twenty thousand casualties from this largely futile campaign. I tried to think of those men as individuals with families, friends and a lifetime ahead of them and the scale of the butchery came home to me.