On a ridge high above the River Ancre, four miles to the north of the town of Albert, stands the greatest of all Britain’s memorials to its dead. For some curious reason the Thiepval Arch has never touched the imagination in the same way as Blomfield’s Menin Gate, but as an evocation of the pity and horror of war, Lutyens’s astonishing pyramid of arches, rising high above the old battlefields of the Somme on the site of one of its bloodiest sectors, has no equal.
It is the Marabar Cave of war memorials, the negation of every concept of honour or glory or fame that ever sent a soldier to his death, and on its walls are inscribed the ‘intolerably nameless names’ of the ‘Missing of the Somme’. At the foot of the monument are the graves of 300 unknown British soldiers, but they are, as it were, just a ‘taster’ for what the Western Front has to offer, a small, symbolic sample of the 73,357 names carved on Lutyens’s memorial alone and the half million and more Empire soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Great War who have no known burial place.
There are three names on the Thiepval Arch that also appear on a small granite memorial in the Devon village of Lydford and in War Memorial Clive Aslet has taken on the heroic task of restoring to them and their fellow villagers something more than their names.
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