A few years ago, I had the pleasure of visiting the Low Countries. Among my list of must-do’s was the Somme and of course, the Thiepval Memorial. I plugged the address in and headed off in my rental car.
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The memorial is 150 ft tall, so I assumed I’d see it as I got close. Unfortunately, the way the hills roll in the Somme, I did not see it until I was nearly upon it. Also, my GPS took me through the backroads on a rugged farm not fit for pedestrian vehicles.
When I emerged, there was a group of British students staring at me, probably wondering where the hell this Yank came from. I was wondering the same thing.
For those of you unacquainted, the Thiepval Memorial is massive. It dwarfs the largest monument we Americans have at Gettysburg—the Pennsylvania State Memorial, even with the compensating sword.
Inaugurated in 1932, this structure was built to honor the missing soldiers who fought in this region, mainly during the battle of the Somme in 1916. Their names cover the stone walls.
Considering that the main arch alone is taller than the Pennsylvania State Memorial at Gettysburg, it is overwhelming to stand beneath it.
The designer buried arches within the arches. You could start a Facebook fad where people must successfully count the number of arches within the Thiepval Memorial. This was by design, as the builders sought to provide enough stone surface in order to etch the most amount of names. They had to do this on a £117,000 budget. ((Gavin Stamp, The Memorial to the Missing of the Some (London: Profile Books, 2007), 158.))
Even the smaller arches are impressive.
I noticed some of the British students huddled around a little cubby hole on the inside of the memorial, which had some books in it.
I thought it was a bunch of copies of the same book, but no, each of these is a unique book of names you can find somewhere on this memorial.
The monument displays 73,357 names of British and South African men that died here, but were never identified. ((Gavin Stamp, The Memorial to the Missing of the Some (London: Profile Books, 2007), 146.)) The books come in handy to track down an ancestor.
The numbers are baffling to Americans whose largest battle during the Civil War had an army roughly the size of the total names on the Thiepval Memorial. It gets more mind boggling. Of those 73,357 men, 90% of them died in first 20 weeks of the Battle of the Somme between July and mid-November 1916. Then 12,000 of those died on the first day!
That is not all the men the British Empire lost here, as the official estimate is roughly 150,000. Those that are identified, might end up in a grave such as this behind the Thiepval Memorial or in one of the countless graveyards throughout the Somme.
The Thiepval Memorial is an overwhelming experience by itself and the Somme would take weeks to properly explore. If you ever have the opportunity, you must make the pilgrimage.
If you’re looking for a history on the Thiepval Memorial, then Gavin Stamp’s exhaustive The Memorial to the Missing of the Some is superb.