Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme

You can see Thiepval from kilometres away. The arch, 46 metres high, 16 brick piers, the largest British war memorial in the world, sits on a ridge above the Somme valley and is visible across most of the 1916 battlefield.

On its faces: 72,195 names. Men who died on the Somme between July 1915 and 20 March 1918 and have no known grave.

That number is worth sitting with. 72,195 men. No grave. No identified remains. The ground took them.

The Battle of the Somme and why Thiepval stands here

The Battle of the Somme began on 1 July 1916. On that first day alone, the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties, killed, wounded, captured. It remains the bloodiest single day in the history of the British Army.

Thiepval was one of the key German positions on 1 July 1916. The village sat on the ridge commanding the northern part of the battlefield. The German defences here were particularly deep, bunkers cut into the chalk, some 10 metres underground, that survived even the week-long British artillery bombardment before the assault.

The British attack at Thiepval on 1 July failed entirely. The village was not captured until 26 September 1916, after nearly three months of further fighting.

The Thiepval Memorial stands on the site of the former German strongpoint. Sir Edwin Lutyens designed it. It was unveiled on 1 August 1932 by the Prince of Wales, in the presence of the French President.

The 72,195 names, how to find one

The names on Thiepval are organised by regiment and within each regiment alphabetically by surname. The panels are numbered, and the panel layout is published by the CWGC.

Before you visit: search cwgc.org. The result will give you the regiment and panel number. Write it down and bring it with you, the memorial is large and the panels are not labelled in a way that is immediately intuitive.

The CWGC also maintains a small visitor centre at Thiepval with maps and staff who can help locate specific panels.

At the memorial: the panels run around all faces of the arch. The regiment is listed first, then names alphabetically within that regiment. Some regiments have hundreds of names. Others have fewer than ten.

What you see at Thiepval

The scale: nothing prepares you for the actual size of the arch. It is visible from the car park but the weight of it, the sheer volume of names, only registers when you are standing underneath it.

The CWGC cemetery within the memorial: integrated into the base of the arch is a small cemetery with 300 graves, half British, half French. The joint burial is deliberate: Thiepval stands on ground that was a Franco-British battlefield, and the memorial acknowledges both.

The ridge: stand at Thiepval and look south and west. You are looking at the ground the British attacked across on 1 July 1916. The village of Authuille is visible below. The distance from the British front line to the German line, the ground men crossed in the open under machine gun fire, is visible from here. The terrain explains what the records describe.

The Visitor Centre: small but well-designed. It contextualises the Somme campaign and helps first-time visitors understand what they are looking at before they walk to the memorial itself.