Military History | Thiepval Memorial — Six Hundred Graves Under the Wall of Names

Edwin Lutyens's brick and stone arch above the Ancre valley was built between 1928 and 1932 and unveiled on 1 August 1932 by Edward, Prince of Wales, with Albert Lebrun, President of the French Republic, beside him. Its panels carry the names of more than 72,000 British and South African soldiers who died on the Somme battlefields and have no known grave.

The exact total is not fixed. The panels have been amended over the decades — names added, and names removed when a man's grave was finally identified — which is why published counts differ from one account to the next.

The part visitors walk past is the ground in front. A cemetery of 600 graves was laid out at the memorial's foot, 300 Commonwealth and 300 French, filled between December 1931 and March 1932 with bodies recovered from the surrounding countryside; some were brought from as far north as Loos and as far south as Le Quesnel. Most could not be identified. One published breakdown gives 239 of the Commonwealth graves and 253 of the French as unnamed.

The symmetry was the point. Thiepval was built as a joint monument to the two armies that fought over this ridge, and it carries a French inscription addressed to both.

Thiepval village was erased in 1916 and rebuilt after the war on a smaller footprint below the memorial. A visitor centre opened in 2004 and a museum was added on the site in 2016.

The 600 graves are mown and planted like any other war cemetery. Roughly four in five of the headstones carry no name.

📸 Cover: the memorial and the Anglo-French cemetery at its base — Amanda Slater, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.