The story of this place
On the hills of Artois, some of the bloodiest fighting of the First World War raged in 1914–15 as the French army struggled to dislodge the Germans, suffering staggering losses. Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, consecrated in 1925, became the largest French military cemetery in the world, holding the remains of more than 40,000 soldiers beneath its endless crosses and in ossuaries. In 2014, on the war's centenary, a vast elliptical Ring of Remembrance was unveiled beside it, inscribing in bronze the names of 579,606 soldiers of all nationalities—French, German, British, and dozens more—who died in the region, listed alphabetically together, without distinction of rank or side, in a radical gesture of reconciliation.