Somme — Thiepval Memorial

On 1 July 1916 the British Army launched the Battle of the Somme along the river valley in Picardy. In a single day it suffered 57,470 casualties, nearly 20,000 of them killed—the bloodiest day in British military history. The offensive dragged on until November, advancing barely a few miles at a cost of over a million casualties on all sides, and marked the combat debut of the tank. Sir Edwin Lutyens's colossal brick Thiepval Memorial, unveiled in 1932, bears the names of 72,337 British and South African soldiers who died on the Somme and have no known grave. The gentle chalk hills conceal countless unrecovered dead.