Epitaphs of the Great War: The Somme - Sarah Wearne

Limited by the Imperial War Graves Commission to 66 letters - and that included counting the space between each word as one letter - this first in a short series of books highlights what The Times called, 'the heart of the bereaved'; the thousands of silent voices that 'speak' from the war cemeteries. Voices which stand at the opposite end of the commemorative spectrum to the Cenotaph; an austere 'silent' tribute to the Empire's dead, the other a clamour of individual'voices', each one a personal tribute to an individual and cultural reference from the world which these soldiers and their families lived in.In this book, the selected epitaphs look at a variety of themes, tones and locations from both ordinary and famous backgrounds, the privileged and the poor- the officers and men who all lie in some corner of a foreign field. Second in the series publishing in 2017 will feature epitaphs from the Battle of Passchendaele (1917). A complete study of these epitaphs will be published to coincide with the centenary of the Armistice in 2018