The Missing of the Somme

This work was written by someone who was born after the two world wars and who, like everyone of his and subsequent generations, have been brought up on the myth and memory of war. In this examination of the poems, memorials, memoirs, photographs, histories and documentaries of World War I, this book brings together a network of memory that illuminates people's relation to the past. The author brings to it his own experience - his father, who was at the Somme, watching "The Blue Max" and all the yesterdays on television, making airfix kits, buying poppies every November. By the end the reader understands more about war and memory, tenderness, horror, the comfort of landscape, the morality and immorality of order and disorder.