This is a compendium of bits and pieces on the carnage at the Somme during the Great War, in which cohesiveness is created by a kind of elegiac commentary by Geoff Dyer. He hitches around places Amiens, Beaumont Hamel, Mametz, Pozieres visits cemeteries, views monuments, and writes about them beautifully. He also unearths relics of the time from his own family cupboard principally, a grand fat her who fought and survived to tell his tale. There are many telling pieces here to bring out the sorrow and the loss, but the one that stays with me is the inscription on a head stone in a graveyard near Thiepval
A Soldier of the Great War
Known unto God.