Roll call for hundreds of thousands of Great War dead

“Lorette,” the French soldier Louis Barthas wrote in his memoir, “a sinister name evoking horror and the terror of dark woods, paths, plateaux and ravines that we retook 20 times and where, for months, day and night, we slashed each other’s throats, massacred without respite, transforming this corner of the earth into a mass grave.”

The historian Yves Le Maner describes the 1914-1915 first winter of the war in four words: "Hell. Mud. Cold. Wind."

As historic adviser for the first ever international monument to the Great War, Le Maner obtained the names of 294,000 British Commonwealth soldiers (including thousands of Irishmen), 174,000 Germans, 106,000 French and smaller numbers of other nationalities who died in the region between August 1914 and November 1918.

The “Ring of Memory” monument bearing all 579,606 names will be inaugurated today by French president François Hollande in the presence of the British and German defence ministers and the ambassadors of 70 countries.

Angela Merkel, David Cameron and Prince Charles were among those who did not accept the invitation to attend.

It is a stunning piece of architecture, perched on a hillside adjacent to France's largest military cemetery. Architect Philippe Prost built the outer edge of the oval structure from dark grey concrete, "the colour of war". He designed the entry to resemble a trench, to remind visitors of what soldiers endured.

One emerges inside a large ellipse whose inner walls are lined with gold-coloured, accordion-pleated pages engraved with the names of all the combatants who died in the region. The eye embraces all nearly 580,000 names at once.

The far side of the ellipse seems to hover like a spaceship over the 60-metre void created by a dip in the hill, revealing the peaceful countryside beyond the monument. The central lawn will be planted with the flowers that symbolise the three main armies: red poppies for Britain, blue cornflowers for France and white forget- me-nots for Germany.

Alphabetical

The names are arranged from A to Z, starting with A Tet, a Nepalese who fought in the British army, and ending with ZYWITZ Rudolf, a German.

The construction was a European undertaking.

Stainless steel went from Belgium to the Gard department in southern France, where it was cut into 500 one-by-three-metre panels. These were shipped to London for dipping in a chemical bath that tinted them gold. Then it was back to the Gard for laser engraving, which indented the names in the original white of the stainless steel.

Each panel holds about 1,200 names. The section beginning with “Mc” runs to seven panels; the “O” apostrophes fill a full panel.

"People came from all over the planet, from all the great empires, to fight in the Nord- Pas de Calais," says Senator Daniel Percheron, the president of the region and the force behind the project.

The area is dotted with national cemeteries, but Percheron wanted an international monument as a symbol of “posthumous fraternity . . . in the name of the globalisation of memory.”

Yves Le Maner says Nord- Pas de Calais has been “the forgotten front” in the Great War because it was so internationalised. British Commonwealth troops replaced the French when they were transferred to Verdun in March 1916. The French Foreign Legion added still more nationalities.

"Nations tend to centralise their memories in a single place," Le Maner says. "For the French, it's Verdun. The British concentrated their memory in Ypres [Belgium], where they've played The Last Post at Menin Gate every evening since 1918, and at Thiepval, in the Somme . . . They've forgotten that along the 90km front from the Belgian border at Armentières going down to the edge of the Somme, one-third of all British losses occurred, and that's including Macedonia, Gallipoli and losses at sea."

Recalling names

Whenever he met old comrades, the French first World War writer Roland Dorgelés always asked that they recall the names of the dead. “Simply saying their names is a way of defending them, of saving them,” he wrote.

The soldiers of the Great War were the first generation almost all of whom could read and write, says Le Maner. They demanded that war dead be buried in individual, not mass graves.

Yet 30 per cent of the 9.5 million soldiers who were killed have never been found. Soldiers wore dog tags around their necks or wrists, which were often blown off. Or the dog tags corroded. Only a fifth of those found now can be identified.

The remains of eight men were discovered while the Ring of Memory was being built. Three skeletons were found entwined in one shellhole. Two were identified from their dog tags as French soldiers Leon Senet and Pierre Sorhaits, from Tours and the Landes region near Bordeaux.

Because the French register listed them as missing in action in the Nord-Pas de Calais, their names had already been engraved on the memorial.