The Missing of the Somme

"[The author's] journey of inquiry takes him from the cemeteries and one-time battlefields of Flanders to the memorials that stand in every town and village in Britain, from the countless poems, memoirs, photographs and documentaries that the Great War spawned to an old family album whose images record how this most far-reaching event touched the lives of his own grandparents. Relying more on personal impressions than systematic analysis, Geoff Dyer weaves a network of myth and memory that illuminates our own relation to the past"--Jacket.