The war poet Siegfried Sassoon called the Meningate Memorial in Epe, a sepulcure of crime.

He felt that the men listed on its panels were nameless names. Yet on every battlefield of the Western Front,

nearly half of those who died, had no known grave.

How could so many men just disappear? What happened to this generation of missing soldiers

along the old front line? When you begin to research the men who fought and died in the Great War or travel

along the battlefields of the Western Front, you quickly realize that one of the dominating

stories of the conflict is that of missing soldiers, men who have no known grave. It's a subject that confuses and perplexes many people.

There's a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding. So in this podcast we'll look at the story

of the missing and we'll ask a few essential questions. How did soldiers go missing? How many were missing? What was the

debates over whether to commemorate the missing or not? What was the work of the Graves

registration units in the Imperial War Graves Commission? Does the work still continue and

what is there to see today? When we look at the story of missing soldiers in the Great War,

first we have to ask ourselves,

how do these soldiers go missing?

How do men completely disappear?

And in that, I think back to some of the stories

that the veterans told me in the 1980s and 90s,

some of which I have to confess were so graphic that I probably couldn't describe them here.

But a couple come to mind.

Albert Banfield served in the 13th Battalion the Royal Sussex Regiment, the 3rd South Downs battalions,

and an Epe in the summer of

1917, not long after the offensive of Third Eap had begun, he was moving up near St Julian

...