WINSTON CHURCHILL: The wounded died between the lines; the dead mouldered into the soil.  Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate, or killed as they swam.  Every effort was made to starve whole nations into submission without regard to age or sex.  Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately.  Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered often slowly in the dark recesses of the sea.

JOHN KEEGAN: Over half those who died in the Great War were lost as corpses to the wilderness of the battlefield. So numerous were those missing bodies that, in the war’s immediate aftermath, it was proposed that the most fitting of all the memorials to the War dead would be a disinternment and reburial of one of those unidentified in a place of honour. A body was chosen, brought to Westminster Abbey and placed at the entrance under a tablet bearing the inscription, ‘They buried him among the Kings because he had done good toward God and toward His house’.

“We know not whence he came, but only that his death marks him with the everlasting glory of an American dying for his country.”