By the end of the First World War, the whereabouts of more than half a million British soldiers were unknown.
Robert Sackville-West brings together the extraordinary, moving accounts of those who dedicated their lives to the search for the missing: Rudyard Kipling’s quest for his son’s grave; E M Forster’s conversations with traumatised soldiers in hospital in Alexandria; desperate attempts to communicate with the spirits of the dead; the campaign to establish the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior; and the exhumation and reburial in military cemeteries of hundreds of thousands of bodies. It was a search that would span a century.