Military History | Anneau de la Mémoire — One Alphabet, No Rank, No Nationality

On a chalk ridge above Ablain-Saint-Nazaire, facing the gate of the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette national necropolis, five hundred gilded panels stand in an ellipse around a lawn. At one point the ring stops resting on the ground and carries on into the air, cantilevered over the slope. Philippe Prost designed it. The Anneau de la Mémoire — the Ring of Remembrance, formally the Mémorial international de Notre-Dame-de-Lorette — was inaugurated on 11 November 2014 by President François Hollande. Its mechanism is the alphabet. Every man recorded as having died in the Nord and the Pas-de-Calais between 1914 and 1918 is engraved in one continuous list, ordered by name and nothing else: no nationality, no rank, no religion. The first entry is A, Tet, a Nepalese seaman in British service. The last is a German soldier, and the accounts differ on which one: Zschiesche, Paul in some, Zywitz, Rudolf in others. The total moves as well. 579,606 is the figure usually printed; one French account gives 579,636 after later additions. Panel five hundred was deliberately left blank, for names still being found. A French genealogical review of the list records how it was built and where it fails. Three archives supplied it: the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge and the French defence ministry. German missing are under-represented, because part of the Volksbund's records was destroyed in the Second World War, and French names are comparatively few, because the French army left the Artois front for Verdun in March 1916. The lantern tower of the necropolis shows over the trees behind. At the foot of the panels, visitors leave small wooden crosses. 📸 Cover: "Notre Dame de Lorette-Anneau de la Mémoire-20151231.jpg" by Daniel Villafruela, CC BY-SA 4.0; the engraved panels, "Anneau de la Mémoire -5.jpg" by Wernervc, CC BY-SA 4.0, both via Wikimedia Commons.