The Searchers: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War
Sep 2021 · Bloomsbury Publishing
Ebook
368
Pages
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About this ebook
SHORTLISTED FOR THE HISTORICAL WRITERS' ASSOCIATION CROWN AWARDS 2022
'Compelling and often horrifying' THE TIMES Best Paperbacks of 2022
The epic, moving stories of Britain's search to recover, identify and honour the missing soldiers of the First World War
By the end of the First World War, the whereabouts of more than half a million British soldiers were unknown. Most were presumed dead, lost forever under the battlefields of northern France and Flanders.
In The Searchers, Robert Sackville-West brings together the extraordinary, moving accounts of those who dedicated their lives to the search for the missing. These stories reveal the remarkable lengths to which people will go to give meaning to their loss: 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: from the department set up to investigate the fate of missing comrades in the war's aftermath to the present day, when DNA profiling continues to aid efforts to recover, identify and honour these men. As the rest of the country found ways to repair and move on, countless families were consumed by this mission, undertaking arduous, often hopeless, journeys to discover what happened to their husbands, brothers and sons.
Giving prominence to the personal battles of those left behind, The Searchers brings the legacy of war vividly to life in a testament to the bravery, compassion and resilience of the human spirit.
'Compelling and often horrifying' THE TIMES Best Paperbacks of 2022
The epic, moving stories of Britain's search to recover, identify and honour the missing soldiers of the First World War
By the end of the First World War, the whereabouts of more than half a million British soldiers were unknown. Most were presumed dead, lost forever under the battlefields of northern France and Flanders.
In The Searchers, Robert Sackville-West brings together the extraordinary, moving accounts of those who dedicated their lives to the search for the missing. These stories reveal the remarkable lengths to which people will go to give meaning to their loss: 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: from the department set up to investigate the fate of missing comrades in the war's aftermath to the present day, when DNA profiling continues to aid efforts to recover, identify and honour these men. As the rest of the country found ways to repair and move on, countless families were consumed by this mission, undertaking arduous, often hopeless, journeys to discover what happened to their husbands, brothers and sons.
Giving prominence to the personal battles of those left behind, The Searchers brings the legacy of war vividly to life in a testament to the bravery, compassion and resilience of the human spirit.
About the author
Robert Sackville-West worked in publishing after studying history at Oxford University. He now chairs Knole Estates, the property and investment company which – in parallel with the National Trust – runs the Sackville family's interests at Knole, the house in Kent where his family have lived for 400 years. Robert is the author of the critically acclaimed Inheritance: The Story of Knole and the Sackvilles (2010) and The Disinherited (2014).
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