THE SEARCHERS: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War.

• Author: Couchman, Bryan

THE SEARCHERS: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War

Author: Robert Sackville-West

Published by: Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2021, 336pp, 11.69 [pounds sterling].

Reflecting on his service during the First Wold War, Australian soldier Edgar Morrow observed, 'In my heart I wish that time was not so great a healer; for as he heals he kills the memory, and some memories are too precious to be killed, even though they live to hurt.' As the feminist writer Vera Brittain recorded in her memoir, Testament of Youth, the trauma of the First World War did not end with the celebrations on Armistice Day 1918. Like so many others, she had been desperate to learn more about the circumstances surrounding the deaths of, first, her fiance Roland Leighton and, later, her only brother Edward Brittain. Both these men had marked graves, but, by the end of the First World War, the whereabouts of some half a million other servicemen from the British Empire were simply unknown. This is one of the tragedies explored so poignantly by accomplished writer Robert Sackville-West in The Searchers: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War. In a chilling observation, the author notes that the bodies of two-thirds of New Zealanders killed at Gallipoli were never recovered.

This book is the first foray into military history by both the publisher and Sackville-West, and was inspired by the First World War centenary commemorations. An Oxford University history graduate, Sackville-West is the current guardian of Knole in Kent, the Sackville family's home for the past 400 years. The author explores how families, society and the state responded to the unprecedented scale of loss and bereavement resulting from the First World War. It details in a series of moving vignettes how the emotional trauma was often compounded by the numbing absence of remains over which to grieve. The central theme of Sackville-West's book concerns the extraordinary dedication and determination of those who embraced, and in some cases were consumed by, the challenge of trying to resolve what had happened to the missing, presumed dead.

One of the stories described concerns Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling's son John, killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915. After extensive inquiries and a long period of denial, it was not until 1919 that his parents finally accepted John was dead. They would never recover from this loss. Kipling and his wife Carrie continued to conduct annual pilgrimages to the...