The cold English sea has washed away portraits of soldiers raked into the sand on UK and Irish beaches, in a moving Armistice Day tribute by director Danny Boyle.
Drawn in the sand at low tide, the faces of World War I slowly disappeared into the ocean as part of Boyle's Pages of the Sea project.
Tens of thousands of people gathered at 32 beaches around the UK and Ireland to stencil silhouettes of soldiers into the sand, representing the millions of military personnel whose lives were torn apart by the war.
A poem, written by Carol Ann Duffy for the event, was read at each of the memorials:
It is the wound in Time. The century's tides,
chanting their bitter psalms, cannot heal it.
Not the war to end all wars; death's birthing place;
the earth nursing its ticking metal eggs, hatching
new carnage. But how could you know, brave
as belief as you boarded the boats, singing?
The end of God in the poisonous, shrapneled air.
Poetry gargling its own blood. We sense it was love
you gave your world for; the town squares silent,
awaiting their cenotaphs. What happened next?
War. And after that? War. And now? War. War.
History might as well be water, chastising this shore;
for we learn nothing from your endless sacrifice.
Your faces drowning in the pages of the sea.
Pages of the Sea was the largest simultaneous coastal arts project to take place in the UK.
Boyle spent the morning at the service at Folkestone, where a portrait of British poet and soldier Wilfred Owen was drawn.
"Wilfred Owen swam here the day before he left for France and he never returned," Boyle told the Manchester Evening News.
"Thankfully his poems did."
Owen died on November 4, 1918 while attempting to lead his men across the Sambre-Oise canal at Ors, France.
His parents received word of his death a week later, on Armistice Day.
Most of his works were published posthumously, with his most important poems including Anthem for Doomed Youth and Dulce et Decorum Est.
