The sheer scale of the slaughter on the Western Front was remembered today in a moving new memorial to the thousands of men whose bodies were never found after the Battle of the Somme.
Artist Rob Heard, 53, has spent the last three-and-a-half years hand-sewing calico shrouds and binding them over 72,396 small figures to represent every Commonwealth serviceman who died in the First World War battle and has no known grave.
They have been laid out next to each other at the Olympic Park in a temporary memorial.
The Somerset-based artist said: “The key to this is about the individual, so that is why the way we’ve chosen to lay these figures out there — with a gap between them. It is an ordered gap which is so important because they are individuals. They’re not a mass, and each one is made to a name.”
The thousands of figures can be seen at the park from tomorrow until Sunday next week. They will then be sold off in aid of military charities.
Heard started the project after injuring his hands in a car crash, which meant he could not continue his work as a wood carver.
He said: “I was feeling sorry for myself post-surgery, and I was just looking at the guys coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq at the time without their legs and with arms off, and just started thinking, ‘Come off it, get it together.’
“The idea for making the shrouds was just an epiphany, I can’t actually remember how that came around. I just started to do it. I wasn’t commissioned or asked to do it.”
Heard, who finished the last figure only five days ago, said the project had become like an “immense freight train” as it captured the public imagination.
He said: “I liken it strangely to a prison sentence, I never had to think about what I was doing the next minute, the next hour, the next day, the next month, the next year. I knew exactly what I was doing every day and I did it for 12 hours a day for three-and-a-half years, every single day.”
The display in Stratford is part of a nationwide commemoration of the centenary of the end of the war. Other events include 100 veterans and serving military walking 100 miles from the battlefield at Ypres to the Cenotaph.
Organised by the military housing charity Haig Housing Trust, the Long Walk Home will finish on Remembrance Sunday in time for the memorial service. Veterans began walking from the Menin Gate war memorial this morning.
This year 68 per cent of Britons will wear a poppy to mark Remembrance Day, a study for the Charities Aid Foundation has found.
