SOURCE: “The Lost Boys,” in New Statesman and Society, October 28, 1994, p. 41.

In the following review of The Missing of the Somme, Chalmers discusses the legacy of the First World War in Britain and Dyer's treatment of the subject.

By the end of the first world war—or Great War, as Geoff Dyer still prefers to call it—10 per cent of the males of Great Britain under 45 had simply disappeared. The country, however, to which the survivors returned from that “zone of obliteration” called the Western Front was virtually untouched by war, unlike in 1945. “The problem,” notes Dyer, “was to find a way of making manifest the memory of those who were missing … since there was to be no repatriation of bodies [often no bodies to repatriate] … how to make visible this invisible loss … How to inscribe the story of what had happened on a death-haunted landscape which was...