The nearest we’ll ever get to experiencing the horrors of 1914
In a German war cemetery to the north-east of the Belgian town of Diksmuide is the grave of a young soldier called Peter Kollwitz. He once lay among the 1,500 dead of the Roggevelde cemetery and it was there, in 1932 – the same year that Lutyens’s memorial to the dead of the Somme was dedicated – that his mother, the great German printmaker and sculptor Käthe Kollwitz, placed at his graveside the two granite figures known as the ‘Grieving Parents’. There is, as the historian Jay Winter wrote, ‘no monument to the grief of those parents who lost their sons in the war more moving than this simple stone
