Thiepval. View from the the Great War Memorial , designed by Sir Edwind Lutyens, toward the cemeteries.

Vincent Scully, in his Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade (1991), describes the memorial geography of this landscape with monument and graves:

"Again, a great work of architecture . . . helps us perceive the character of one major part of that threat, the evil, empty face of war. North of Amiens the land rises slowly in rolling open fields leading toward the heights of the Somme. There Lutyens built a memorial to the hundreds of thousands of British and French soldiers who were killed in this landscape, literally for nothing, throughout the summer of 1916. They were heading for the high ground. We follow their track across the open fields. The memorial looms indistinctly far ahead of us on the height. We move toward it. There is no cover. We imagine the machine guns sweeping the gentle slopes. We turn t oward the little folds in the earth that open to left and right of the road and seem to offer refuge from that fire; it is apparent that the infantry did exactly that before us. They are still there in many of the defilades, laid out neatly in small cemeteries where the artillery and the mortars found them. We arrive at the height, the objective." (p. 358)