The Lost Tommies by Ross Coulthart review – young martyrs to pointlessness

Recently unearthed in an abandoned French farmhouse, these haunting portraits of British soldiers on the Somme are a lesson to us – and to Isis

• Portraits of first world war soldiers – in pictures

“Lest we forget” is the trusting motto of first world war commemorations. All the same, preoccupied by later disasters, we have forgotten this most pointless of conflicts, which began as a fatuous diplomatic squabble and ended as a rehearsal for Armageddon; we need a rude reminder. More than 17 million soldiers and civilians died between 1914 and 1918, but such totals stupefy the brain and numb the heart. The Lost Tommies therefore deals with individuals, not an indiscriminate mass. Ross Coulthart’s book rescues from oblivion a few hundred British combatants who fought in the trenches and foxholes of the Somme, and forces us to look at their depressed, bewildered or downright anguished faces.

Battle was industrialised, and the Somme was like an abattoir in which the men, as Wilfred Owen put it, died like cattle

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