Even though I have been visiting the Somme to sing remembrance for nearly a decade, I still feel tremendous sorrow when I see the gravestones and names of the missing. For each name and for each grave there must surely have been families and whole communities of grieving people back home.

This year, on the anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, I led the singing at the Royal British Legion’s ceremony at the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing, a huge monument that is lovingly in the care of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I sang at the Ulster Tower, Northern Ireland’s national war memorial, and at the memorial to the 16th Irish Division in Guillemont.