Memorials must usually be, to a greater or lesser extent, monuments to failure. Failure of negotiation. Failure of military strategy. Failure of intelligence. Even worse, they can be monuments to success: the success of battle plans that factor in huge loss of human life as the price of victory. Perhaps for this reason the Great War memorials - the first to be built to commemorate a war of mechanized mass slaughter - have such enormous emotional pull. As with later Jewish examples, their designers had somehow to come to terms with the unthinkable. Look at the thousands and thousands of names lining the arches on Lutyens’ Thiepval monument. These are soldiers whose bodies were never found, who are still merely officially “missing”.

The military understandably expects, and always gets, its memorials. More difficult is the task of recording the sacrifice of civilians, even when civilians find themselves in the front line. There has never been a satisfactory memorial to those who died and suffered in the London Blitz - though a huge and somewhat tasteless monument involving a crashing bomber was once proposed in the Surrey Docks by architect Theo Crosby and sculptor Michael Sandle. Though many less questionable have been mooted, they have all failed to capture the notion of innocent lives brutally lost.