Lost Battalions
Thomas S. Monson April 1971 Tuesday Morning Session
This past November I stood on a very old bridge which spans the River Somme as it makes its steady but unhurried way through the heartland of France. Suddenly I realized that fifty-two years had come—then gone—since the signing of the Armistice of 1918 and the termination of the Great War. I tried to imagine what the River Somme looked like fifty-two years before. How many thousands of soldiers had crossed this same bridge? Some came back. For others, the Somme was truly a river of no return. For the battlefields of Vimy Ridge, Armentieres, and Nueve Chappelle took a hideous toll of human life. Acres of neat, white crosses serve as an unforgettable reminder.