The figures available for troops from the Commonwealth are very precise, as the bodies of all fallen soldiers were buried in individual graves near to where they were killed. This allows us to arrive at an estimate of the number of fallen soldiers whose remains have never been found. All nationalities combined, 640,000 Commonwealth soldiers met their demise on the Western Front. A total of 520,000 graves are recorded in the cemeteries managed by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, leaving 120,000 fallen soldiers with no known graves, i.e. around 20% of all those killed or missing in action. Applying this ratio to the other warring nations – France (1,300,000 killed), Belgium (38,200 killed), the United States (52,000 killed) and Germany (1,490,000 killed) – thus leaves us with a total of almost 700,000 bodies unaccounted for along the Western Front.
