The memorial takes the form of a 320m ring of concrete barely touching and, as if by magic, projecting over a plateau set below the neo-Byzantine chapel and soaring lantern tower of the National Necropolis, the biggest of French military cemeteries.
It's hard to believe that this was once the heart of France's coal-mining industry, a target for attacking German armies; and that these green farmlands - poppy-strewn in summer - were once churned into an ooze of mud and blood by an estimated 1.5 billion artillery shells.
"To give shape to brotherhood, to unite yesterday's enemies," says Philippe Prost, the architect, "I chose the ring as a figure to bring together the names of the soldiers, thinking of the circle formed by people holding hands. The ring is synonymous with unity and eternity. Unity, because the names form a sort of human chain, and eternity because the letters are joined without an end, in alphabetical order without any distinction of nationality, rank or religion."
Invention and engineering skill as well as a lightness of artistic touch has made this apparently simple war memorial special in its own right and comparable to the most revered WWI memorials in France and Belgium and to those witnessing the loss of life in later wars. These share the power to move people across time, nationality, class and religious background.
Sir Edwin Lutyens' Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval is the biggest and greatest of British war memorials, a monumental gateway commanding remote countryside in a gloriously complex sequence of interlocking arches. It records the name of 72,195 British and South African soldiers with no known grave. Coming across it, especially in low light and mist, is a haunting and unforgettable experience. All those missing soldiers stand with you.
Maya Lin's simple and beautiful Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC might appear to be at odds with Lutyens's at Thiepval, and yet Lin's twin walls of reflective stone record the names of 58,272 US soldiers lost in Vietnam. People come here to feel these with their fingertips. Ultimately, it is the same when you get close to the Thiepval memorial: what you see is not so much sublime architecture, but all those names carved in heartbreaking profusion.
And, yet, perhaps the most beautiful of all war cemeteries are the simplest of all, notably the German cemeteries at Vladslo and Langemark, near Ypres, designed by the architect Robert Tischler, a former Great War soldier. In these, names are recorded on simple granite stones set on grass stretching beneath under oaks: man and nature, mourning and universal life married beautifully and for ever.
Not all British observers from this week will necessarily agree with Dr Markus Meckel, president of the German War Graves Commission, who says, "It is in places such as Notre Dame de Lorette that we can and must assert loud and clear that the European Union is more than just a financial and economic programme. It is a major step towards peace and reconciliation that must not just be preserved and developed but which represents all our futures."
Yet in Prost's beautiful design, as in all those soldiers' deaths, we are truly united, even if we are never free of the politics that causes such horrific wars.
