Robert Hardman recounts how a First World War memorial to Captain Francis "Toby" Dodgson — a cousin of Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll — quietly disappeared from the French battlefield where he was killed, only for it to be tracked down and restored. The story matters as a reminder that individual sacrifices of the Somme are still cared about more than a century on, and it culminates in a commemoration marking 110 years to the minute since Dodgson's death.

Captain Dodgson of the 8th Yorkshires was 27 when he was last seen leading an assault on the village of Contalmaison on 10 July 1916; his battalion took its objective but lost 361 men, including 12 officers, that day. His name was among the 72,000 on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing, though his remains were later found and reinterred nearby. After the war his mother and brother Philip erected a granite memorial where he fell, which stood for decades until it vanished. A Dutch historian helped rediscover it, and Dodgson's family, the Yorkshire Regiment and the local mayor were due to gather for a commemoration.