The Western Front did not just kill men. It often unmade their bodies entirely. Shell fire could obliterate a soldier so thoroughly that nothing was left to bury; mud could swallow a stretcher party and not give up its dead for years, if ever; ground captured and lost and recaptured saw graves shelled and reshelled until no trace remained. The Imperial War Graves Commission - now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission - resolved early that every man who died in service would be remembered by name. For those who could be buried, headstones in cemeteries. For those who could not, panels of names on memorials to the missing. New Zealand, a small country a long way away, had its own pattern. Rather than place all its missing on one giant memorial, the New Zealand government chose to commemorate them close to where they had fallen, in seven separate memorials across the Western Front.

The Polygon Wood Sector had been part of the Ypres Salient since the early months of the war. Held by the Allies in 1914, lost to the Germans in 1915, it was recaptured by the Australian 5th Division in September 1917 during the wider Third Battle of Ypres. After the First Battle of Passchendaele on 12 October, the New Zealand Division wintered in the sector. Belgian winter in waterlogged shell ground is its own kind of warfare - trench foot, frost, snipers, the gas shelling that came without warning, the men who slipped off duckboards into shell holes and were never found again. The Division stayed until February 1918, then went south for rest, then was thrown into the line against the German spring offensive on the Somme. The 378 names on Holden's memorial belong to men killed between September 1917 and May 1918, almost all in this corner of Flanders.

Holden had served in the war himself, working as a lieutenant in the Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries before transferring to the Imperial War Graves Commission in 1918 with the rank of major. He understood what these memorials had to do. They could not bring the dead back. They could not even claim, honestly, to mark a place where a particular man had died - because in most cases no one knew. What they could do was give a name a piece of ground. Holden's obelisk at Polygon Wood is restrained almost to severity: a tall pale shaft on a stepped base, the names arranged in neat columns, the lettering deep enough to last. There is no allegory, no weeping bronze figure, no Latin. The memorial stands inside Buttes New British Cemetery on the cemetery's eastern boundary - close to, but separate from, the men with known graves who lie in front of it.

New Zealand built seven memorials to its missing on the Western Front. Three are in Belgium: Buttes New British Cemetery at Polygon Wood, Messines Ridge British Cemetery for the Messines fighting, and Tyne Cot for the wider Passchendaele dead. Four are in France: Caterpillar Valley Cemetery at Longueval and Grévillers, both linked to the Somme; Cité Bonjean near Armentières; and Marfaux, on the Marne, where New Zealanders fell in 1918. The choice to disperse rather than centralise was deliberate. A New Zealand mother in Otago whose son had no known grave at Passchendaele could know, at least, where his name was. The memorials are not interchangeable. Each one is tied to a particular stretch of front, a particular fight, a particular six or eight or twelve months of loss.

There is nothing more to do at a memorial like this than read names. The 378 of them are arranged by regiment - Wellington, Auckland, Canterbury, Otago, the Rifle Brigade, the mounted units that fought dismounted, the engineers, the artillery, the medical corps. Some are common surnames; some are Māori names, men of the New Zealand (Maori) Pioneer Battalion and the regular battalions in which Māori soldiers served. Visitors trace the letters with their fingers. They photograph particular columns and send them home. They leave small wooden crosses with poppies at the base. There is no body to mourn over, no headstone to stand at. There is only the stone, and the names, and the wood behind it - the same wood, more or less, where these men were last seen alive.