The monument: If the Vietnam Memorial artfully avoids editorial comment on the war it commemorates, the great monument at Thiepval, France, looks askance at what it marks. Its designer, British architect Sir Edwin Luytens, created a monument that generates unease, even repulsion. It is an ugly structure, dominating the hill like a grotesque red-and-white crab, its mouth gaping in horror. The tondi near the top, repetitions of the sculpted wreaths that festoon the monument near its base, look like the wide-open eyes of the psychotic soul in Edward Munch’s The Scream.

The ugliness is intended. At first glance, visitors may perceive they are seeing a creature warped by dread and dismay at the memory of the catastrophic things that happened at its feet 86 years ago. But then the monument’s more distressing reality becomes manifest: The manic eyes and wide open mouth are the face of Death itself, its maw yawning to suck in the soldiers who so futilely stormed the slight hill it crowns.

Thiepval commemorates 100,000 French and British soldiers who fell here during the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916 and were listed as missing in action. Because armies in those days did not provide identification tags, nobody knows where their bodies might be buried. Their names are incised around the walls of the monument’s base, while a graveyard with 70,000 dead sweeps down away from it.

Why to go: Six hundred thousand French and British soldiers died over five months in the Battle of the Somme in northern France, victims of the bankrupt ideas and hardened hearts of the generals who led them, and the butchering fusillades from relentless German machine guns. So extensive was the slaughter there, and at similar battle sites, that Europe never really recovered from it.

Thiepval is a place to ruminate on how an old civilization, once vibrant and confident, lost its heart and self-assurance and descended into the twin madnesses of fascism and communism. Today Europe frets helplessly as the center of world dynamism passes inexorably to China, India and the United States.

What to add to the journey: Thiepval is near the village of Albert, itself only a few miles from Amiens and its landmark gothic cathedral. Paris lies 80 miles (130 kilometers) south.