Booklist: The Living Unknown Soldier, by Jean-Yves Le Naour

The Living Unknown Soldier: A Story of Grief and the Great War, by Jean-Yves Le Naour
Translated by Penny Allen
Metropolitan Books, 2002
204 pages plus notes. 8 pages of b&w photos
Library: 940.412 LEN

Description
In February 1918, a derelicy soldier was discovered wandering the railway station in Lyon, France. With no memory of his name or his past, no identifying possessions, marks or documents, the soldier-given the name Anthelm Mangin-was sent to an asylum for the insane. When, after the Great War ended, the authorities placed the soldier's image in advertisements to locate his family, hundreds of "relatives" claimed him-as their father or son, husband or brother who had failed to return from the front.

Marshaling a vast array of original material, from letters and newspaper articles to accounts of battlefield deaths, hospital reports, and police files, French historian Jean-Yves Le Naour meticulously re-creates the long-forgotten story of the single soldier who came to stand for a lost generation.

With humane sympathy and the skill of a novelist, he recounts the twenty-year court battles waged by the families competing to take the amnesiac soldier home. In the process, he portrays not just the fate of one individual but the rank and file's experience in the trenches, as well as an entire nation's inconsolable grief at the loss of more than one million of its men.

Dramatic, taut and powerfully relevant to our own times, this heartrening history depicts the pain and turmoil of a society that, without bodies to bury, is caught between holding on and letting go.

Table of Contents
1. The Soldier without an Armistice (1918-1922). (pg 5-37)
2. The Impossible Grief for the Missing (pg 38-79)
3. The REturn of Colonel Chabert (pg 80-106)
4. The Pilgrimage to Rosez (pg 107-124)
5. Against All Odds: Three Accounts of GRief (pg 125-147)
6. Lemay vs. Monjoin (pg 148-168)
7. The Double Death of Anthelme Mangin (pg 169-199)
Conclusion
Notes