The Living Unknown Soldier: A Story of Grief and the Great War
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.33 (722 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0805075224 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 240 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-11-01 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Great story told by a brilliant writer Read this book about 2 years ago, and i still think about the stories. Really brought home the horrors of WWI-a war which we almost all but forgot. Brutal stuff told with a compelling eye for detail and nuance-a keeper for life long referal.. A Somber, Unsettling Tale Jean-Yves Le Naour has magnificently written an unsettling tale of the Living Unknown Soldier of post-WWI France, Anthelme Mangin. Penny Allen has masterfully translated the story. Le Naour brings to life the past of Anthelme Mangin, an amnesiac veteran of WW One who returned to France in a state of complete dementia. Mangin had been a prisoner in Germany who was repratriated with other invalids in early 1918. A great sadness permeates the book. Mangin's poor soul never recovered its memory, alth. Beautiful Stranger Anthelme mangin wasn't even his real name, but the doctors had to call him something in order to fit him into their bureaucracy. In Jean-Yves Le Naour's research he found that many of the Army records he needed to lay his hands on have mysteriously been "disappeared," but from press accounts and asylum he was able to piece together most of the story, though some details remain alarmingly vague. It didn't help him that the journalist who did the most to publicize M. Mangin's plight was himself a f
With humane sympathy and the skill of a novelist, Le Naour recounts the twenty-year court battles waged by the families competing to take the amnesiac soldier home. 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, 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. The powerful story of a soldier who lost his memory and identity, and of a people in mourning who found in him their own missing men In February 1918, a derelict soldier was discovered wandering the railway station in Lyon, France. In the process, he portrays not just the fate of one individual but the rank and file's experience in the trenches and an entire nation's great and inconsolable grief following a war that consumed the lives of one million men.Dramatic, taut, and powerfully relevant to our own times, this heartrending history depicts the pain and turmoil of a society that, without bodies to bury, is caught between holding on and letting go.. With no memory of his name or past, no identifying possessions, marks, or documents, the soldier-given the name Ant
From Publishers Weekly This incisive historical study probes the vexed issues of war and remembrance through the tragic story of Anthelme Mangin, an unidentified amnesiac World War I veteran who washed up in a French mental hospital in 1918. Historian and political scientist Le Naour (A History of Sexual Behavior During World War I) draws on legal and medical files from the case, press accounts, personal letters, poems, novels and plays to illuminate French attitudes towards World War I vets; he explores the anguish and pathos of the families of the missing, psychiatric attitudes towards shell-shocked soldiers, methods for establishing identity, and the conflicting political significance assigned to the dead and missing by the left and the right. The Mangin case became a cause célèbre after a war in which hundreds of thousands of French soldiers had gone missing in action, buried or obliterated by artillery fire, or hastily interred i