The Living Unknown Soldier - Hardcover

Fascinating and moving Jean-Yves Naour tells [Mangin's story] with judicious precision and admirable lack of sentiment Le Naour recounts the details of the Mangin case with impressive and unobtrusive scholarship and exemplary lucidity... The case illuminates much about the complex psychology of mourning In closing the book one is left with a feeling of great sadness and an abiding, useless rage against warfare Mangin was the real victim, but the deluded grief of those who claimed him as a loved one is even more poignant and distressing Mangin, and his lonely half-life opens a baleful window onto the aftermath of war and exposes the long dark shadow that it casts for decades, far beyond its conclusion. - William Boyd, Sunday Times. This hauntingly emblematic story reads like something Sebald would have taken up and absorbed. - Telegraph (a) poignant but admirably unsentimental book - Independent"

This is the remarkably powerful and moving true story of a soldier who lost his memory and identity, and of a people in mourning, who found in him the symbol of their lost generation. With no memory of his name or his past life, and no documents or distinguishing marks to identify him, he was renamed Anthelme Mangin, and sent to an asylum for the insane. With the end of the Great War, a newspaper advertisement placed in the hope of finding his lost family found instead a bereaved multitude ready to claim him as the father, son, husband or brother who had never come home. With humane sympathy and the skill of a novelist, French historian Jean Yves Le Naour meticulously recreates the twenty-year court battles waged over the Living Unknown Soldier, Poignant, psychologically penetrating, and profoundly revealing of the human cost of war, this remarkable book portrays not just the fate of one individual but of a nations inconsolable post-war grief.