THE LIVING UNKNOWN SOLDIER

“Somewhere in France, in some village, on the column of a war monument somewhere, one name is engraved that should not be there.”

Le Naour (History/Univ. of Aix-en-Provence) offers an engrossing account—whose English publication is well timed to coincide with the 90th anniversary of the conflict’s outbreak—of a French poilu of the Great War who lost his memory and, in effect, his life somewhere on the battlefield. This man was discovered wandering in a railroad yard near Lyon on February 1, 1918, before the war’s end, apparently one of a convoy of paroled prisoners coming home from Germany. He had no knowledge of who he was or how he had come to be there; he could not even remember how to eat. “At police headquarters,” writes Le Naour, “he is shaken, cursed, accused of faking, and threatened with court-martial.” Finally, from some deep recess of memory, he produced the name Mangin, though he could not say why. The man dubbed Anthelme Mangin was then taken off to a hospital, and then to a psychiatric asylum, where he would up reside until his death in 1942. Claimed from time to time by would-be family members (some, but far from all, apparently interested in Mangin’s pension as a wounded veteran of war, for he was “in the maximum-benefits category”), Mangin became a symbol of “the living unknown soldier,” and eventually contested in yet another way: some from his time believed that there could be only one unknown soldier, the one buried beneath the Arc de Triomphe, even though, as Le Naour observes, “from 1914 to 1918, more than 250,000 soldiers vanished, leaving no trace beyond the notice of their disappearance in action.” Mangin’s identity was eventually discovered, writes Le Naour, but small matter: he is utterly forgotten today, as surely as if he had never lived.

Reminiscent in approach and substance of Michel Foucault’s I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother . . . and Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre: a thoughtful and highly readable work of history.