Jean Yves Le-Naour: The living unknown soldier - a true story of grief and the great war

As anyone who has ever been to a war cemetery knows, such places are scattered with the graves of unknown soldiers. There lie the bodies of men killed in battle, many of them far from home, whose remains were never able to be identified.

At the end of WWI, France had 1.5 million dead, which included around 400,000 counted as missing. In the final count, writes Le Naour, from 1914 to 1918, more than 250,000 soldiers vanished, "leaving no trace beyond the notice of their disappearance in action".

Some of the families informed that their loved ones were missing accepted their sons and brothers, husbands and lovers were dead. They mourned, and limped on with their lives. Others went on hoping, usually against hope, that their men would come home: that they were still in Germany somewhere, perhaps injured or in POW camps.

And sometimes the lost soldiers did come home.

Le Naour's book is about one who did. He pieces together the story of a soldier called, perhaps, Anthelme Mangin, who was found alive and sent home to France, one of a tattered, battered, physically and mentally ill company of men. Mangin suffered total amnesia and a form of dementia. He did not know who he was, and he was never to know. Mangin remained missing in his mind, and in his identity, until his death in an asylum in 1942.

That he likely starved to death — there was another war on now and Le Naour writes that inmates were deprived of rations and Mangin was incapable of fighting for any available crumbs — is the tragic epithet of a tragic snippet of a life.

And it was from snippets that Le Naour has had to put together Mangin's life. There were certainly news stories about him. By 1920 he had become one of six unclaimed, unknown living soldiers. When his photograph was published in a newspaper, thousands claimed him as theirs. By the time of his death an identity, much contested in court battles that went on for years, had been established. All of this — the claims, the longing, the form of bitter grieving that accompanied such claims — meant nothing to Mangin. He died as he had returned from the war: unaware of who he was.

And certainly unaware that, says Le Naour, "he had become a symbol: in his anonymity and his madman's remove from the world of the living, he was like a twin to the Unknown Soldier buried beneath the Arc de Triomphe. He stood for both the suffering of the families of the missing, who sought to identify him as their own, and for France's difficulty in coming to terms with grief between two world wars".

Le Naour has written a deeply moving account of the lost life of one man, which encompasses the lost lives, and lost hopes, of the many. And in doing so he has restored Mangin from symbol to man.

* Michele Hewitson is a Herald feature writer.

* William Heinemann, $54.95