The Living Unknown Soldier : A Story of Grief and the Great War

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.