Anthelme mangin biography
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The Living Unknown Soldier: A Story of Grief and the Great War
The remarkably powerful and moving true story of a soldier who lost his memory and identity during World War I, and of a people in mourning, who found in him the symbol of a lost generation.
Released from a German POW camp with no memory of his name or his past life and no documents or distinguishing marks to identify him, the soldier was given the name 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, 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
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Soldat inconnu vivant. English The living unknown soldier : a story of grief and the Great War / by Jean-Yves Le Naour ; translated by Penny Allen.
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When I Come Home Again by Caroline Scott - the true story that inspired the book
When I Come Home Again was inspired by a true story from France. In 1918, a confused man in a military uniform was wandering on a Lyon railway station. He couldn’t remember his own name, or how he’d got there, and couldn’t give details of any home or family. He was wearing no dog tags, carrying no identity papers, and the number of his regiment had been torn away from his overcoat.
The man was transferred to an insane asylum, where, for practicality’s sake, he was given the name Anthelme Mangin. Over the months ahead, his doctors would try various therapies to trigger his mind into recall, but Mangin was actively resistant. He came up with false names and addresses to make the questioning stop. It quickly became clear that he just wanted to be left in peace.
In 1920, photographs of a number of amnesiac former soldiers were published in the French national press, in the hope