Biography books list
Jean-Yves Le Naour is a history lecturer, specialising in World War I. His publications include Mis-res et Tourments de la chair pendant la Grande Guerre (Deprivation and Torments of the Flesh during the Great War), Aubler,
The Soldier without an Armistice
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Bringuier s report of a mysterious soldier wandering the platforms of the Lyon-Brotteaux station gave rise to many more news items, sometimes contradictory and often romanticized.
Anthelme mangin biography books in order Warriors: Portraits from the Battlefield. Le Naour has achieved the most piercing account I have ever read of the ghosts who crowd the landscape after a modern war. They found him, so Bringuier related, in a railroad station at Lyon. It was early morning on February 1, A hospital train bringing exchanged prisoners of war from Germany had arrived at Lyon-Brotteaux a few hours before, but its occupants had long since been welcomed by their families and taken away.It was clear the soldier had been shipped from Germany in a convoy of disabled and severely wounded prisoners, probably on a train that left Konstanz on January 30, , heading for Lyon via Switzerland. From there, the stories diverged. In some, "Anthelme Mangin" either got off in Lyon on his own initiative or was separated from his companions when they were dispatched to various hospitals.
Others theorized that the German authorities had simply jettisoned the amnesiac on the first available train without providing any papers for him.
Anthelme mangin biography books free
On 1 February , a French soldier was repatriated from Germany and arrived at the Gare des Brotteaux in Lyon , suffering from amnesia and lacking military or civil identification documents. When questioned, he gave a name that sounded something like Anthelme Mangin, and this became the name by which he is known to history. He was diagnosed with dementia praecox and placed in an asylum in Clermont-Ferrand. In January Le Petit Parisien published a front-page feature with photos of several asylum patients, including Mangin, in the hope that their families would recognize them. The Mazenc family of Rodez claimed that he was their son and brother Albert, who disappeared in Tahure inThe Courrier de l Aveyron fumed, "One might reasonably ask how it is that the German administration, which considers itself so perfect, returned sick men to us without even having the decency to tell us who they are. But we ve seen it all before!"
Nothing in particular distinguished the "poor vet." He had no identity papers, he had lost his dog tag, and the number of his regiment had long since fallen off his threadbare overcoat.
A search through his pockets turned up only a cigarette lighter made from a Mauser cartridge, and just about every soldier possessed this kind of thing.
In one of a series of articles titled "The Enigma of the Living Unknown Soldier," published from May 11 to May 20, in L Intransigeant, Paul Bringuier referred to February 1, , as the day that marked the birth of Anthelme Mangin.
Anthelme mangin biography books By burlington 9 January , in Books and Book Reviews. The book, which was reviewed in the Sunday Times a week ago, illustrates the heartbreak of those who lost their loved ones and the straws people will clutch at in a vain hope of finding them. Mangin died in and in between , when he was shipped home and committed to an asylum, and the 's there were many attempts by the bereaved to identify him as their own. All to no avail. I saw this book in the store a few months back and posted a similar question.Other newspapers took up his report, which was larded with mistakes, including passages where, for lack of real information, Bringuier gave free rein to his imagination. He conjured up icy rain, night, and fog to lend a gloomy ambience to the scene of the amnesiac s discovery by a military policeman, lantern in hand on his rounds, who finds him prostrate next to an iron pillar, shivering with cold and fever:
"Hey!
What are you doing there?"
"I don t know."
"Were you on the train from Constance?"
"I don t know."
The policeman raises his lantern. He sees a waxen face with two weeks beard and a blank stare. The man is wearing a dirty old infantryman s overcoat without insignia, a filthy cap, corduroy civilian trousers, and galoshes.
"What s your name?"
"I don t know."
At police headquarters, the interrogation continues. He is shaken, cursed, accused of faking, and threatened with courtmartial. He remains silent, but in his exhaustion he finally blurts out "Mangin."
"What s that? Mangin? . .
. Is that your name?"
"No."
"So why did you say Mangin ?"
"I don t know."
The military authorities soon enough realize that it is pointless to continue questioning the unknown man. He is sent to the psychiatric asylum in Bron and interned there as No.
Apart from this final fact the only verified one in the account these events existed solely in the mind of a journalist with a vivid imagination.
In addition to a document denying the existence of any wandering soldier, which was made public only in , several aspects of the account cast doubt on its veracity. First of all, the unknown man did not arrive in Lyon on some convoy or other, but specifically as one of sixty- five shell-shocked or demented repatriates.6 Further, when Le Petit Parisien, a national morning newspaper, published photographs of six amnesiac soldiers on January 10, , three of them were still hospitalized in the Bron asylum.
Biography books free: This incisive historical study probes the vexed issues of war and remembrance through the tragic story of Anthelme Mangin, an unidentified amnesiac World War I veteran who washed up in a French mental hospital in
One Berrinet, interned there since February 1, , had probably been on the same convoy as Anthelme Mangin, who had been sent to the asylum in Clermont-Ferrand on the day of the photographs publication. Given Mangin s condition, it is especially difficult to believe the gendarmes could have for an instant suspected him of desertion or fraud, and it is even more difficult to imagine, with Bringuier, that such a suspicion could have persisted in the asylum, since the prisoners repatriated from Germany were anything but sound that was precisely why the enemy had gotten rid of them.
Once in France, their treatment was what came to be known as "the gentle cure," developed by a specialist named Damaye: hot baths, regular meals, plenty of restorative sleep, and exercise. In any case, they were not regarded with the same suspicion as psychotic combatants, who were often accused of faking their condition in order to get pulled off the front lines.
Until recently, the historiography of modern warfare ignored tens of thousands of traumatized combatants, in particular those from the First World War. Their pathologies were poorly diagnosed by their contemporaries, who attributed them to the shock from bombings, whence the name "shell shock," coined by British medical personnel.
Biography books for 4th graders By signing up, I confirm that I'm over To find out what personal data we collect and how we use it, please visit our Privacy Policy. Skip to Content The Penguin Podcast is back! 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.The French used the terms obusite (shell shock), choc émotionnel (emotional shock), and even commotion (concussion) interchangeably for the variety of nervous or psychic wounds the troops suffered. But if thevocabulary is diverse equal to the multiple forms of disturbance the frequency of such pathologies was always explained the same way.
Warfare and its violence were left largely blameless; the sick were "predisposed," the victims of a morbid S heredity, and war only revealed or aggravated what was already there. An explanation that emerged during the conflict and prevailed at least until , when it was officially proposed by the surgeon-general, a professor of experimental psychology named Georges Dumas, and his psychiatric colleagues Antonin Porot and Angelo Hesnard, was that war "weighs seriously only on those whose mental state is already verging on imbalance, madness, or constitutional fragility." It was hard for specialists to find warfare itself responsible when they viewed it as a test of virility, a kind of sink-or-swim for both body and soul.
"Feminine" hysteria and nervousness were incompatible with the stereotype, yet these combat neuroses were now threatening to upset the norm. Still, it was simpler to go with the notion of predisposition than to blame the war.