“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. He had no knowledge of who he was or how he had come to be there he could not even remember how to eat. 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. 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. “Somewhere in France, in some village, on the column of a war monument somewhere, one name is engraved that should not be there.”
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