Volume 53, Number 5 · March 23, 2006
Ghosts
By Neal Ascherson
The Living Unknown Soldier: A Story of Grief and the Great War
by Jean-Yves Le Naour, translated from the French by Penny Allen
Owl Books, 234 pp., $15.00 (paper)
Warriors: Portraits from the Battlefield
by Max Hastings
Knopf, 354 pp., $27.50
'It is the most touching, the cruelest story of the war that I tell, a story of the purest and most brutal symbolism.' In these words, written in the 1930s, the French journalist Paul Bringuier revealed to his readers the tale of a 'living unknown soldier,' the man they called 'Anthelme Mangin.' But in his excellent book, Jean-Yves Le Naour shows how much more touching and cruel this man's real story was, and how impure its symbolism became. Le Naour has achieved the most piercing account I have ever read of the ghosts who crowd the landscape after a modern war.
Review, 4519 words
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