Chapter One
The Soldier without an Armistice
(1918–1922)
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. 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, 1918, 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. The 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, 1935 in L’Intransigeant, Paul Bringuier referred to February 1, 1918, as the day that marked the birth of Anthelme Mangin. 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. 13.
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 1937, 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, 1920, three of them were still hospitalized in the Bron asylum. One Berrinet, interned there since February 1, 1918, 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. 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 1919, 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. People could then tell themselves that it was the enemy who was subject to such psychic delicacy—evidence of his weak constitution and, thus, his sure defeat.
Given this ideological exoneration of war (a thesis that would be abandoned only gradually), the sick could be seen as frauds. Throughout the conflict, the health service dreaded malingering and exaggerated its extent. In 1935, Drs. André Fribourg-Blanc and Marcel Gauthier were still insisting that many soldiers used “all available ruses and means to escape peril,” a ruling in line with the continuing fantasy of fakers and exaggerators put forward by the medical corps, whose mission was to return men to the front as quickly as possible. The treatment of the mentally ill was directed at this single goal.
Accompanying the “gentle cure” Anthelme Mangin received in Bron in February 1918 were more coercive methods, including electroshock. This treatment had come into use in psychiatric centers and elsewhere before the war; it became prevalent, even systematic, during the war years, 1914 to 1918—a brutal method, wrote P. Chavigny but “efficient” if not “nearly infallible.” The physical pain was “always quite tolerable,” according to Georges Dumas. This was not the opinion of the patient who claimed to have received an electric shock strong enough to move a tram, adding that he would rather be court-martialed than relive the experience. The goal of this torture (as some would call it) was to make patients want to emerge from their psychosis—the unconscious refuge of those who had chosen to flee the war. If the malady became more difficult to endure than military service itself, then they would choose the horrors of the front over those of electroshock. Of course, they would not really have recovered, but every time the army would get one more soldier back, and that was what counted.
It is not known whether Mangin lost his senses on the battlefield, when he was wounded in the right leg and taken prisoner, or if he began to show signs of dementia in captivity. For if war can traumatize, so too can prison. The French medical profession would later coin the term psychose des barbelés (prisoner’s syndrome) to describe the range of mental illnesses experienced by prisoners, while continuing to use the traditional and imprecise cafard, which could mean anything from passing gloom to suicidal depression. But in order for shellshocked prisoners to receive the benefit of the Franco-German accord regarding repatriation of the wounded and the ill, the psychoses had first to be recognized, and the sick men no longer charged with faking or acting.
According to the Geneva Convention, nations at war must repatriate soldiers so ill or gravely wounded that they can no longer be expected to take part in the conflict. The Franco- German negotiations hit a snag, however, over whether to repatriate by individual or by category—as the French preferred, since they had far fewer prisoners than the Germans. It was only after the intervention of the Vatican and the president of the Helvetian Confederation that the first convoys of soldiers were exchanged, via Switzerland, in March 1915. The Red Cross had to keep expanding its evacuations, which initially had been limited to the blind, amputees, and men with facial wounds. It even invented a classification of prisoners to be kept in Switzerland, which included the potentially curable. Not until May 1917 were those afflicted with the psychose des barbelés finally taken into account. That was when Anthelme Mangin was added to the list of soldiers eligible for repatriation.
The civil service intake worker who completed the form for the unidentified man’s hospitalization in Bron on February 1, 1918, took the trouble to add some question marks next to the name Anthelme Mangin, to indicate that he found the sick man’s statements incoherent. When Mangin arrived at the asylum, without evacuation papers, the doctors knew nothing about his ailment. But the diagnosis was rapid: on February , Jean Lépine, the physician in charge of psychiatric services for the XIVth district as well as the director of the Rhône departmental asylums, stated that the patient in question was suffering from a “persecution complex” and “withdrawal,” and should therefore be kept among the mentally disturbed. The director of the Clermont-Ferrand asylum, where Mangin was soon sent, diagnosed “dementia praecox” and recommended that he be committed. The medical certificate issued by A. Fenayrou, the director of the Rodez asylum, which Mangin entered on June 19, 1920, confirmed the ruling of his colleagues, but with more precision as to the subject’s behavior: “Mental difficulties characterized at present by confused ideas, disorientation, complete unawareness, indifference to his situation, unconcern, total incapacity to care for himself. Incoherent language, answers with no relation to the questions asked; he stubbornly refuses to reply to questions regarding his identity. Extravagant gestures. Disorderly appearance. Mediocre general health. To be observed.” The symptoms he listed, from babbling to confusion, from indifference to rapidly alternating excitement and depression, are all part of what was known at the time as dementia praecox, which Fenayrou suspected but hesitated to diagnose. It is a progressive malady, characterized by disorientation in relation to time and space and manifests initially as excessive melancholy, leading to apathy, inertia, and reclusiveness. Symptoms include flat affect, split personality, dreaminess, incoherence, whisperings, and the incomprehensible muddle of words that is, according to the psychiatrist Miloch Popovitch, “an adaptation of language to the feelings experienced in dreams.” The physical state eventually reflects the mental.
Progressive and incurable, dementia praecox is accompanied by the loss of memory, as it was in thirty-eight of the forty-one soldiers who were committed with the malady between 1914 and 1918 and who were still in treatment in 1926 in the Cadillac asylum, in the southwestern department of Gironde. In reality, amnesia is rarely autonomous and is more easily understood as a secondary symptom, as Popovitch puts it, “contributing, with others, to the clinical expression of various affects.” Heterogeneous in its manifestation, it can be total or partial, permanent or temporary, delayed or retrograde, but it is always fascinating for medical personnel. The war made the condition so common that as early as 1915 it was attracting the attention of specialists— a double-edged interest, because, as with all mental disturbances of the period, the sick soldiers were suspected of faking. “We believe there is no intellectual disturbance as frequently and easily simulated as amnesia,” Dr. Jules Perret stated in 1919. However, recognizing that “the simulator is rarely a normal person,” he agreed with Freud, for whom “all neurotics are fakers; they simulate without knowing it, and that is their illness.”
Their treatment for amnesia was not simple. As Louis Régis explained in 1920, the doctors had to restore the patient’s confidence with gentle care while taking pains to avoid the “caresses” and “unnecessary pampering” that might allow the amnesiac to find comfort in his affliction. Fresh air, sunshine, baths, exercise: all these were called for, plus a detoxifying regimen of purgatives, diuretics, or stomach pumping, on the theory that it is necessary to expel the evil—an approach in reality not so very far removed from the practice of bleeding, which had fallen out of use a century earlier. Not all medical personnel were convinced of the virtues of such treatment, though, and some called for another approach. Based on the accepted understanding of regression, whereby in amnesia the destruction of memory follows a logical pattern, first erasing recent memories and then, more slowly, earlier ones, these specialists imagined that in focusing on “dominant memories”—the ones most charged with feeling (intimacies, tragedies, passions, marriage, children, grief)— they could break down the patient’s psychic armor. They theorized that amnesia is always partial and that the memory’s fabric can be repaired via the fundamentals that organize even the memories of sick people. The way to proceed, they thought, was through establishing connections, evoking situations, questioning, and encouraging the family to recall the most important moments in the amnesiac’s life. But this method could work only with patients actually seeking to recover their memories. Mangin had no such desire, and thus he foiled the work of those trying to identify him.
Questioned upon his entry into the Rhône departmental asylum in Bron on February 1, 1918, the unidentified man gave his name as Anthelme Mangin, his birth date as March 1 (he did not know the year), and his residence as rue Sélastras in Vichy. There were no more questions, and he waited to be transferred to the Clermont-Ferrand asylum, which was closer to where he apparently was from, once a convoy of soldiers repatriated from Germany was ready to leave for the Auvergne. The transfer took place on March 22. Mangin entered the private Sainte-Marie-de-l’Assomption asylum in Clermont- Ferrand, and an investigation was launched in Vichy.
It was quickly determined that rue Sélastras did not exist there and that Anthelme Mangin was completely unknown. The hoax the patient had pulled on the authorities highlighted an aspect of his behavior and of his affliction: he absolutely refused to allow himself to be identified, sending doctors on wild-goose chases and inventing names and addresses out of whole cloth in order to cut short the interrogations, which he hated. His unconscious wish was to be left in peace, unidentified. The doctors spoke of this syndrome as “negativist” amnesia, a relatively rare disturbance with few prospects for a cure. Fenayrou, the director of the Aveyron departmental asylum in Rodez, confirmed the diagnosis in November 1920: “His behavior when he is asked questions of this sort leads me to believe that his silence and false replies are not due to a loss of memory but are, rather, manifestations of reticence originating in delirium.” By that time Anthelme Mangin, interned in Rodez since June 19, had repeated his stunt, embarrassing Fenayrou. Four days after his arrival at the asylum, Fenayrou had met with him at length and interrogated him, calmly but insistently, until the patient cracked and revealed his identity, twice—once in writing. Fenayrou immediately alerted the Aveyron prefect to his success and asked for a prompt follow-up:
I am pleased to report that today, as a result of my persistence, I succeeded in getting this man to answer the questions I asked him regarding his name, his age, and his place of birth. According to his statements, he is named Mongin Adrien, is approximately thirty years old, and was born in Chartres.
Aware, however, that his colleague in Bron had been duped, Fenayrou did not yet claim victory: “There is nothing less certain than that this information is correct.” And in fact the investigation that the prefect of Eure-et-Loir undertook brought no more satisfaction than the one in Vichy had. Once again, Mangin had bested his caretakers. Fenayrou’s misadventure might have been amusing had Mangin not been so oblivious. But it did give fodder to journalists, one of whom characterized the amnesiac as a cynic “who, in going mad, has willingly entered into a kind of living death out of disgust with murderous humanity, the way one used to discover religion out of love’s loss.” Marcel Nadaud and Maurice Pelletier, of Le Petit Journal, went even further and wrote that the patient, when asked to sign a document, had, with great irony, signed the name Lenin.
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