Fiction: ‘The Remembered Soldier' by Anjet Daanje

Wall Street Journal

08-05-2025

They were called les morts vivants, or the living dead. These were survivors of the battlefields of World War I who were so severely shell-shocked that they no longer knew who they were. Some were catatonic, some schizophrenic. In rare cases, they suffered from post-traumatic retrograde amnesia, an inability to remember any of their past, and if their identity tags had gone missing they would have been rendered anonymous. The men were housed in asylums. Their photos were advertised in newspapers and desperately scrutinized by the countless parents and widows whose loved ones had gone missing at the front. The most famous case was that of a man known as Anthelme Mangin, who was claimed by upward of 20 families. A custody dispute continued into the late 1930s, almost until the end of Mangin's damaged life.
The Dutch writer Anjet Daanje has borrowed loosely from the Mangin case for her big, powerful drama of love and memory, 'The Remembered Soldier.' The Flemish-speaking soldier of this novel is called Noon Merckem, because in 1917 he was discovered around midday, wandering around a battlefield near Merckem, a village in the Flanders region of Belgium (he appears to have been involved in the Battle of Passchendaele). Since the end of the war, he has lived in the Guislain Asylum in Ghent, alone and with no idea of who he used to be. But in 1922 Julienne Coppens, a Belgian woman responding to an advertisement, recognizes him as her missing husband. He is, she says, Amand Stephaan Coppens, the proprietor of a photography studio and the father of two.
Amand, as he must now get used to being called, leaves the asylum with Julienne, and Ms. Daanje progresses patiently through the stages of their acclimation. Initially he resides in their home as a guest, anxious and uncomfortable. Julienne is standoffish as well, assailed by longings but fearful of scaring Amand away. Gradually they begin to work side by side in the photography studio. Proximity softens their doubts and an intimacy blooms. For Amand, who cannot remember their earlier married life, this is a newlywed's passion, and the novel revels in the excitement of his 'puppy love.'
The rub is that, in his dreams, Amand's memories are slowly returning, but they are not of Julienne—they are nightmares of battlefield slaughter that he cannot reconcile with his newfound domestic happiness. Here 'The Remembered Soldier' begins to explore the gray area between performance and reality. Amand and Julienne embrace the roles of the joyful couple reunited by the hand of providence while papering over Amand's panic attacks and strange, dissociative episodes. As word spreads of his homecoming and Amand plays the part of 'the miracle man' returned from the dead, he feels surprised by 'how easily his life can be reshaped into an inspiring story, correct in every factual detail, yet a lie from beginning to end.'