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The ink on the Versailles Treaty was barely dry before the French tyre company Michelin began publishing a series of first world war battlefield guides. According to the Association des collectionneurs de guides et des cartes Michelin, 46 different volumes in various languages were published between 1919 and 1938, selling roughly 2mn copies. The windfalls of war come under the spotlight in Dutch writer Anjet Daanje’s extraordinarily vivid novel The Remembered Soldier, in which the Michelin guide to the Flemish battlefields is notably perused by a British tourist during a crowded bus tour of Ypres.
Daanje’s capacious tale begins in 1922 at the Guislain Asylum in Ghent, where Noon Merckem — so named because he was found around midday wandering aimlessly near the village of Merckem in Flanders — is visited by a succession of war widows, all searching for their lost husbands. Merckem, who has been at the hospital for around four years, has no memory of fighting in the war or indeed of the years leading up to it. He has all but given up hope of ever being recognised when Julienne, a Flemish Belgian woman, swears that Noon is her husband, Amand Coppens, and the father of her two young children. After embarking on a difficult train journey, during which Amand suffers a panic attack, the couple eventually arrive back at their leaky-roofed home in the Belgian city of Kortrijk.
The Remembered Soldier, which was originally published in 2019, draws on case studies in France and Belgium where men with shell shock-induced amnesia were claimed by multiple families. This is Daanje’s first novel to be published in English after a long record of short stories and novels that have built her a loyal following in the Netherlands, where The Remembered Soldier won two of the country’s top literary prizes. David McKay’s page-turning translation faithfully conveys the propulsive nature of Daanje’s long, sinuous sentences, which multiply the word “and” to build up streams of thoughts, emotions and dreams.
Though Daanje’s novel treads similar psychological terrain to the work of other first world war-focused novels by female writers such as Rebecca West (The Return of the Soldier) and Pat Barker (the Regeneration trilogy), the ambiguity of Amand’s status and the lack of any definitive identification keep the reader guessing about who he really is until the very end. When Amand sees a photograph of his supposed wedding day, even he does not know what to think: “She looks young and naive, and so does he, he is chubbier than he is now and has a mustache, and his hair is longer and covers more of his forehead, and it’s stranger than he could ever have imagined to see that man and realize it’s himself.”
Photography is a key component of the novel. Julienne informs Amand that before he left her to go off to fight with the Belgian army, he spent his last free hour hastily explaining to her the basic rudiments of photography so that she could take over the family portrait business. During his eight-year absence she has mastered the skills of photography, from developing glass negatives to retouching prints. But the business has nosedived and it is only when Amand returns that the couple land on a profitable scheme to turn things around. Together they paint romantic backdrops for Amand to pose in front of, alongside war widows who are ever hopeful for their own husbands to make a similarly miraculous return. In the Belgian dark blue uniform and blue-and-red kepi of the early war, Amand is like a blank canvas on to which these widows can project what they think a returning soldier should look like.
It is a joint enterprise that brings the hesitant couple closer together. “He prints the photographs she took and retouched earlier that day, six widows and six times his own likeness in that everlasting uniform, with that mysterious, heroic look frozen in his eyes.” Both Amand and Julienne slowly emerge as compelling, full-blooded characters with tumultuous, unenviable past lives. Daanje paints a portrait of a loving but increasingly uncertain marriage as Amand gradually begins to get his memory back, causing him to cast doubt on everything that Julienne has told him about their history together.
If there is a criticism to be made of The Remembered Soldier it is that perhaps Daanje could have given a bit more context about Belgium’s status during the first world war and the integral part the country played in slowing down Germany’s advance into France, which subsequently allowed other Allied forces to better arm themselves. But this is a minor quibble for a novel of epic scope that resonates powerfully while wars of tragic loss continue to be fought on multiple fronts, including in Europe.
Daanje exhibits brilliant powers of reconstitution in her descriptions of the war’s aftermath and the blighted landscapes that it left behind. When Amand and Julienne decide to visit Ypres and tour the surrounding battlefields, these scenes of devastation take on a life of their own: “everything they see, the bare, pockmarked expanses stripped of rubble, and the useless steps leading up toward the sky, and the housefronts riddled with holes through which the blue sky tumbles, and even the houses, rebuilt just as they were, like corpses irreverently exhumed and brought back to life, it all exudes a nightmarish, thick-skinned indifference from which only the windows of the autobus and her hand in his can protect him.” It is virtuoso stuff but also terrifying, as, amid the physical ruins of war, Amand and Julienne gradually have to acknowledge that the harmless and clumsy man who went away to fight has come back as someone inherently different.
The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje, translated by David McKay Scribe £20/New Vessel Press $22.95, 576 pages
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