They located him almost by accident.

That was part of the controversy, that was why the military authorities hesitated at first. They felt there were questions, serious questions, about Second Lieutenant Leon Matthieu Duday.

To complicate matters even more, the soldiers who found him didn’t like to ask some of them out loud.

It wasn’t as if the war were still white-hot. It wasn’t as if that part of France wasn’t already firmly in the hands of the Allies. It wasn’t as if Duday had been an escaped POW. There was absolutely no indication he’d ever been captured by the Germans, even though his plane had gone down in territory held by the Axis. And yet they were expected to believe he’d made his way on foot from Austria to the northern coast and survived there for two years. And walked out in beautiful condition. Unshaven and dirty, but absolutely fit, with no sign of malnutrition or exposure.

The American soldiers who found him had been looking for a wild dog. It had been spotted carrying off supplies — a bag of potatoes, k-rations, a few live chickens and — this was what had them scratching their heads — a bottle of Chateau Margaux that had been set aside for a visit by General Eisenhower.

The locals were oddly reluctant to help out, given that the thing had been lurking in the woods outside their village for the past year and half. The mayor of the little town of Sain-Bellecourt emphatically rejected speculation the dog had been abandoned by the retreating Nazis. It had, he insisted, been in fact feared by the Germans during the occupation. Several German soldiers had disappeared while patrolling the countryside around the town. They’d even brought in a Gestapo officer, one Hauptsturmfuhrer Cornelius Steinmann to investigate what the Germans suspected might be a pocket of resistance.

He was last seen alive two nights after he arrived, walking down the main street of Sain-Bellecourt.

What was left of him was found outside of town two days later in scattered, well-chewed pieces.

The village had come to regard the creature as a sort of protective totem.

But it was stealing supplies, so several soldiers had been sent out to deal with it. Efforts to find it during the day came up empty, but one night after it was spotted by a sentry three men were sent out to deal with it.

Sergeant Fred Marston was the most forthcoming.

“All I can say is its reaction to us was strange in a way I can’t quite explain. For one thing, it didn’t run away immediately but stood for a moment, looking at us, snarling. Now, I know dogs, and this animal did look kind of like an Alsatian or German Sheppard, but it was larger, and not quite the right color. And… I know this sounds weird, but if you’ve been around dogs all your life you’ll understand — its stance wasn’t right. Dogs ‘talk’ with their bodies and their voices, and neither was telling me anything the way a dog usually tells you things. That’s the only way I can put it. It was standing too still, for one thing, and its eyes…

Well, I’m not even going to go into what was wrong with its eyes.”

“Private Breard fired, and he must have put at least two bullets into the thing, but it didn’t fall. It just turned tail and ran.”

“We followed. Like I said, I was sure Breard had hit it, and I figured we’d find it dying some distance away and finish it off. I never could stand to see an animal suffer. But we didn’t find it, just a few spots of blood here and there, much less than you’d figure if it had been shot, and Clay Breard wouldn’t miss an easy mark like that. We followed its trail for about ten minutes, because we knew it was heading for the coastline and we’d have another clear shot there. When we came out of the brush, the dog was nowhere in sight.

So we spent some time searching the area, circled the perimeter, and when we came back to the clearing on the coast, Lieutenant Duday was sitting on the grass.

As soon as he saw us he stood up, holding up his hands, and trying to say something. It was like he was having trouble getting his mouth to work, like maybe he hadn’t talked in a long, long time.

But as we drew closer, we were able to make out what he kept saying, over and over again.

‘Thank God… Thank God…’

Lieutenant Duday was very cooperative. He showed us what he called his ‘campsite’ which consisted of a small cave which, he claimed, he’d been using for sleeping, even though it didn’t look large enough to hold a man comfortably, the remains of a small campfire, and a tattered knapsack which contained only a small knife and his wedding ring. He could make himself understood now, but he tended to talk very slowly, slurred many words, and occasionally lapsed into French, which is understandable if he’d been living rough in the French countryside for a long time. He was confused. Seemed to think his plane had only crashed a month or two ago, and he had no explanation at all about how he got from Austria to the northern coast of France. Said he knew nothing about a dog.”

Private Clay Breard only had this to add.

“First of all, I shot it. Twice, see, Dammit. And I don’t care what Sergeant Marston says, it didn’t look like a man sitting when I first saw it in that clearing and what stood up to meet us it didn’t look right either. It just didn’t, see. Yeah, I know what he looked like when we got closer, but it wasn’t the same and I’m not going to say anymore about it, see. I just want to forget I ever saw it.”

Leon was cleaned up, debriefed, examined by an army psychologist. His speech was almost normal after two weeks, and his memory had improved. He said he could remember jumping out of the plane with his parachute and landing somewhere in the Austrian countryside, though the area where he claimed to have landed was well populated and he should have been captured (or shot, or lynched) very quickly. Much of what happened after that is unclear — he may very well have sustained a blow to the head — but he insisted he’d made his way to the coast in the hopes of getting somehow to England.

“All I really want now is to see my wife and family again,” he said.

It was determined that, after his plane crashed, Lieutenant Duday suffered a concussion which resulted in a loss of memory that only increased the longer he lived a rough, solitary life. The combination of shock and isolation led him to become feral, too disoriented to act rationally. “Lieutenant Duday strikes me as a capable and courageous officer who’s gone through a terrible ordeal,” commented the examining physician, Captain Joshua Ackerman “His is truly fascinating example of survival against incredible odds, and it’s my hope that once he makes the full recovery more of his memory will return. I expect he’ll have some amazing stories to tell.”

Lieutenant Leon Matthieu Duday was honorably discharged and sent home.