The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Sartoris finds a "bill from [a] London tailor" in "his overalls in Amiens that day in the spring" (530-31). Although nothing more is said about the tailor, the sentence provides an interesting juxtaposition of the upper class clothing he wore when off duty with the 'overalls' - which although the point is not made in "All the Dead Pilots," are the badge of menial labor in Yoknapatawpha - that he presumably wore while flying.

This pilot was below Sartoris when the latter was "shot down while in pursuit of duty over enemy lines" and saw the circumstances of his death, which he has described to his commanding officer (530).

In "All the Dead Pilots" Sartoris mentions these people in his letter to Jenny, asking her to "tell [them] hello" (529).

From other Yoknapatawpha fictions we know that Isom is Elnora's young son. Sartoris mentions Isom by name in his letter to Jenny, so we can surmise that Isom is somehow important to him, or at least more important than the other black residents back home.

Elnora plays a much smaller role in this story than in either Flags in the Dust or "There Was a Queen." The one mention of her underlines her loyalty to the Sartoris family as a servant who knits a pair of socks for the Sartoris who is away at war, but there is no indication of her racially mixed character (established in Flags - or the fact that she herself is an (unacknowledged) member of the Sartoris family (revealed in "There Was a Queen").

After Sartoris' trick in "All the Dead Pilots," "the brigadier and the Wing Commander" arrive at the squadron's aerodrome to investigate (527). Historically, Wing Commanders were in charge of multiple squadroons. That the high command would personally see to the Sartoris-Spoomer rivalry speaks to the influence of Spoomer's uncle, himself a brigadier general in a different branch of the British military.

After Sartoris' trick, "the brigadier and the Wing Commander" arrive at the squadron's aerodrome to investigate (527). Historically, brigadier generals were the second highest ranking in the R.A.F. That the high command would personally see to the Sartoris-Spoomer rivalry speaks to the influence of Spoomer's uncle, also a brigadier general.

This "Anzac major" sends the drunk ambulance driver back to his unit (527). (Anzac, sometimes written ANZAC, stands for 'Australian and New Zealand Army," to which many of the Allied troops fighting around Amiens belonged.)

In defense of his drunken strafing of troops at the front, Sartoris reminds himself that he only knows of one person "on the ground being hurt by an aeroplane" - a hapless Canadian farmer who was "crashed on top of" by this hapless young beginner (526).

In Sartoris' memory of his training as an aviator, this man, who seems like a figure in a tall tale, was injured when "a cadet crashed on top of him" during flying practice in Canada (526).