The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

In "All the Dead Pilots" this Australia and New Zealand Army ("Anzac" in the story) unit is "resting in the ditch" when Sartoris returns from Amiens, but four of them are willing to forgo rest to help him with his "tight take-off" (526).

This soldier with a "raised moustached face" (524) is "drinking from a bottle in a doorway" of the estaminet when Sartoris arrives there in search of Spoomer (522). Sartoris has to fight him in order to leave the place.

This officer seems like a by-the-book kind of soldier; he won't release Sartoris from duty just because Sartoris asks. He does have a sense of humor, though, and at least a working knowledge of history and geography: "the operations officer told him that La Fayette awaited him on the Santerre plateau" (522). In other words, "get back to work."

This "young man in spectacles" who "looked like a student" is "dead drunk" when Sartoris takes his ambulance to Amiens (522).

This "old woman working in a field" works on through the shelling of the French countryside by the Germans, "stooping stubbornly among the green rows" as Sartoris passes her twice going to and from Amiens (521).

These soldiers include the forces that take Cambrai (520) as well as the pilots of the "E.A." (enemy aircraft) that shoot down Sartoris in July 1918 (530).

These are the French soldiers in the Amiens estaminet who witness Sartoris' frustration about Spoomer's affair with Antoinette. Knowing no French, he imagines they are "Laughing at me about a woman. Me knowing that he was up there" in a bedroom with her, but being unable to do anything about it because of Spoomer's superior rank (519-20).

This soldier, wearing "a peasant's smock" rather than a uniform (519), drives Sartoris back to the squadron after he finds and takes Spoomer's clothes from 'Toinette's room in Amiens.

Sartoris and Spoomer, enemies in love, both belong to the same Royal Air Force unit, identified only as the "-- Squadron" in Kaye's letter to Aunt Jenny (530). The "whole squadron" is referred to several times by the narrator, also a member of the unit, but it is never made explicit how many men and planes this adds up to (521). (By 1918 there were 150 squadrons in the R.A.F.)

These soldiers - "the enlisted element of the whole sector of French and British troops" - are fascinated with the rivalry between Sartoris and Spoomer, two officers who find 'Toinette in a bar "where officers did not go" (516). They discuss it frequently and even make bets it.