Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Thu, 2015-06-25 17:39
Mons, Belgium, was the site of the first engagement of the British and German forces in World War I. One of Britain's military honors during the war was the Mons Star, an award for combat service that was given to troops who served in France or Belgium between August and November 1914. In "All the Dead Pilots," Spoomer has a Mons Star but not the full wings of a pilot.
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Thu, 2015-06-25 17:24
The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, in Surrey, England, is where the British Army trains all of its officers and some from other nations. It dates to 1720 and has great prestige, both in Britain and abroad. In "All the Dead Pilots," it serves as a shorthand for Spoomer's upper-class status and family history. For our purposes, Sandhurst also serves as the location for the club of Spoomer's uncle, a brigadier general, and the ground school to which Spoomer is transferred.
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Thu, 2015-06-25 17:13
Amiens is a city in northern France that has a long history of military contestation and occupation. During World War I, it was a key location on the Western Front; and not long after Sartoris is shot down, it was the site of the first armored warfare in the war and the beginning of the offensive that ultimately resulted in the Armistice. In this story it is the site of the "estaminet, a 'bit of a pub'" (516), run by an old woman, where the rivalry between Sartoris and Spoomer reaches its climax among the chaos of falling German artillery shells.
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Thu, 2015-06-25 16:57
The story mentions London as the setting of the wartime affair that Sartoris had with the woman who left him for Spoomer. We are also using London as a way to locate the story's unnamed narrator. He identifies the point in time from which he's looking back at the war as "thirteen years" later (511), i.e. 1931, but says nothing about where he is at that time. Because he is clearly not American and probably British, we speculate that this inventor/raconteur has made London his home.
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Thu, 2015-06-25 16:49
Lucius' narrative comparison of Parsham, Tennessee, to the capital of Great Britain - "in those days, unlike London, Parsham had no summer season" (189) - locates him in a much more cosmopolitan world than the rest of The Reivers. This is also apparently the only reference to London outside a war-time context in the fictions.
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Thu, 2015-06-25 16:38
Mentioned in "All the Dead Pilots," the Santerre Plateau on the Western Front saw some of the bloodiest battles of World War I, including Verdun and the Somme.
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Thu, 2015-06-25 16:38
During the Great War, as World War I was called at the time Faulkner wrote "All the Dead Pilots," the British military maintained a pool of aviators in Ayr, Scotland. The pilots were deployed from Ayr to units in France like the Camel squadrons in this story.
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Thu, 2015-06-25 16:37
Mons, Belgium, was the site of the first engagement of the British and German forces in World War I. One of Britain's military honors during the war was the Mons Star, an award for combat service that was given to troops who served in France or Belgium between August and November 1914. In "All the Dead Pilots," Spoomer has a Mons Star but not the full wings of a pilot.
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Thu, 2015-06-25 16:37
The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, in Surrey, England, is where the British Army trains all of its officers and some from other nations. It dates to 1720 and has great prestige, both in Britain and abroad. In "All the Dead Pilots," it serves as a shorthand for Spoomer's upper-class status and family history.
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Thu, 2015-06-25 16:36
Amiens is a city in northern France that has a long history of military conflict and occupation. During World War I, it was a key location on the Western Front: the offensive against Germany that the Allies launched there, which featured the first use of armored vehicles in combat, ultimately resulted in the Armistice. Faulkner uses Amiens as the main setting for his two short stories set in the war, "Ad Astra" and "All the Dead Pilots." In the second story German shells fall on the city.
