Western Front Inset: Trenches (Location Key)

Although Flags in the Dust mentions the "mud and filth" in which soldiers lived and fought during the First World War (71), and in "Knight's Gambit" Gavin Stevens tells his nephew about the "four-year tunnel of blood and excrement and fear" in which the soldiers lived (242-43), the description of the war provided by the Subadar in "All the Dead Pilots" is the most graphic representation of trench warfare in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. While most of the servicemen in the story are aviators, the Subadar served with infantry troops; he describes both the allied "trench" in which the troops "squat, motionless" for days (424), and the German "trench" which the same troops charge and capture for several days (425). He also mentions a bomb "crater" in the space between the trenches (425), the area typically referred to as No Man's Land during the War.