In the bistro in "Ad Astra," a French officer, "tall, with a gaunt, tragic face," implies that Monaghan and the military policeman should remove the German prisoner from the premises (422). The officer has a glass eye, probably as a result of the war; it is described as "motionless, rigid in a face that looked even deader than the spurious eye" (422).
The residents of Amiens who gather in the Cloche-Clos to celebrate the end of the War in "Ad Astra" had to endure great destruction and loss of life. They are "astonished" and "outraged" by the presence of a German aviator, even as a prisoner, in the bistro, and their resentment eventually boils over into violence (411).
The "damned king" of England in "Ad Astra" - whom Monaghan refers to contemptuously and whom the Irish Comyn denies is "his damned king" - was George V (416). King George V ruled the United Kingdom from 1910 to 1936. He was also Emperor of India during this period.
As an American military policeman (A.M.P.), this unnamed character in "Ad Astra" competes with Monaghan for control over the German prisoner. Mystified by the company of headstrong and independent aviators in which he finds himself, he insultingly asserts his authority over the French officer at the Cloche-Clos in Amiens, thus helping to bring on the riot. The French officer calls him a "devil-dog" - a World War I era slang term for a U.S. Marine (422).
This Allied aviator in "Ad Astra" helps Sartoris take revenge on the German pilot who shot down his brother by flying an out-moded airplane as the bait in Sartoris' trap. The narrator says "we" never knew who this aviator was (414).
This "somebody" is the pilot in "Ad Astra" who witnessed Sartoris "roosting about five thousand feet above an old Ack.W." - i.e. Sartoris is circling in his plane above a comrade flying a less maneuverable aircraft "for bait" to attract the German aviator who had shot down his brother (414). Ack.W. was military slang for a British World War I plane made by Armstrong Whitworth.
This character is "the other guy" in "Ad Astra" who was flying with Sartoris' brother when he was shot down (414). He is serving as a British aviator, presumably in the same "Camel squadron" as Sartoris, but given all the non-English aviators in the story, we cannot say where he was from (414). The Sopwith Camel was a standard single-seat British aircraft during World War I.
An immigrant to the U.S., Monaghan's father brags about his "Shanty Irish" origins, but at the time of "Ad Astra," he is a self-made millionaire who began his rise to wealth by collecting refuse and finally by building municipal sewage systems. Monaghan quotes him: "When you're with your fine friends, the fathers and mothers and sisters of them you met at Yale, ye might just remind them that every man is the slave of his own refuse and so your old dad they would be sending around to the forty-story back doors of their kitchens is the king of them all" (415).
This is one of Faulkner's characters who are defined by absence and indeterminacy. In "Ad Astra," when the aviator Monaghan explains his "Shanty Irish" origins, he gives a memorable description of his father, but he cannot trace his ancestry before that: other than saying his father came "out of a peat bog," which suggests the Irish peasantry, Monaghan claims, "I don’t know what my grandfather was. I don’t know if I had one. My father don’t remember one. Likely it could have been one of several" (415).
