The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Charles Mallison thinks of "the British, the handful of boys, some no older than he and some probably not even as old, who flew the Royal Air Force’s fighter command" against the German air campaign during the Battle of Britain in 1940 (205). The valor of these R.A.F. pilots was widely celebrated during and after World War II.

This "inspector-general" is apparently part of the Reserve Officer Training Corps, which was officially organized in 1915 to train male college students in military tactics and discipline (205). He certifies the high quality of the R.O.T.C. program that Charles Mallison participates in as a student at the Academy in Jefferson. R.O.T.C. programs are usually based in colleges and universities, but according to Charles, "although the Academy was only a prep school, it had one of the highest R.O.T.C.

Ironically, Gavin Stevens, something of a private detective himself, feels the need to engage a private detective to surveil Max Harriss in Memphis; as he puts it, "A good private man, just to keep an eye on him without him knowing it" (201).

The Jefferson barber who joins the conversation about Gualdres' blind horse is "a neat dapper man with a weary satiated face and skin the color of a mushroom’s belly" (178).

This wiseacre comments on Sebastian Gualdres and Gualdres's mare: "teaching it what, nobody knew, unless as a barber-shop wit said, since it was going to be blind, how to dodge traffic on the way to town to collect its pension" (178).

"A neighbor [of Mrs. Harriss] on his way home" provides the people in Jefferson with information about Gualdres' odd behavior at nights (178).

Seeing Rafe McCallum "coming up the alley," Charles Mallison recalls "the twin McCallum nephews" (210). This is the one named "Anse" in "The Tall Men," where they are the sons of Buddy.

Rafe McCallum "had bred and raised and trained and sold horses all his life" and "knew more about horses probably than any man in the country" (176). He is "a compact light-poised deliberate man with about him something of the same aura, sense of horses which Captain Gualdres had" (230).

In comparing Mr. Harriss to Huey Long, Charles Mallison describes how the politician "made himself founder owner and supporter of what his uncle said was one of the best literary magazines anywhere," probably not "even caring what the people who wrote and edited it" produced (241). Faulkner is referring to a real magazine, the Louisiana Progress.

In a conversation with his nephew about the First World War, Gavin Stevens refers to soldiers involved in the fighting of World War I as the "whole generation of the world's young men" (242). Gavin is exaggerating, but in fact over 30,000,000 men were killed or wounded during this war, the first great global conflict. In the same conversation he refers to two different categories of combatants, comparing "the groundling during his crawling minutes and the airman during his condensed seconds" (242). (The "groundling" is an infantryman.)