Identified as "a Southerner" (408), before the War Bland went to England as a Rhodes scholar. During the War he serves as an Royal Flying Corps pilot, though "in the five months he had been out, no one had ever found a bullet hole in his machine" - suggesting that he was choosing not to engage in combat (408). Drinking with the other officers, Bland likes to talk about his imaginary wife. This "Bland" is probably the same person who appears In The Sound and the Fury as Gerald Bland, one of Quentin Compson's Harvard contemporaries, who is preoccupied with conquests of women.
The Sartoris who appears in this story has a twin brother who is killed in July, 1918, four months before the end of the War. In Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha novel, Flags in the Dust (1929), he is named Johnny, and his death in the air over France is perhaps the novel's most important event. As the novel describes in more detail, in the story his death is soon avenged by his brother (414).
The American southerner named simply "Sartoris" in "Ad Astra" is Bayard Sartoris, one of the major characters in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha novel, Flags in the Dust (1929); there his inability to get over the death of his twin brother, described briefly in this story, symbolizes his membership in a lost generation. Like the other central characters in the story, Sartoris is a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps. He "never did talk much; just did his patrols and maybe once a week he'd sit and drink his nostrils white in a quiet sort of way" (414).
Comyn, a native of Ireland and a Royal Flying Corps pilot, is among those who go to the Cloche-Clos in Amiens to celebrate the end of the war. Proud of his Irish background, he disdains the English nation he has served. He is drinking heavily and looking for women or a fight or both.
