Sartoris and his brother are serving in different units in the Royal Air Force when the brother is shot down somewhere over the enemy lines. Sartoris spends a week "roosting about five thousand feet" above the troops on the ground until he finds and shoots down the "Hun patrol leader" who shot down his brother (414).
Monaghan's describes himself as "of the Irish nation" (420), the "son of an immigrant" who came "out of a peat bog" in Ireland and across the ocean to America (416).
In "Ad Astra" Monaghan's describes himself as "of the Irish nation" (420), the "son of an immigrant" who came "out of a peat bog" in Ireland and across the ocean to America (416).
This location includes both the road where the story begins - "in the car," "going to Amiens" (407) - and the specific spot "on the lonely road between two beet fields" where the car stops and the men in it are joined by Monaghan and "a second man" (410).
In "Ad Astra" Sartoris and his brother are serving in France in different units in the Royal Air Force when the brother is shot down somewhere over the enemy lines. In Flags in the Dust this scene is described several times by Bayard, the Sartoris who survives.
"All the Dead Pilots" begins "in the car," "going to Amiens" (407). The road the aviators are traveling is described as a "lonely road between two beet fields" (410).
The subadar is from India, as are the troops serving with the English forces in the story he tells. The story he tells - especially the way the troops compare the "rifles" they are issued to "spears" which are "too short and too heavy" to "slay a swift enemy" (424) - makes "India" seem like a very primitive place. (Over one million Indian troops served in the various theaters of World War I.)
The subadar tells a story about his "people," the soldiers from India with whom he serves for a time on the front lines in the War (414). The story mentions 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). It also mentions a [bomb] "crater" in the space between the trenches (425), what was typically called No Man's Land during the War, but does not go into any further physical descriptions of the front.
Prussia, where the German pilot's family are "little barons" (417), is the large German state that dominated the nation's politics before and during the First World War. Berlin was its capital before it also became the county's capital in 1871.
Although the story spells it "Beyreuth," it's clear that it is referring to Bayreuth, Germany, where Richard Wagner composed and staged many of his famous operas - the "music" that the subadar and the German pilot share a passion for (413).
