The RAF squadron that most of the story's characters serve in flies out of an airfield located somewhere behind the front, probably west of Amiens - though the text gives no clear clues about its location.
Prussia, where the family of the German pilot in "Ad Astra" 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.
Bayreuth, Germany - spelled "Beyreuth" in "Ad Astra" - is 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).
Most of the story takes place in Amiens, France. The area around the city saw heavy fighting in 1918, during Germany's last campaign of World War I, though the city itself was not captured.
Before the war, Monaghan attended Yale University, which is located in New Haven, Connecticut. His immigrant father speaks sarcastically about his "fine friends, the fathers and mothers and sisters of them you met at Yale" (415).
Monaghan is the son of an Irish immigrant who grows up in New York City. New York was where many of the Irish who fled the potato famine settled; by 1860 there were over 200,000 of them in the city, and by the end of the 19th century they were a dominant force in city politics.
Bland attends Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and while there he heard the subadar speak "before the Union" (409). The oldest university in the English-speaking world, Oxford is located in Oxford, England, which is also the home of the Oxford Union debating society, founded in 1823.
