World War I, fought from 1914 to 1918, pitted the Allied Powers (chiefly Britain, France, Russia, and, from 1917, the United States) against the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire). It was the first conflict in which industrial technology was turned wholesale toward human destruction. Machine guns, poison gas, long-range artillery, tanks, and aircraft transformed battlefields into killing fields of a scale no prior war had approached. Of the 8.5 million soldiers who died in World War I, over 26,000 American soldiers were killed during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive (“The Hundred Days Offensive,” National WWI Museum and Memorial). Kraus captures the scale of this annihilation through Bagger’s burial duties, his cataloguing of men reduced to disarticulated parts, and a landscape where “so few trees remain to block the October wind” because years of shelling have stripped the Argonne to mud and stumps (5). The passage conveys how mechanized warfare rendered individual death anonymous, reducing soldiers to material to be quicklimed and shoveled over.

Trench warfare compounded the killing with its own ecology of disease. Soldiers living in waterlogged ditches shared their quarters with rats, lice, and standing sewage, breeding conditions for typhoid, trench fever, pneumonia, and trench mouth. This last condition, formally called acute necrotizing ulcerative gingivitis, was a painful bacterial infection of the gums caused by poor nutrition, stress, and the impossibility of oral hygiene in the trenches. Kraus portrays it vividly through Hugh Popkin, whose “gums hotdog red and swollen around gray teeth so guttered by ulcers they look as long as fingers” mark him as a walking symptom of the trench system’s corrosive environment (27). Over 3.5 million disease cases were treated among American troops between 1917 and 1919, underscoring that illness was as lethal as artillery (Speaker, Susan. “Fit to Fight,” NIH National Library of Medicine, 18 Oct. 2018).

The novel also addresses the racial segregation that pervaded the American military. Black soldiers served in segregated units under predominantly white officers who frequently undermined them. The 368th Infantry Regiment, to which Ben Veck belongs, was a real unit whose retreat during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive was blamed on the soldiers’ alleged cowardice, rather than on the inadequate maps, missing wire cutters, and the absence of artillery preparation that precipitated their failure. Historian Chad Williams documents in Torchbearers of Democracy (2010) how Black troops were systematically set up to fail and then punished for the results. Veck’s account of being sent into unshelled woods without basic equipment mirrors these documented failures, while Reis’s intercepted note reveals the contempt that white officers held for Black soldiers on the frontlines.

Finally, Kraus draws on the legend of the Angel of Mons, a wartime myth originating from the Battle of Mons in August 1914, in which British soldiers reportedly saw angelic figures intervening against the German advance. The legend is widely traced to Arthur Machen’s short story “The Bowmen,” published in the London Evening News on September 29, 1914, which readers mistook for factual reportage. Machen himself documented this misapprehension in the introduction to his 1915 collection, writing that he had “succeeded, unwittingly, in the art of deceit” (Machen, Arthur. The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War, Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1915). The tale spread through newspapers, sermons, and soldier testimonies, becoming one of the war’s most durable supernatural narratives. In the novel, Veck invokes the Angel of Mons to frame the mysterious woman’s appearance, providing the squad with a ready-made mythology through which to interpret the inexplicable amid industrialized horror.