Goodspeed insists the woman lifted Bagger and Arno out of the crater before the shell detonated; Popkin argues the blast simply threw them. Bagger, barely able to speak, identifies the woman as the shrieker. When she opens her eyes, all four soldiers feel inadequate under her gaze. Bagger asks her name in basic conversational French. After Popkin raises Reis’s order to deal with the woman, Veck kneels and identifies the woman as the Angel of Mons, recounting the legend of an angelic figure who halted a German advance in Belgium in 1914.

Bagger feels a tentative rekindling of long-dead faith but resists it, arguing that Bois de Fays is too strategically insignificant to warrant divine intervention. Veck counters that over 300 thousand French soldiers died in these trenches, making the forest a gateway between worlds. Goodspeed theorizes that modern long-range weapons may have been the first capable of striking a being at previously unreachable altitudes, allowing it to reach Heaven for the first time.

Veck sobs, convinced the angel knows their sins and that they must beg her mercy. Bagger, though dismissive, cannot fully counter the idea.

Goodspeed proposes exploiting the angel through contacts in New York and a French doctor in Nancy; Popkin demands an equal cut, but Goodspeed insists on a controlling stake. Enraged, Popkin wades over and aims his rifle at the angel’s face. Veck knocks the barrel aside with his flamethrower lance, and Popkin begins drowning him in the trench water. Bagger, unwilling to let Arno wake and see his cowardice, intervenes and gets Popkin in a chokehold. In the chaos, Veck’s boot lands on Arno’s knee, jolting him awake in pain.

While the others brawl, Goodspeed climbs the trench ladder with the angel, lifts the ladder out of everyone’s reach, removes her hood to reveal a golden halo, and mocks the men below. A German mortar, drawn by the angel’s exposed light, fires a shell nearby, and the shrapnel cuts Goodspeed in half.

Goodspeed’s torso drops into the trench onto Popkin; the angel rolls down onto Arno, and Bagger pulls her into his arms. As a German barrage begins, Goodspeed’s bisected haversack spills into the trench, including The Son of Tarzan he stole after Arno left it behind, which Veck snatches from the air.

The group flees the trench. Arno covers the angel’s head to extinguish her light. The men argue over custody: Popkin declares the angel is his; Veck claims the same. To create unity, Bagger insists their mission is to deliver her to the President. He proposes rotating who carries her as mutual insurance against defection. A shell destroys the section of trench they just vacated, and Bagger leads the group toward the tree line.

The group’s trek through the ravaged forest is difficult; without a compass, Bagger cannot maintain direction. Each man carries the angel differently: Popkin with a leering gaze, Veck protectively, Arno adoringly. Between turns, the men exhibit compulsions. Popkin chews debris as a tobacco substitute and spits out two teeth, Arno obsessively picks lice, and Bagger stabs every corpse they pass with a scavenged pitchfork to confirm none are feigning death.

Veck hollows out a severed horse’s head and wears it as a mask, entertaining the angel with neighing sounds until she smiles. A series of small apparent miracles follow: a pack of cigarettes appears after Popkin wishes aloud for one; Arno’s foot is punctured by a nail but shows no wound; and a litter of crushed kittens produces one survivor. When Popkin kills a mouse to eat it, the angel weeps openly, which stops Bagger cold.

At nightfall, the group shelters under a derelict French howitzer already occupied by a drunk French soldier who mockingly calls himself “Frenchy Franchouillard.” Bagger and Popkin try to approach Frenchy with peaceful intentions. Frenchy mocks the Americans, claiming France had all but defeated Germany before the US arrived and that the Americans came only for the spoils.

Frenchy’s words about American ignorance of real suffering hit Bagger with a sickening shame, and he vomits while Popkin beats the soldier bloody. Frenchy is hurled into the dark but lands on his feet and taunts Bagger about the “Spanish plague” before disappearing. Bagger, still consumed by shame, grows more desperate for the angel to repair something inside him.

Under the howitzer, the men eat scavenged rations. Arno asks Bagger to read from The Son of Tarzan; Bagger props the angel’s hood to use her glow as a lamp. As he drifts off, Arno asks whether they will die, and Bagger deflects with a bleak joke.

Reaching for his father’s Bible, Bagger realizes it is gone. He lost it in the trench collapse. The loss devastates him, reminding him of the grief that surfaced while clearing out his father’s apartment. He slams his head against the howitzer and stares at Arno and the angel, certain he will fail to protect them just as he has failed everything else.

Unable to sleep, Bagger asks Veck to remove the horse head and is unnerved by what he sees underneath: Veck is strangely still, his tremors gone. Veck insists the angel grants wishes, citing their survival and Goodspeed’s death as proof. He reveals his own wish is for revenge. He describes how the 368th Regiment was deliberately sent into an impossible battle without tools or any intelligence, and explains that back home he faced constant demands to prove his worth in a country that repaid Black Americans with riots and killings. He reads aloud from a German propaganda leaflet inviting Black soldiers to consider that Germany treats them better.

Bagger defuses the tension by praising Veck’s temporary attachment to the 43rd Division. Veck warms to the flattery, recounting proudly how Major General Reis personally selected him. As Bagger finally falls asleep, he hears Veck whispering to Naomi, his daughter, as though she were present.

Bagger dreams of a rigged cockfighting operation he ran in 1915, which morphs into a memory of brutalizing fellow recruits in basic training. He wakes swinging at an unseen enemy, cracks his head on the howitzer, and is knocked out again.

Veck, who has a newly swollen eye himself, revives him with the news that Popkin has stolen the angel. Bagger finds Arno bleeding badly from a bayonet wound to the neck. Momentarily stunned with anguish, especially over the belief that he will never tell Arno the true ending of The Son of Tarzan, he presses a gunnysack to Arno’s wound, orders Veck to keep the boy alive, and bolts after Popkin’s bootprints into a nearby ruined village.

After an encounter with two elderly survivors who beat him with a dead cat, Bagger hears repeated cries for help from a derelict ambulance. Inside, Popkin emerges holding the angel, who has been stripped of her clothing and radiates intense light. Popkin aims his rifle at Bagger.

Bagger realizes Popkin intended to sexually assault the angel. Bagger charges forward, and the startled Popkin drops the angel to bring up his rifle.

Drawing on Tarzan’s example of never abandoning the defenseless, Bagger resolves to fight. He taunts Popkin, who responds with a strange, empowered declaration that he will be like the rain. Bagger understands that Popkin believes intercourse with an angel will elevate him to godhood. He continues to provoke, and Popkin reveals with complete sincerity that he believes the angel is his beloved Effie. When Bagger tries to correct the delusion, Popkin works the bolt on his rifle and prepares to shoot.

The standoff breaks when the elderly husband rushes toward the ambulance reaching for the angel; Popkin shoots him dead without hesitation. Bagger uses the distraction to tackle Popkin, and both men crash to the cobblestones.

Popkin overpowers Bagger, pins him face-down, and bites his scalp. Bagger retaliates by driving his fingers into the scar tissue on Popkin’s head, causing enough pain to break the hold. Both men scramble upright near the wall of a ruined jail. As Popkin closes in, light from the angel creates rainbows behind him that Bagger finds galvanizing. He fights back ferociously until Popkin’s backward kick connects with Bagger’s chin and floors him.

With Bagger stunned and defenseless, Popkin advances to deliver a killing blow, but the wall he has been battering collapses and buries him.

Bagger retrieves the angel’s clothes and dresses her. Exhausted and angry, he confronts her about her muteness and her immobility, then realizes with a shock that she has no wings to go with her halo. He briefly considers hurting her to force a response, but the thought prompts him to wonder whether she is a test of benevolence, recalling Abraham Lincoln’s saying about the better angels of human nature.

Choosing to set aside his doubts, Bagger carries the angel east toward the 43rd Division. He crosses a field strewn with German dead and copes by inventing a mental game: For each atrocity he sees, he forces himself to name something ordinary or beautiful it resembles. The exercise ends with him laughing, and he marches on feeling, for the first time, like a real soldier, imagining his father feeling proud of him for once.

Hearing what sounds like a battalion ahead, Bagger hurries forward, but the angel’s limbs repeatedly snag on branches and slow him. He realizes the sounds belong to German forces and ducks behind a toppled stationary tank called a Fahrpanzer.

Bagger observes a company of exhausted stormtroopers moving through a corpse-strewn bog, stripping only dog tags from the dead. Bagger realizes that the 43rd Division is nearby but retreating. Deciding to wait for the column to pass, Bagger wraps himself and the angel under his coat and falls asleep, feeling safe in France for the first time in the entire war.

Bagger wakes to find Veck sitting across from him in the snow, unnervingly still, eating a scorched pigeon. When Bagger asks about Arno, Veck’s expression confirms the boy is dead.

Veck produces a bloodstained army field message he found on Arno’s body. The message informs Reis of Veck’s assignment to his division and the note in the margin, handwritten in Reis’s cursive, uses a racial slur to show contempt for Veck. The note destroys Veck’s long-held belief that Reis had personally chosen him for the division. Bagger realizes Reis has been deliberately placing Veck in fatal situations to get rid of him.

Distraught, Veck strips naked in the freezing cold and straps his flamethrower onto his bare body; Bagger tries to intervene and discovers Veck has handcuffed him to the Fahrpanzer. Veck places the key just out of reach and calmly explains that his wish is for the angel to end the world, since there is no place left for a man like him. To silence Bagger’s skepticism, Veck closes his fist and a biplane overhead explodes.

Veck carries the angel into the chemical gas field without a mask; Bagger struggles to seal his own mask with one free hand. Veck stops among a circle of corpses and demands the angel end everything, urging her to do to all of humanity what humanity has done to the world.

As gas dissolves his lungs, Veck turns his flamethrower lance on the angel and strikes her face, causing light to bleed from the wounds. The angel opens her mouth, revealing not teeth but concentrated light. Roughly 200 German and American corpses rise from the mud and are positioned in their death poses, a display of the war’s full cost. Veck, unable to see through the gas fog and understanding that the apocalypse he wished for is already accomplished, stumbles among the suspended bodies, crying out for Naomi. His knee punctures the flamethrower’s propellant tank; the leaking gas ignites, and Veck is consumed in a massive explosion that knocks Bagger unconscious.

Bagger wakes, still cuffed to the Fahrpanzer, to find a creature floating above him. It has large dark eyes, a long trunk-like snout, and mirrors his every movement. He realizes it is imitating how he looks in his gas mask. When he removes the mask, the creature tears off its own face, absorbs the flesh, and transforms back into the woman in her red dress and blue cape. She speaks for the first time, telling Bagger not to be afraid.

Bagger obeys and feels his fear leave him. He works through each soldier’s perception of the woman: Veck saw his daughter Naomi, Popkin saw his hometown sweetheart Effie, Goodspeed saw the film star Theda Bara, and Arno saw his mother. The angel confirms each perception with a single word.

When Bagger accuses her of manipulating them all, the angel replies that people see what they need to see. She notes that Bagger alone has asked nothing of her. When he challenges her about the deaths, she explains that she is an instrument, not the one who kills, acting under command.

Bagger asks for Arno’s life to be restored. The angel agrees but sets a condition: Bagger must vow never to take another life; if he breaks the promise, global catastrophe will follow. He accepts without hesitation, and she kisses him.

Bagger wakes free of the handcuffs to find Lewis Arno alive, sitting on the tank and twirling the cuffs. Arno immediately challenges the fabricated ending Bagger gave The Son of Tarzan, correctly reasoning that Tarzan would sacrifice himself rather than fight his son. Arno then pulls both The Son of Tarzan and Bagger’s red leather Bible from his pack, having rescued the Bible from the trench. Bagger turns away to hide his tears.

Arno describes what death felt like: a dream in which he became a monster living in the trenches, eventually eating everyone including Bagger, until a cold, clawed presence pulled him out of the dark. The story is so outlandish that both of them laugh. Bagger shares his vow with Arno, inspects the boy’s neck, and finds only a healing flesh wound where a fatal injury had been.

Filled with purpose for the first time, Bagger lifts the angel, lets Arno climb onto his back, and marches east, with Arno steering him by kicking his sides like a tank commander directing a driver.