Angel Down

In October 1918, during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, one of the final major campaigns of World War I, Private First Class Cyril Bagger regains consciousness in the mass grave he had been digging when a German mortar shell struck. Bagger, a con man drafted into Company P of the U.S. 43rd Division, finds himself physically intact amid obliterated corpses. He retrieves his father's red leather Bible from his pack and inhales its scent, a grounding ritual. His father, Bishop Bernard Bagger, drowned when the RMS Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1915, and the Bible is the only inheritance Bagger kept. Across the battlefield, an unceasing, agonized shriek fills the air.

Lewis Arno, a fourteen-year-old orphan who lied about his age to enlist, finds Bagger and tells him that Major General Lyon Reis, commander of the 43rd Division, has summoned him. Bagger resents Arno for complicating his policy of caring about no one, yet feels an unwanted affection for the boy. Since basic training, Bagger has been reading adventure novels aloud to the illiterate kid, currently The Son of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Bagger's background as a Mississippi riverboat hustler has defined his war experience: he spends his time swindling fellow soldiers at cards and dice, forcing losers to take his place in combat while he stays on safe duties. A persistent inner presence Bagger calls "Uncle Sam," originating from a fly that literally flew into his mouth at training camp, lives in his chest as a manifestation of shame and guilt linked to his dead father.

Reis, known for his withered right arm and reckless tactics that have decimated the division, assembles five soldiers: Bagger, Arno, Vincent Goodspeed (a profiteer who robs battlefields for tradeable goods), Hugh Popkin (a massive, slow-witted man obsessively devoted to a girl named Effie back home), and Ben Veck (an African American flamethrower operator transferred from the all-Black 368th Infantry Regiment, who has severe shell shock). Reis orders them to stay behind as the division marches off, find the source of the shriek, and "help him" (31), a euphemism for euthanizing a dying soldier. The five argue over who should venture into No Man's Land, the devastated strip between opposing trenches. Veck proposes Rochambeau, or rock-paper-scissors. Bagger conceals his excitement; the game was his first childhood grift. Using his skill at reading tells, Bagger defeats each opponent, and Arno, who loses every match, is left to go alone.

As Arno prepares to climb out of the trench, Bagger hears an internal voice pleading, "Save me" (65). Connecting the moment to Tarzan always arriving to save his son, Bagger strips his gear and follows the boy. Together they discover the source of the shriek: a luminous woman entangled in barbed wire, her skin radiating blinding white light. She wears a red dress and a blue cape. Bagger and Arno cut her free under machine-gun fire and flee toward the Allied trench. A mortar descends, but an invisible force lifts them through the air and deposits them safely inside. In the trench, the soldiers debate the woman's nature. A faint golden halo hovers above her head. Veck identifies her as an angel, referencing the legend of the Angel of Mons, a 1914 account of a divine figure that supposedly halted a German advance in Belgium. Goodspeed theorizes that modern artillery may have literally shot down an angel. Before the group can agree on a course of action, Goodspeed steals the angel and attempts to flee, removing her hood and exposing her light to the Germans. A shell lands nearby, and shrapnel bisects Goodspeed below his ribs.

The four survivors escape into the forest with the angel. Small apparent miracles occur along the way: a pack of cigarettes materializes when Popkin craves tobacco, a rusty nail that pierces Arno's boot leaves no wound, and a dead kitten revives after Veck mourns over it. Each man carries the angel in turn, perceiving her differently based on his deepest need. That night, Popkin stabs Arno in the neck, knocks out the others, and flees with the angel. Bagger tracks him to a destroyed village and finds Popkin preparing to assault the angel, whom he has conflated with Effie. A brutal fight ensues, and a weakened jail wall, battered by Popkin's wild punches, collapses onto Popkin and kills him.

Veck then catches up, handcuffs Bagger to a derelict German armored position, and takes the angel into a gas-contaminated field. Veck has found a note in Reis's handwriting reading, "I SHALL NOT FORGET YOU SENT ME A NIGGER" (169), which destroys his belief that Reis valued him. Veck demands the angel destroy the world. When she refuses, he strikes her face. The angel opens her mouth, and concentrated light raises hundreds of corpses from the mud, suspending them in grotesque re-enactments of their final moments. Veck, blind and dissolving from chemical exposure, accidentally punctures his flamethrower's propellant tank, and the resulting explosion kills him.

Alone with the angel, Bagger watches her speak for the first time: "Do not be afraid" (186). She confirms that each man saw in her the person he most needed. She offers a wager: Arno's life in exchange for Bagger's promise never to kill. If he breaks this vow, a catastrophe will consume his entire world. Bagger accepts. He awakens to find Arno alive, his wound sealed. The three set off to rejoin the division. Bagger brings the angel to Reis, hoping the commander will use her to end the war. Instead, Reis recognizes her as "Minerva," the goddess depicted on the Medal of Honor. He begs the angel to heal his withered arm, and she complies in a gruesome miracle of biological reconstruction. Emboldened, Reis reveals his true ambition: to prolong the war for years, then deploy the angel as a weapon to win it single-handedly.

During a German surprise attack, Arno tackles Bagger before he can fire a weapon, reminding him of his vow. Bagger realizes with horror that each soldier's death was prefigured by his loss in the Rochambeau game: Goodspeed fell to scissors and was scissored by shrapnel; Popkin fell to rock and was crushed by a wall; Veck fell to paper and died after finding Reis's paper note. The angel has been translating Bagger's game into real deaths. Bagger and Arno storm back into Reis's collapsing dugout and free the angel from a locked trunk. Reis attacks with his walking stick, destroying Bagger's left eye and breaking his fingers. As Reis prepares to kill Arno, the angel freezes time. She stands and walks for the first time, revealing her prior passivity was an act, and carries Bagger on a visionary journey. In his father's church, Bagger finally identifies her face as the Virgin Mary from Raphael's Solly Madonna, the painting reproduced in his Bible. She then shows him Earth's core, where a vast infernal engine smelts the bodies of the war dead into bullets: an image of humanity's self-perpetuating cycle of violence, the Great War not the end of conflict but its industrial beginning.

Time resumes. Bagger picks up Reis's dropped pistol and shoots the major general, saving Arno but breaking his vow. He then puts the gun to his own head and pulls the trigger, offering his life as a new wager. The angel stops the bullet a hair's breadth from his eye, cradles it, and walks into No Man's Land, where she buries it in the clay like a seed. Bagger receives a vision of decades passing, the forest regrowing, and a magnificent tree sprouting from the burial site. An elderly, one-eyed Bagger visits the tree with a large, loving family, touches the bark, and whispers, "You were right about everything," then adds, "But I regret nothing" (280). At this, Uncle Sam the shamefly finally flies out of Bagger's chest and away forever. The angel then transforms: her skin ridges into scales, her spine splits to push out enormous bat wings, and obsidian horns replace her halo. She ascends and vanishes. Bagger grips Arno's hand and feels another clasp his mangled left, a calloused grip he recognizes as his dead father's. The two remain in a crater as war rages around them, and the novel's final line loops back to its opening: "and Cyril Bagger considers himself lucky" (285).