Unnamed Narrator

Writing "twelve years" after November 11, 1918, the unnamed narrator served during the War as an American flying in a British squadron (408). In his only explicit references to himself, he talks about the "pleasant" but tense feeling that precedes the moment "in combat" when "you know something is about to happen" (421). Until the last pages of the story he remains a silent witness to the events, but he reports what the others say and do clearly and without bias. He agrees to write the wounded German aviator's wife. When Comyn and Monaghan escort their prisoner into an Amiens brothel, Bland asks the narrator if they will "Prop him in the corner and turn the light off? Or do French brothels have he-beds too?" (427). The narrator clearly dismisses Bland's question and the complex of assumptions it implies: "Who the hell's business is that?" (427). He is an extraordinarily intelligent, articulate, and objective reporter. Recalling the Indian subadar's assertion that "all men are brothers," the narrator thinks of the entire group "as bugs in the surface of the water, isolant and aimless and unflagging" (408).