World War I

World War I matters in the novel less as a narrated campaign than as an inheritance: a war that leaves its survivors with altered lives, gives Fred Jones a lasting way of seeing, and recurs in later generations’ arguments about art and militarism. Through Rabo Karabekian’s retrospective account, the conflict links Depression-era foreboding to the personal histories of the men he encounters, while its images of falling aircraft and balloons become an uneasy analogue for modern painting.

Historical Presence and Retrospective Frame

World War I enters the narrative through recollection and comparison rather than through an extended account of its battles. Rabo, writing decades later, recalls a world in which men who had served in the conflict remained present in American life, including a veteran selling pencils in Grand Central Station. Marilee Kemp’s descriptions of New York during the Great Depression include this man, whose status as a veteran is uncertain even within her account: he may have served in the war, or may only have said that he had. The detail places the conflict in the street-level aftermath of economic hardship, where military service does not necessarily protect a person from poverty or social invisibility.

The historical reference also reaches Rabo through his father’s warnings before the Second World War. While encouraging his son’s artistic ambitions, his father fears that Europe’s large armies and recurrent conflicts could draw the young man into military service. His suspicion of European claims to civilization is bound to the prospect of renewed mass violence; he warns that the people Rabo might imagine discussing art and literature in European cafés could also be waiting for another opportunity to fight. Rabo later presents this antiwar outlook as characteristic of an earlier American patriotism, when people boasted of the country’s small armed forces and called arms manufacturers “Merchants of Death.” His contrast with the later political and popular celebration of war makes World War I part of a changing national memory, not merely a distant episode.

Fred Jones and the Aerial Image

The war’s most sustained personal afterlife belongs to Fred Jones, a former First World War aviator whom Rabo comes to understand as another person trapped in a life shaped by expectations. Jones had discovered a talent for flying improvised kites used as machine-gun platforms; when he later took control of an airplane, Rabo imagines the exhilaration of that new command, followed by the experience of firing on aircraft in flight. His life, in Rabo’s judgment, had been downhill since the war, even though his appearance and bearing made him seem dignified and honored as Dan Gregory’s assistant.

Jones himself once told Rabo that smoke trails from falling planes and observation balloons were the most beautiful things he expected to see. Rabo sets this recollection beside the marks Jackson Pollock watched paint make when it struck a canvas on his studio floor. The comparison is not a claim that war and painting are equivalent: rather, it shows how Jones’s aesthetic response had been formed by wartime destruction, while Pollock found visual possibility in paint’s movement. The same arcs, spirals, and dispersed marks can thus belong to radically different circumstances, connecting an aviator’s remembered vision to the language through which Rabo interprets modern art.

The War’s Survivors and Later Conflicts

World War I also supplies a point of comparison for Rabo’s own later military experience. Near the end of the Second World War, while commanding a platoon of Army Engineers in Luxembourg, he is wounded and loses his left eye. Discussing the difference between his ordeal and that of his father, Rabo insists that his injury entitles him to a survivor’s sense of alienation, though Circe Berman reminds him that he has described little pain and a rapid recovery. He remembers the approach of a white German tank and soldiers in white across a snow-covered meadow, then waking under morphine in a German military hospital set up in a church across the border. He is soon sent to a prisoner-of-war camp as an unremarkable captive.

When the war ends, the United States pays for cosmetic surgery where Rabo’s eye had been. He recalls feeling blank rather than bitter, and compares that emotional absence to what he understood as Fred Jones’s condition. Neither man, Rabo says, had anything to come home to. The comparison brings the two wars into a single account of survival without implying that their experiences were identical: Jones’s earlier service and Rabo’s capture in the later conflict both remain bound to the difficulty of returning to civilian life. Rabo’s subsequent marriage to his hospital nurse, Dorothy, and the eventual estrangement of their sons, Henri and Terry, give that postwar return a family consequence as well as a military one.

Art, Violence, and Historical Memory

The novel makes World War I recur as a problem of interpretation: what can be called beautiful when the image comes from destruction? For Jones, the smoke and motion of aircraft falling were an intense visual experience; for Rabo, recalling Jones, those shapes can be compared with Pollock’s freely moving paint. The parallel preserves the difference between the historical event and its later artistic reading. It also reveals how a memory of war can persist not only as an account of injury or service, but as a pattern of seeing.

Elsewhere, the war’s presence is social and political. It appears in Marilee’s account of a possibly veteran pencil seller, in Rabo’s father’s fear that Europe will again make soldiers of young men, and in Rabo’s later judgment that Americans’ former aversion to war has been displaced by a culture that makes military violence seem necessary to manhood. These references do not form a continuous chronology of World War I. Their recurrence instead lets the conflict cast a long shadow across different lives: poverty after service, an aviator’s altered vision, a father’s warning, and a later veteran’s troubled return to family and civilian existence.