The Spanish flu pandemic appears as one of the dangers Cyprian survives on his way to the front. Its place in his wartime history is brief but consequential: survival brings him into combat at Belleau Wood, and eventual return does not end the war’s influence on him or on Fidelis. Across the novel, sickness and war belong to a wider landscape of loss, remembered privately and commemorated publicly.

Cyprian’s Wartime Exposure

Cyprian enlisted in the United States Marine Corps with a cousin and a friend. After training, exposure to Spanish flu became one of the most dangerous parts of his early military experience. He survived and went on to fight at Belleau Wood, where he suffered further wartime hardships. The sequence places the pandemic not as a separate episode but as part of the accumulation of threats that marked his service.

Cyprian returned home during the last year of the First World War. His recovery was slow, and he could not vote during that period. The narrative notes that he had not yet realized that, as an Ojibwe man, he was not a United States citizen. His illness and recovery thus sit alongside a further constraint: military service had not secured him full civic belonging.

A War That Continues After Return

Cyprian and Fidelis never spoke directly about the war they had shared, yet it remained present between them. Memories surfaced in fragments—a picture, sound, or word—and either man might pause before continuing. The other recognized the interruption and responded with a joke or a long drink of beer. Their practiced silence does not signify that the past has disappeared; it shows how each man accommodates what the other cannot readily say.

The pandemic belongs to the same history of exposure and survival, but the novel gives it no separate aftermath or explicit medical account. Instead, it establishes the scale of danger Cyprian passed through before the battles and memories that later shaped his life. That restrained treatment keeps attention on the lasting human consequences of a wartime experience rather than turning illness into an isolated spectacle.

Memory, Commemoration, and Loss

In 1954, during a visit to his hometown, Fidelis practiced with the surviving master butchers for the unveiling of a monument to the victims of Ludwigsruhe’s bombing. Delphine walked through cemeteries and streets while the statue remained wrapped and secured for the ceremony. At the gathering, the butchers sang in formation; Delphine’s attention shifted from their voices to the image of her mother and the town’s history of burning and marching. The scene contrasts an organized public tribute with private memories that the ceremony cannot contain.

The novel’s attention to what is remembered and what remains unspoken also extends beyond the European war. Its closing reference to oral history of the Wounded Knee massacre notes that two people from the north, Cree or Ojibwe, are said to have died with Big Foot’s people, while their identities remain unknown to the narrator. This uncertainty, like the silence shared by Cyprian and Fidelis, marks the limits of the record. The Spanish flu is one element in a broader story in which survival is real, but neither personal memory nor public commemoration fully accounts for every loss.