Auld Lang Syne

“Auld Lang Syne” is one of the songs through which the novel makes memory audible: it crosses the boundary between the living and the dead, and carries private loss into shared experience. Its appearances connect Step-and-a-Half’s recollection of Wounded Knee to the novel’s broader scenes of wartime remembrance and communal singing.

The song in Step-and-a-Half’s memory

Step-and-a-Half remembers hearing “Auld Lang Syne” among the soldiers’ drinking songs on the night before the great guns sounded at Wounded Knee. The voices were sometimes rough and sometimes smooth as whiskey, their harmonies mellow in the freezing December air. The song belongs to a remembered soundscape that also includes “Aura Lee,” “Calpurnia, the Faithful,” and a mother’s lullaby to her baby. Against the violence that followed, these songs preserve a human closeness that the coming attack cannot erase.

Song, the dead, and survival

The song’s meaning is made explicit through Step-and-a-Half’s keepsake: a scrap of ghost shirt, yellowed muslin with tattered fringe, a painted crow, and a white moon. She believes the Ghost Dancers understood that the cloth could let its wearer visit the dead and take comfort from their singing. In that understanding, “Auld Lang Syne” is not merely a tune from the past; it is part of a larger idea that the dead remain near, separated from the living by only a song. The remembered music gives form to grief without claiming to undo the deaths.

A private memory within a wider history

The novel places this intimate recollection beside other forms of war memory. Fidelis Waldvogel and Cyprian Lazarre never discuss the war they shared, yet its images and sounds return to them in daily life; each recognizes the other’s pauses and answers with a joke or a drink. Elsewhere, Delphine Watzka fears that Fidelis and Tante have set aside the slaughter associated with political change in Germany, while she gathers reports of terror and persecution that they do not want to dwell on. These contrasts show how memory can be preserved in silence, in argument, or in song.

From remembered song to communal singing

The song also belongs to the book’s wider pattern of voices crossing distances and generations. At the 1954 unveiling of a monument to the victims of the bombing of Ludwigsruhe, surviving master butchers gather to sing. Delphine sees the ceremony’s beauty and its darkness together: the men’s voices make a wall of melody, then, in her disoriented vision, smoke and ash pour from their mouths as they sing. Their performance turns remembrance into a public act, even as the people around her continue to smile and applaud.

The novel finally imagines song travelling through Argus in a multitude of forms: ballads, anthems, German sailors’ songs, voyageurs’ songs, Cree lullabies, hymns, and remembered Ghost Dance songs. In that expansive soundscape, “Auld Lang Syne” is one thread in a living archive. Its force comes not from explaining the past, but from making the past audible among those who remain.