Markus's military service and reassignment

Markus’s military service and reassignment mark a turn from Delphine’s fear of losing the son she has raised to a quieter, more complicated encounter with wartime death. She cannot keep him from enlisting, and he initially leaves for Fort Snelling expecting that he will probably remain in the United States. His later desk assignment spares him from the front, but not from the consequences of combat: he is tasked with composing condolence letters for families whose sons have died.

Delphine’s warning

When Markus tells Delphine that he is going into the Army, she is prepared to speak with him. She asks him to sit at the kitchen table, though she knows he is unlikely to listen or believe her. Her appeal is grounded in the reality of war rather than its public image: men are killed through mistakes as well as deliberate attacks, and the cheerful assurances aimed at soldiers’ families obscure the danger.

Delphine is angered by the contrast between that danger and the advertisements she finds in a magazine. One pitches toothpaste as a useful gift for men at the front; another suggests that chewing gum can ease loneliness and improve observation. To her, such marketing makes destruction into a way to sell ordinary products. Her distress is as much about the public’s evasions as about Markus’s personal risk.

Markus answers gently, putting his hands on her shoulders and trying to reassure her. He says he will be careful and thinks it unlikely that he will be sent overseas. He also distinguishes his prospects from Franz’s, since Franz had gone into service as a trained pilot. Delphine can appreciate the kindness in Markus’s attempt to comfort her without mistaking it for certainty. She sends him out on his last night at home, and he chooses a walk and a newspaper rather than a night on the town.

Departure and the household left behind

On the following day, Markus leaves by bus for Fort Snelling. Delphine bakes late into the night, reads novels from the town library, and eats some of the cookies she has made for his first package before baking another batch. These domestic preparations do not dispel her anxiety. After she finally sleeps, she dreams of the dead associated with the cellar, including Ruthie Chavers, whose appearance brings an earlier family tragedy into the moment of Markus’s departure.

The departure also recalls Markus’s childhood attachment to the toy soldiers and armies left on display in his room. He had kept his brothers’ playthings in place after learning that they were not coming home, as if maintaining their miniature battlefield could preserve a route back to the family. On the night before leaving, he again adjusts the figures and their positions. The objects give his military departure a private connection to the absent brothers, even as the real war threatens to repeat the losses their toys had long represented.

Reassignment and Delphine’s relief

Delphine later receives a letter saying Markus has failed the vision test and will probably do desk work at OCS for the duration. She is elated, experiencing the news as a reprieve for the family, and at last begins to sleep. The reassignment changes the immediate shape of her fear: rather than imagining Markus in combat, she can take comfort in his likely service away from the front.

Markus writes far more often than Franz does. His work involves writing letters, although Delphine does not understand what he means by this until he returns home. When he is back with his parents, he appears neat and well groomed, but tired. He sits with Fidelis over beer, and their halting conversation makes clear how much they rely on Delphine to bridge the silence between them.

The work of writing for the dead

Asked what his letters concern, Markus explains that he writes to the parents of dead servicemen. Officers give him lists of names; he has never known the men whose lives and deaths he must describe. He calls the task an art of creative fiction and admits that he hates it. His assignment is physically distant from combat, yet it places him within the machinery by which the Army communicates loss to families.

The letters sharpen the contrast between Delphine’s earlier fears and the reality of Markus’s service. He has not been sent into the thick of battle, but the dead are not distant abstractions: their names arrive in lists, and his task is to supply words about lives he never witnessed. The episode gives his desk work a double character—safety for Markus, and an intimate, uneasy responsibility for representing strangers to their bereaved parents.

A name recognized

After describing his work, Markus tells Fidelis and Delphine why he has come home with something else on his mind. A fellow serviceman from Illinois, transferred from a camp far north, recognizes the Waldvogel surname. He recalls a prisoner of war there with a similar appearance and a name beginning with Wald-, though he does not know the man’s first name. Markus’s account opens a possible connection between his own military experience and a German captive, turning an incidental conversation into a thread that leads toward the family’s wartime past.