United States Marine Corps

The United States Marine Corps enters the novel through Cyprian Lazarre’s wartime service, which leaves him physically scarred and binds his later life to the unspoken history he shares with Fidelis Waldvogel. His experience moves from enlistment and combat to a difficult return home, while the novel presents military service not as uncomplicated glory but as lasting injury, memory, and silence.

Cyprian’s Service and Wounds

Cyprian enlisted in the United States Marine Corps with a cousin and a friend. After surviving training and exposure to the Spanish flu, he went into the fourth wave at Belleau Wood, where he was burned in the wheat. The account makes his survival a sequence of bodily assaults: chlorine gas blinded him, a machine-gun barrel nearly severed his hand, and dysentery left him profoundly weakened. His humor failed, and he regretted the zeal that had carried him into war.

He returned home before realizing that, as an Ojibwe man, he was not yet a United States citizen. During his slow recovery, he could not vote. The juxtaposition is stark: the Marine Corps sent him into battle, but military service did not resolve his exclusion from full civic belonging. The injuries continued to shape his body after the fighting ended; scars fanned across his shoulders and rose toward his throat, where Fidelis would later notice them.

The War’s Afterlife

The novel connects Cyprian’s service to the intimate, largely unspoken relationship between former combatants. Fidelis and Cyprian never discuss the war they shared, yet it remains between them like old battlefield ground covered over with grass. Each carries memories that may return through a picture, a sound, or a word. When one man pauses under their pressure, the other senses the disturbance and lets the conversation turn toward a joke or a long drink of beer.

Only once does some of their buried knowledge enter open conversation. Sitting with Fidelis at the kitchen table, Cyprian is seen through the bodily evidence of the war: the scars at his throat. The brief exchange does not undo their silence. Instead, it shows how military experience survives in visible marks and in the careful restraint between men who know that speaking might summon losses neither has fully put away.

The Corps and Unequal Citizenship

The novel situates Cyprian’s service within a contradiction between military obligation and civic inclusion. After his return, he learned that his Ojibwe identity meant he was not yet a United States citizen; during his slow recovery, he could not vote. The Corps’ role in his story is therefore double-edged: it placed him in the battle’s most dangerous exposure, but his service did not secure the political rights he might have expected from having fought for the country. His exclusion sharpens the distance between being sent to war and being accepted as a full member of the nation.

The Corps Within a Wider War Memory

The Marine Corps episode forms one strand in a novel that repeatedly shows war being carried beyond the battlefield through silence, bodily memory, and contested belonging. Cyprian’s scars remain legible even when he and Fidelis leave their shared war unspoken; years later, the sight of them prompts Fidelis to recognize that Cyprian had taken fire. The image of the old front—trenches covered and tunnels collapsed, with grass growing over the ground—captures the distance between a landscape apparently returned to peace and the memories that persist beneath it. Their pauses, jokes, and drinks do not erase that history; they mark the subdued ways it continues to press into ordinary companionship.

Beyond the Battlefield

Cyprian’s service belongs to a wider pattern in the novel in which war persists not only through individual recollection but through family choices, political loyalties, and public commemoration. In 1934, Delphine follows reports of the purge and later gathers newspaper details about violence against Jews, while Fidelis and Tante focus on German prosperity and their family’s growing holdings. Their different responses show how accounts of the past can be set aside even as the evidence of violence accumulates. Much later, Erich’s life as a German prisoner of war is shaped by an oath of loyalty and a fear that prisoners who become too friendly with Americans may disappear—rumors he cannot verify but that help govern his conduct. The Marine Corps episode is not the novel’s only account of military experience, but it makes especially clear that service and belonging do not necessarily coincide: Cyprian fought for a country that had not yet recognized him as a citizen.