War

Kraus portrays World War I as a self-feeding apparatus that converts individual lives into interchangeable parts and then asks the survivors to call the result luck. Bagger’s first instinct is to translate catastrophe into odds, insisting that “and Cyril Bagger considers himself lucky” while the ground around him is a churn of bodies, bones, and shell craters (1). That flippant phrasing matches a world where burial duty, ration lines, and trench raids blur into one continuous production of death. Command reinforces the factory logic by treating men as named units and predictable liabilities, and Reis’s certainty that “I have names for all of you” makes surveillance feel like another weapon (17).

The angel’s arrival does not interrupt this system so much as reveal how quickly it absorbs anything that might threaten it. The patrol drags a glowing body out of the wire, and arguments immediately...