This leads me to my next point, that in these two chapters of the book Faust seems to move from focusing on death and dying to the living survivors. After the war was over, survivors could understandably not simply will themselves “move on” from such vast devastation. As she accounts on page 212, the end of the war “offered an opportunity to attend to the dead in ways war had made impossible,” and “the fallen could be honored without encroaching on the immediate and pressing needs of the living.” It was interesting to read the great lengths to which survivors went to properly bury and honor the dead, even years after the war had ended. Expending almost $4 million, creating a new governmental department, and utilizing every method of communication, the effort to bury the dead was a driving force in the struggling nation. It was as though the country could not even begin the Reconstruction process, which it so desperately needed, without first finishing the grief and devastation of the war—primarily accomplished by identifying, naming, and honoring each dead soldier.
- Taylor Duncan