Miracle at St. Anna

“What follows is real. It happens a thousand times in a thousand places to a thousand people. Yet we still manage to love one another, despite our best efforts to the contrary.”

James McBride’s author’s note foreshadows the novel’s relationship between storytelling and reality. The framing of this text as happening “a thousand times” suggests both that it is real and unreal, both personal and societal. The following discussion about love alludes both to the violence of the text and the hope that pervades this violence.

“[The newspaper] floated down and pirouetted in the air a few times and finally landed on a table at the sidewalk café below, as if God had placed it there, which He, in fact, had.”

The discussion of the newspaper “pirouetting” suggests an artistry and intention to the happenstance of a newspaper being thrown out the window. This is then combined with the impression of divine intervention to assert potential beauty in a violent world as a sign of God’s influence.

“Train marveled at how tiny the Germans were. He expected them to look like the ones he’d seen in the newsreels […] straight-backed, strong, fit, neat […] Instead, he saw soldiers that looked like skeletons.”

Train’s astonishment that the Germans do not resemble those in propaganda (implied both as pro-German and to rouse anti-German sentiment among Americans) indicates the efficacy of that propaganda. The contradictory reality of the struggling Germans shows The Brutality of War in a way that humanizes an enemy and highlights the difference between the individual soldiers and the governments that dictate them when it comes to understanding the war.