AtDTDA: [38] p. 1077 "We're in Hell, you know"

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

"Yash" & Dally drift off into some sort of pre-marriage polymorphously perverse 
fantasy-land:

           "We about to do something stupid here?" one of them 
           would ask after a while. 

           "Sure hope so," the other would reply. 

Policarpe hails Dally, emerging from back in the middle of the book over in 
Belgium:

           "We're in Hell, you know," he said conversationally. 
           
           "Everybody thinks we're finally out of there," she said. 

           A shrug. "The world came to an end in 1914. Like the 
           mindless dead, who don't know they're dead, we are as 
           little aware as they of having been in Hell ever since that 
           terrible August." 

>From the Cornell University Press blurb for:
REHEARSALS
The German Army in Belgium, August 1914 
Jeff Lipkes

           People screamed, cried, and groaned. Above the tumult I 
           could distinguish the voices of small children. All this time 
           the soldiers were singing. . . . Sometime after the first salvo, 
           there was another round of fire and, once again, I was not 
           hit. After this I heard fewer cries, save from time to time a 
           small child calling its mother.”—Félix Bourdon, survivor of a 
           mass execution in Dinant, Belgium

           In August 1914, without any legitimate pretext, German soldiers 
           killed nearly 6,000 Belgian noncombatants, including women and 
           children, and burned some 25,000 homes and other buildings. 
           Rehearsals is the first book to provide a detailed narrative history 
           of the German invasion of Belgium as it affected civilians. Based 
           on extensive eyewitness testimony, the book chronicles events 
           in and around the towns of Liège, Aarschot, Andenne, Tamines, 
           Dinant, and Leuven, where the worst of the German depredations 
           occurred. Accounts of the killing, looting, and arson have long 
           been dismissed as “atrocity propaganda,” particularly in the 
           United Kingdom and the United States. Rehearsals examines 
           the campaign by revisionists that led to voluminous and compelling 
           testimony about German war crimes being discredited.

           Recently, the case has been made that the violence that came 
           to a peak between August 19 and August 26, 1914, was the result 
           of a spontaneous outbreak of German paranoia about civilian 
           sharpshooters. In Rehearsals, Jeff Lipkes offers compelling 
           evidence that the executions were in fact part of a deliberate 
           campaign of terrorism ordered by military authorities. In his 
           shocking account of events that have been largely overlooked 
           by historians of World War I, Lipkes commemorates the 
           heroism as well as the suffering of the Belgian victims of 
           German aggression.

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4865

Rehearsals for the Death Camps. Mechanized death. The phrase 

           Like the mindless dead, who don't know they're dead. . . .

echos the Thanatoids in Vineland.

Policarpe cannot trust his eyes:

           "Hallucination, obviously. For a moment I thought I saw 
           your former husband." 

Kit returns to Paris unexpectedly. Post-war, after spending some time 
in Lwow,  Kit runs into the "strangely possessed algebraist E. Percy Movay."