How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
I didn't want there to be wars and death, I wanted them not to exist; only rabbits with their coloured egg houses, sun and moon orderly above the flat earth, summer always, I wanted everyone to be happy. But his pictures were more accurate, the weapons, the disintegrating soldiers: he was a realist, that protected him. He almost drowned once but he would never allow that to happen again, by the time he left he was ready. (15.41)
The narrator seems to believe that, because she was into drawing peaceful things like eggs and bunny rabbits as a child, she was less of a "realist" than her brother, who was more into war-related imagery. The idea seems to be that violence is a part of reality, one that her brother confronted and she tried to escape.
Quote #8
The trouble some people have being German, I thought, I have being human. In a way it was stupid to be more disturbed by a dead bird than by those other things, the wars and riots and the massacres in the newspapers. But for the wars and riots there was always an explanation, people wrote books about them saying why they happened: the death of the heron was causeless, undiluted. (15.38)
As the narrator herself acknowledges, her extreme reaction to the dead heron seems a bit strange, given that there's a whole bunch of other serious stuff going on that barely gets a reaction out of her (like David's consistently bullying and jerky behavior, her conflicts with Joe, and oh yeah, her missing father). The senseless brutality of the heron's murder is what seems to get under her skin—like her father with Hitler, irrationality really bothers her. The narrator makes sure we're thinking about this moment through the lens of the war by a) bringing up wars and b) talking about the "trouble some people have being German," presumably in the wake of World War II.
Quote #9
They may have been sent to hunt for me, perhaps the others asked them to, they may be the police; or they may be sightseers, curious tourists. Evans will have told at the store, the whole village will know. Or the war may have started, the invasion, they are Americans. (25.2)
Later in the novel, when the narrator has hidden from the others and is adopting an animal lifestyle, she thinks to herself that perhaps the "Americans" have invaded Canada. Given the incident with the heron earlier, which she attributed to the "Americans" (who were actually Canadian), it seems she was already feeling that their country had been invaded by bad values.