Dick Norton’s abandoned plan to flee to Spain

Dick Savage’s abandoned plan to flee to Spain turns a pocket compass into the emblem of an escape that nearly becomes real. After being rejected by the army intelligence service and preparing to leave France, he imagines crossing into Spain and beginning a new life beyond the war. But an accidental reunion with Blake Wigglesworth changes his route: instead of slipping across the border alone, Savage boards the Touraine for home. The compass survives the plan’s collapse only long enough to be thrown into the sea.

Exclusion and departure

Savage’s proposed flight follows his encounter with army intelligence. A former college acquaintance and the service’s captain treat his pacifism as incompatible with wartime duty. Savage tries to explain that he wants to resume his Red Cross work at the front, but the captain says he will be sent back to the United States and barred from returning in any capacity. The episode leaves Savage not simply wanting to go elsewhere, but facing the forcible end of the work he had hoped to continue.

He obtains transportation from the Red Cross office: an order for the Touraine, sailing from Bordeaux in two weeks. During his final fortnight in Paris, he volunteers as a stretcher-bearer at an American hospital on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. The German offensive has brought the fighting close enough that ambulances carry wounded men directly to base hospitals. Savage helps bring patients inside and, during one twelve-hour shift, carries medical waste from outside the operating room. These duties place him amid the practical consequences of the war even as his own position within its institutions is being closed off.

The labor leaves him exhausted. Walking home after a shift, he recalls the patients’ faces, their pleas, and their groans. The account sets this night work beside the official dismissal that has determined his departure: he remains close to the human cost of the fighting, but no longer has a recognized way to serve at the front. His plan to flee takes shape in that interval between continued exposure to the war and exclusion from its organized relief effort.

The compass and the imagined escape

In a jeweller’s window on the Rue de Rivoli, Savage sees a small pocket compass and buys it. The purchase gives a concrete instrument to a plan that had not yet been fully formed. He will obtain civilian clothes, leave his uniform on the wharf at Bordeaux, and make for the Spanish border. He believes the transport orders he has kept in his inside pocket may help him get across. Once in a country outside the nightmare of war, he expects to decide what to do next. Before leaving, he even prepares a letter to his mother.

The plan also depends on imagining a life beyond escape itself. As he packs his books and belongings into a duffel bag and carries it toward the Gare d’Orleans, a poem by Swinburne recurs in his thoughts, with its claim that men acting together can diminish kingdoms. Savage turns that sentiment toward the present: he thinks people need stirring poems to encourage revolt against governments he regards as predatory. On the train, he pictures himself in a sun-scorched Spanish town, writing poems and manifestoes and calling young men to resist their leaders. The secret presses he imagines publishing his work make the fantasy international in scale, even as its starting point is a solitary border crossing.

That projected identity is sharply different from the exhausted hospital volunteer and the unwanted pacifist in uniform. Spain offers Savage not only a place to get away, but a stage on which he can turn political conviction into writing and address an audience. Yet the plan remains a daydream as well as a practical scheme: the train’s passing suburbs and summer farmland barely register while he composes this future in his mind.

A reunion changes the route

At noon, Savage stops at a diner for what he regards as a last deluxe meal. There he recognizes Blake Wigglesworth, wearing a French officer’s uniform. Blake has been in the Lafayette Escadrille, but was not kept on; he says he was also thrown out, with tuberculosis given as the reason. Savage has to explain where he is going. Blake says he is taking the Touraine home, and Savage finds himself answering that he is going home too.

The change is plain in its sequence, though the narration does not supply a formal explanation for it. A moment earlier, Savage had been preparing a civilian disguise and a clandestine crossing; after meeting Blake, he joins the route already set for Bordeaux and the same ship. Their recognition makes the return voyage a shared undertaking rather than the solitary escape Savage had pictured. Each tells the other that he has got into trouble, and they laugh over the likeness between their situations.

They spend the afternoon talking and drinking, then reach Bordeaux short of money. Blake has spent all of his in Paris, and Savage has little left, so they sell their bedrolls and equipment to newly arrived American lieutenants. Their rambling evening recalls their earlier days in Boston, when they went from bar to bar looking for somewhere still open. The practical details of the journey home are therefore less orderly than the original plan: equipment is sold, money runs short, and Savage’s careful preparations give way to an improvised trip with an old acquaintance.

The crossing and the discarded plan

Savage and Blake cross on the Touraine in calm, misty weather, drinking from late morning onward and enjoying each other’s company. One night Savage stands alone at the stern beside the small gun and feels something hard in the lining of his coat. It is the compass he bought for the Spanish crossing. He takes it out guiltily and drops it overboard.

The gesture resolves the episode without explaining Savage’s decision in abstract terms. The compass had belonged to a plan that joined a clandestine border crossing to a hoped-for life of political writing; on the ship, Savage deliberately disposes of the object that could have guided him toward that alternative. He does not cross into Spain or begin the imagined campaign of poems and manifestoes. He goes home on the Touraine with Blake.

The reversal is not a simple conversion from conviction to compliance: the account does not say that Savage has abandoned his pacifism or his opposition to wartime governments. What changes is the immediate course he will take. His projected escape, initially made persuasive by the compass, the transport orders, and the imagined Spanish town, is displaced by an unplanned reunion and the return voyage. The compass going overboard leaves that rejected possibility visible for one last moment, then removes it from the story.