Dick Savage and Ed Schuyler

Richard Ellsworth Savage and Ed Schuyler are wartime comrades whose postwar reunion in Rome tests the ease of their old companionship against the uncertainty of what comes after fighting. They share memories, drink, and navigate a public scandal together, yet their different expectations of peace emerge sharply: Ed is drawn to upheaval as a spectacle and possible opening, while Dick sees revolutions as war turned inward. Their friendship is affectionate and familiar, but neither can make the other’s future feel settled.

Comrades Reunited in Rome

Dick meets Ed after reaching Rome, where Ed is working with the Red Cross and has made a comfortable life for himself, complete with an apartment near the Spanish Steps and frequent travel. The ease of Ed’s circumstances contrasts with his trouble: the husband of an Italian woman with whom he has been involved is threatening a duel, and Ed fears the affair may cost him his job. His rueful assessment that peace is harder to endure than war gives their reunion its unsettled tone. The fighting has ended, but personal danger and uncertainty have not.

Over lunch at an expensive restaurant near the Pincio gardens, Dick and Ed resume the teasing familiarity of people who have known one another through the war. Ed jokes about Dick’s success as an officer; Dick answers that events have been a series of accidents. They wonder what became of Steve Warner, whom Dick suspects may be in jail, and recall that Fred Summers was joining the Polish Legion. Their absent comrades make the end of the war feel less like a clean return to ordinary life than another turn in a scattered, unresolved story. Ed is tired of Italy and the Red Cross, but even his wish to go home competes with the desire to remain and see whether revolution comes.

Their afternoon together moves from the restaurant to Ed’s room, where they drink cognac and look across Rome’s yellow and green roofs and baroque domes. They remember how intensely the city had affected them on an earlier visit and talk about what each expected to do when the war was over. Ed imagines becoming a foreign correspondent and traveling east to Persia and Afghanistan; he cannot picture himself returning to upstate New York. The contrast between Ed’s eager itinerary and Dick’s inability to imagine his own next step leaves Dick walking back and forth across the tiled floor. Ed’s plans are not merely travel talk: they make visible the future that Dick cannot yet claim for himself.

Shared Trouble and Different Responses

The old companionship becomes practical when Ed’s Italian entanglement erupts in public. After Ed introduces Dick to Magda, Dick remembers Anne Elizabeth Trent and arranges for her to join them. The group goes out in a hired landau and then to the Apollo theatre. During the evening, Magda’s husband rushes at Ed, shouting an accusation, and the two men tumble down the red-carpeted steps. Dick and Anne Elizabeth restrain the husband while Magda clings to him; once the police arrive, Ed apologizes to the manager and explains the disturbance to the officers.

Dick initially treats the incident as absurd, laughing at the husband’s bent spectacles and later joking with Ed about the possibility of a duel. Ed does not share his amusement for long. He is embarrassed by the spectacle and troubled that his affair has hurt Magda, and he leaves after apologizing to Anne Elizabeth. The difference in their responses gives the friendship texture: Dick can turn danger into comedy, while Ed’s humor gives way when he recognizes the human cost. Their shared presence in the crisis does not make them identical; it shows both the ease with which they act together and the different feelings each brings to the aftermath.

Ed’s imminent departure gives their final night in Rome a temporary, almost ceremonial shape. He is packed for the train to Paris and home, and Dick immediately says that he will travel on the same train. They eat an elaborate supper near Trajan’s Column, with Ed making determined efforts to keep the evening lively through wine, jokes, and stories of his Roman misadventures. Dick, however, cannot taste the food and hears his own voice as thin and distant. Their familiar joking remains available, but it cannot dispel his inward unease. The contrast between Ed’s performance of good spirits and Dick’s private coldness makes the meal a farewell weighted with more than the end of a visit.

The Argument About Revolution

On the train north, Ed talks excitedly about a coming revolutionary wave. He predicts that workers’ syndicates will seize factories in Italy on May Day and imagines upheaval spreading through Hungary, Bavaria, Austria, Prussia, and France. Reports of American troops mutinying in Archangel add to his sense that a world revolution is underway. To Ed, the danger is inseparable from the excitement: the prospect makes the moment feel extraordinary, even as he admits that they may not come through it unharmed.

Dick rejects Ed’s expectation that revolution can resolve the war. He argues that the Allies remain in control and, more fundamentally, that the war has not truly ended if political opponents are simply shot in its name. Revolutions, in his view, are the war turned inside out: changing who fights or what cause they invoke does not stop the cycle of violence. The disagreement turns their conversation savage enough that Dick is relieved they are alone in the compartment. It is not a passing difference of mood; the two former comrades are trying to make incompatible meanings out of the same unsettled peace.

Their positions also resist easy labels. Ed reminds Dick of his earlier support for revolution, while Dick’s response focuses on the continuing logic of violence rather than a settled political identity. Ed, who says that he had been a royalist, now imagines a dictator as the answer after seeing the King of Italy. His changing allegiance sits uneasily beside his enthusiasm for revolutionary upheaval. The exchange shows both men searching for an order capable of ending the disorder, but reaching for sharply different explanations and remedies.

A Friendship Without Resolution

After the argument, the two men fall asleep on opposite sides of the compartment, sore and drunk. At a frosty frontier station the next morning, they drink hot chocolate served by a Frenchwoman as the sun rises. Ed turns to praising France, and the hostility loosens; by the time they reach the outskirts of Paris, they are getting along again and planning to see a show. Their reconciliation is modest rather than decisive. A change of scenery and a return to shared plans restore conversation, but the disagreement itself is not resolved.

The journey captures the relationship’s central movement: recollection and banter draw Dick and Ed together, while their competing visions of the postwar world separate them, and ordinary companionship brings them back within speaking distance. Their bond is neither broken by political argument nor strong enough to erase its stakes. In Rome, their actions together have helped them carry the evening’s disorder; on the train, their argument reveals that the end of the war has not given them a common account of what peace should mean. The friendship therefore registers both continuity and rupture: comradeship survives, but the future they face together remains unsettled.