Dick Savage and Henry Savage

Dick Savage and Henry Savage are brothers whose relationship is shaped by a wartime contrast: Henry serves in the infantry and experiences the front, while Richard Ellsworth Savage moves from ambulance service into administrative work and uses his position to help his brother. Their bond is neither easy nor distant. It appears in teasing arguments about privilege and service, in Richard’s efforts to improve Henry’s military circumstances, and in Henry’s willingness to turn to him when a personal crisis leaves him short of money and options.

Different Paths Through the War

The brothers’ unequal positions become especially clear through their mother’s response to Henry’s enlistment. He had joined the infantry as a private and was somewhere in France. Their mother, staying in Atlantic City, was upset that the grandson of General Ellsworth held so low a rank and expected him to rise. Her concern reveals a family identity still attached to military standing, even though the family had not remained comfortably situated. Richard, by contrast, had not even thought of their grandfather’s generalship when explaining his own progress. The difference between their mother’s regard for inherited status and Richard’s professed indifference becomes one source of the brothers’ wry, sometimes uncomfortable understanding of their advantages.

Richard’s own wartime advancement proceeds through a series of administrative connections. After working to get Henry out of the infantry, he became an assistant in the Post Despatch Service under Colonel Edgecombe and attained the rank of captain. He then managed to have Henry transferred from officers’ school to Tours. The move could not secure Henry more than a first lieutenancy, but it did bring the brothers together in the same city and away from Henry’s earlier front-line service. Their reunion is therefore both a family encounter and the visible consequence of Richard’s use of influence on Henry’s behalf.

Reunion and the Argument Over Privilege

When Henry reports to Captain Richard in Tours, he is thin, brown, and sore. The brothers drink together in Richard’s room, and Henry responds to the comfortable surroundings with a mixture of irritation and reluctant admiration. He suggests that his younger brother has prospered while others endured the front, and jokes that Richard’s good fortune has left him surrounded by comforts. Richard answers that their mother’s memory of General Ellsworth may have helped, but says he had forgotten their grandfather’s rank. He also defends himself as having worked hard and behaved properly.

The exchange does not settle whether Richard’s position is deserved or merely fortunate. Henry’s sarcasm keeps the disparity in view; Richard’s account insists that he has earned his place through work as well as connections. Their joking allows them to voice an accusation that might otherwise become a more direct quarrel. Henry can criticize the ease of Richard’s assignment, while Richard can answer without disowning the advantage he has used to help his brother. The intimacy of the scene lies partly in this freedom to needle one another, but the humor leaves the underlying difference intact.

Richard’s care for Henry also takes practical, ordinary forms. He takes his brother out for dinner and arranges for him to meet a woman, seeking to make the evening more agreeable after Henry’s arrival. Henry later returns to Richard’s room before dawn, troubled by the encounter and ashamed of how he feels. Richard gives him pajamas and makes room for him in his bed. He frames Henry’s reaction as old-fashioned reserve and advises him, lightly, to be less puritanical. The teasing does not prevent him from taking Henry in; the brothers’ closeness is expressed as much through shelter and accommodation as through declarations of affection.

Henry’s Crisis in Paris

Later, Henry turns to Richard with a more consequential problem. A woman named Olga has told Henry that she is going to have his child. Henry does not want to marry her or take responsibility for supporting the child, and fears the effects the situation could have on their mother. He asks Richard to speak with her because Richard is more comfortable negotiating in French. His appeal acknowledges both his own difficulty and his brother’s practical competence.

Richard agrees to go, although he is tired and unwell. Henry also admits that he has lost his available money at poker, leaving him unable to manage the matter alone. At the meeting, Richard argues that marriage would be impractical and presents Henry’s circumstances as a reason for Olga not to continue with the pregnancy. When she rejects that proposal, he offers money; after increasing the amount, he leaves her and Henry arranging to meet again. Richard’s intervention is not a clean resolution: it relies on persuasion and payment, and the evidence does not establish what ultimately happens to Olga or the pregnancy. What it does establish is that Henry comes to Richard in distress and that Richard accepts responsibility for negotiating, despite his own exhaustion and limited resources.

Mutual Aid and Its Limits

The brothers’ relationship combines protection with friction. Richard uses his military connections to move Henry from the infantry through officers’ school to Tours, and later responds to Henry’s financial and personal predicament with direct assistance. Henry, for his part, makes Richard answer for the difference between their wartime experiences, teasing him about the comfort and status of his assignment rather than allowing those advantages to pass unnoticed. Their closeness does not dissolve the class and military disparities between them; it gives them a private setting in which to acknowledge those disparities without ending their mutual reliance.

The episodes leave the brothers’ future unresolved, but establish a consistent pattern. Henry challenges Richard’s good fortune and turns to him when he needs help; Richard defends his own position, yet repeatedly puts his resources, time, and home at Henry’s disposal. Their bond is therefore neither idealized nor merely comic. It is a working family alliance in which affection takes the form of intervention, teasing, and practical care, while the unequal burdens of the war remain present between them.