Dick Savage and Steve Warner

Dick Savage and Steve Warner become close companions in the ambulance section through shared routines, exposure to the front, and a growing refusal to accept the war’s official justifications. Their relationship is not marked by a single pledge or dramatic break. It emerges in practical acts of care, long conversations, and the repeated experience of trying to preserve a private life and a sense of moral judgment amid military demands. Their paths later diverge, but the strain falls on a comradeship built through years of shared service and dissent.

Companions in the Ambulance Section

Steve Warner joins the circle of men who spend their off-duty hours eating in villages, visiting estaminets, and talking together. With Dick Savage, Fred Summers, and Ripley, he becomes part of a small group known as the grenadine guards. When the section moves behind Verdun, the five share a corner of a ruined barn for three rainy weeks. The common quarters and repeated rounds of food and drink establish companionship as part of their working life, not a separate refuge from it.

The men’s movement through the war repeatedly changes the setting of their friendship. In the Argonne Forest, the section works amid traffic carrying troops and supplies toward Verdun, while the young French soldiers pass toward the attack. The group’s talk and shared quarters bring Steve Warner and Dick Savage together, but their differences are also visible: Steve Warner gives a name to the horror around them, while Dick Savage listens and continues to inhabit the daily work of the section. The friendship accommodates both speech and silence.

Danger and Mutual Support

Their comradeship is tested when Dick Savage and Fred Summers lose their way in shell-damaged woods during a post. After shells pass close to their car, both men take cover; Fred Summers becomes overwhelmed, and Dick Savage puts an arm around him and keeps speaking reassuringly until they can return toward the safer part of the section. Steve Warner is not present in that particular incident, but the experience belongs to the dangerous shared world in which the ambulance men’s friendships form. The next day, a sustained attack leaves the section exhausted and badly shaken. Steve Warner and Ripley have also been exposed to mustard gas and become ill when they try to eat.

The group’s closeness is carried less by declarations than by the arrangements of its days off. At Récicourt, the men discover a garden beside a villa that has been destroyed, and make the place their private meeting ground. They sit in the dry fountain during shelling, share melons and champagne, and imagine returning to the United States to make an underground newspaper about the reality of the war. Dick Savage and Steve Warner are part of this collective practice of turning a brief interval into company, conversation, and a possible future beyond the front.

A Shared Moral Language

In the garden, the friendship also becomes a setting for arguments about what the war has made of its participants. Dick Savage reflects on wanting to be another kind of creature rather than a human being; Steve Warner responds with shame at belonging to the human race and a conviction that only a large wave of hope, such as a revolution, could restore self-respect. Their exchange brings their disillusionment into direct view. Steve Warner speaks with anguished intensity, while Dick Savage answers by redirecting the moment toward an errand for champagne. The gesture does not resolve their argument; it lets their shared life continue around it.

After the section moves into a quieter part of the Argonne Forest and is eventually disbanded, Dick Savage hates leaving the autumn woods. The men are sent back to Paris as the United States Army prepares to take over the ambulance service attached to the French. There, Dick Savage and Steve Warner rent an inexpensive room behind the Panthéon. They read French during the day and go to cafés and drinking places in the evening, while the former section gathers for dinner and debates what to do next. Steve Warner says he intends to return home and claim conscientious-objector status. Dick Savage remains among those unsure how to proceed, and the shared uncertainty does not require them to make the same decision.

Dissent and Diverging Paths

In Italy, their friendship is tested by an encounter with the language of youthful idealism. A correspondent praises the ambulance men’s youth and idealism; Steve Warner argues bitterly that youth is a wretched time for someone exposed to war, and objects when the correspondent points out that the men are not themselves fighting. Steve Warner calls them embusqués, and he and Dick Savage leave together before Sheldrake can follow. Dick Savage says little in the argument, but follows Steve Warner onto a streetcar. His choice to go with him makes their companionship visible as action: Steve Warner initiates the departure, and Dick Savage does not leave him to make it alone.

Their dissent acquires institutional consequences after their section is ordered to report to Rome. The men hear that seditious utterances and an Italian intelligence inquiry may be involved, while others in the section become wary of speaking to them. Dick Savage and Steve Warner leave without saying goodbye to the group. In Rome, they walk the streets together but have no money for lunch or a drink, spending the afternoon hungry and resting on the Pincian. Their shared hardship contrasts with Ed Schuyler’s good fortune: after meeting a family friend, he obtains meals, a loan, and a publicity job. Ed Schuyler then helps the others with food and travel arrangements, and the group is sent to Paris.

In Paris, Steve Warner goes to the American Red Cross office to arrange to return home and maintains that he will seek conscientious-objector status. Dick Savage instead interviews Red Cross officials and later goes to army intelligence to explain that he wants to continue ambulance work despite his pacifist convictions. He is rebuffed and told he will be sent back to the United States. The difference is consequential: Steve Warner pursues refusal of military service, while Dick Savage tries to remain useful in the work he has been doing. Their choices are distinct responses to the same conflict, not evidence that their earlier solidarity has disappeared.

Dick Savage accepts transportation from Bordeaux and spends his remaining time in Paris carrying stretchers at an American hospital. The evidence does not establish what ultimately happens to Steve Warner, or whether the two men meet again. Their relationship is instead defined by the scenes in which they share work, leisure, danger, political argument, and the practical consequences of dissent. Together, they give the ambulance section a social life beyond its duties, while their contrasting decisions show how comrades can share a moral rejection of war without following identical routes out of it.