Dick Savage's Enlistment in the Ambulance Service

Dick Savage's Enlistment in the Ambulance Service marks the point at which Dick Savage's opposition to war no longer keeps him apart from it. Though he believes helping the war effort would violate his conscience, he secretly volunteers for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service, exchanges the university world for France, and begins the practical, uncertain passage from pacifist student to wartime ambulance worker.

Conscience and the Decision

In the Easter vacation, after the Armed Ship Bill had passed and conscription was already being discussed, Hiram Halsey Cooper tried to secure Dick a job in Washington. He argued that a young man of Dick's talent should not endanger his career by joining the army. Their long conversation circled around duty to the state, party leadership, and expediency, but did not settle the conflict. Dick said that helping the war in any way would violate his conscience. Hiram Halsey Cooper obtained a promise that Dick would not act rashly without consulting him, but that promise did not prevent Dick from making his own decision.

Back in Cambridge, military drills and lectures on military science had become part of the university atmosphere. Dick was completing a four-year course in three years and working hard, yet the courses seemed to have lost their meaning. His literary work continued: a group of sonnets titled Morituri Te Salutant won a prize from The Literary Digest. The editors asked for a note of hope in the final sestet; Dick revised the poem, and sent the hundred-dollar prize to his mother so she could go to Atlantic City. The episode places artistic ambition and family feeling beside the increasingly pressing question of what he would do about the war.

Dick discovered that war work would let him receive his degree that spring without taking examinations. He then went to Boston without telling anyone and signed up for the volunteer ambulance service. The sequence makes the enlistment a quiet, self-directed reversal: rather than accept Hiram Halsey Cooper's proposed refuge in a Washington job, Dick entered war work on terms that avoided military service while still carrying him into the conflict he opposed.

Leaving Cambridge

When Dick told Ned he was going to France, the two drank heavily and talked about the early deaths that might crush youth, beauty, love, and friendship while older, complacent men celebrated over the dead. At dawn they sat together on a tombstone in a graveyard at the corner of Harvard Square. They drank without speaking, then threw back their heads and bleated Blahblahblahblah in unison. The scene gives the departure an intimate cost: Dick's decision separates him from the life and friendships he is leaving, even as the friends meet that prospect with bitter, absurd humor.

Sailing for France aboard the Chicago in early June, Dick felt as though he had been forced to abandon an unfinished book. Ned, his mother, Hiram Halsey Cooper, his poetry, his pacifist friends, and the lights along the Charles faded in his thoughts like the pages of a novel put aside. Seasickness, shyness among the noisy drinking crowd, and the Red Cross workers' lurid stories of wartime atrocities accompanied his uncertainty about what awaited him. His departure is not presented as a confident embrace of battle; it carries the unsettled feeling of leaving one narrative before knowing what the next will demand.

Arrival and the First Days in France

The first impressions of France differed sharply from Dick's anxious imaginings. Bordeaux's red Garonne, pastel streets, sunlight, and shadow, station names that seemed to come from Shakespeare, and wine bottles in the station cafés made the landscape feel newly legible as poetry. On the train toward Paris, poppies scattered across blue-green fields seemed to set its rhythm and imagery. The arrival temporarily turns the journey into an aesthetic experience, a counterpoint to the rumors of violence and disease that had filled the crossing.

Dick and his companions reached Paris too late to report to the Norton-Harjes office. He left his bag at the Hotel Mont Thabor, where he was assigned a room with two other men, and walked through the boulevards in the June dusk. The next morning, the men hurried to rue François Premier to report. They were directed to obtain uniforms, warned away from wine and women, and told to return later; they then had to wait until the following morning for identity cards. Their first days in France thus consisted less of ambulance work than of administrative delay and unfamiliar surroundings.

During the wait, Dick, Ed Schuyler, and Fred Summers stayed together. They rode in horse cabs through the Bois, visited Notre-Dame, the Conciergerie, and Sainte-Chapelle, and took a streetcar to Malmaison. Dick polished his French and read Les Dieux Ont Soif and L’Ile des Pinguins in the Tuileries Gardens. The three ate lavishly each evening for fear it might be their last Paris meal, then walked the crowded boulevards. For Dick, the enlistment initially leads not straight to the front but into a brief interlude of reading, sightseeing, companionship, and waiting: the practical threshold of service arrives before its dangers do.