France

France serves as a point of arrival and exposure in the book, linking wartime maritime danger with ambulance work and the disorientation of entering a country at war. Its significance emerges through sharply different journeys: the novelist’s own service, Joe Williams’s passage toward St. Nazaire, and Richard Ellsworth Savage’s arrival in Bordeaux and Paris.

Wartime Service and the Writer’s Experience

Dos Passos volunteered for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service in 1916 and served in France and Italy. When the United States entered the war, he enlisted in the American Expeditionary Forces; the experience gave him a direct measure of modern warfare and informed his portrayal of soldiers in his first novel, Three Soldiers. France thus belongs not only to the book’s setting but also to the wartime experience behind its writing.

Joe Williams’s Approach by Sea

Joe Williams reaches the French coast aboard the North Star, a leaky former Great Lakes oreboat carrying a cargo described as canned goods but understood by the crew to be shell caps. The sailors receive danger bonuses for crossing the zone. Despite the ship’s pumps having to run much of the time, Joe likes the crew and the food, and regards Captain Perry as an admirable old sailor. The winter passage is smooth until the Bay of Biscay; near the Loire’s low, sandy mouth, the crew grows nervous about mines. A French patrol boat eventually guides the ship through the winding channel and between the minefields, making France’s approach a passage through concrete wartime hazards rather than a simple landfall.

Richard Ellsworth Savage’s Arrival

Richard Ellsworth Savage sails for France aboard the Chicago to join the volunteer ambulance service. The crossing separates him from his unfinished life in Cambridge: his family and acquaintances, poetry, pacifist friends, and familiar views along the Charles River recede from his thoughts as he wonders what awaits him. On reaching Bordeaux, he encounters a landscape and urban life unlike anything he had imagined; the journey onward to Paris seems, in his perception, almost to arrange itself as a poem. The arrival is also uneasy. The travelers reach Paris too late to report to the Norton-Harjes office, leave their bags at the Hotel Mont Thabor, and walk the streets in the June dusk. Warnings about infection from a medical officer still weigh on them, and they return to the hotel early. France is therefore rendered both as an unexpectedly vivid place and as the threshold of an uncertain wartime life.