Fred Summers

Fred Summers is an American ambulance volunteer whose irreverent humor and practical generosity hold steady as the war swings from shellfire to café life and back again. He helps turn a group of volunteers into companions, borrows money for a friend when needed, and recruits his former section into a new Red Cross assignment. His recurring jokes about the war as a madhouse or a Cook’s tour do not erase its dangers; they register the disconcerting distance between those dangers and the men’s improvised pleasures.

Life in the ambulance section

In France, Summers belongs to the close-knit group nicknamed the grenadine guards. He and Richard Ellsworth Savage once left a bombproof dugout during an air raid because Summers found it too smelly and wanted a drink. Keeping close to the houses to avoid antiaircraft fragments, they found a smoky bar where French soldiers were singing. The company welcomed them with drinks; by closing time the pair were walking arm in arm with two French soldiers who promised to show them their cantonment. The night ended back at their folding cots, where Summers sat bolt upright beneath his blanket and called the war a madhouse. The joke followed an evening of comradeship and drink, but it also distilled a world in which an air raid could drive men into a dugout and, moments later, out again in search of a bar.

The group’s pleasures continued amid the danger. Five men, including Summers, Savage, Steve Warner, and Ripley, went looking for omelettes and pommes frites in nearby villages and made nightly rounds of the estaminets. When their section was quartered for three rainy weeks at Erize la Petite, on the Voie Sacrée behind Verdun, the men shared a corner of a ruined barn. Camions carrying men and munitions ground past in the mud, while young French soldiers went toward the attack. During the attack that followed, the section worked twenty-four-hour duty for three days. Dysentery and frayed nerves spread; one man was sent back to Paris with shellshock, and others were evacuated. The grenadine guards came through comparatively well, though Warner and Ripley had inhaled mustard gas and vomited whenever they ate. The account places Summers’ convivial circle not outside the war but inside its rotations of exposure, exhaustion, and brief relief.

A social life built around improvisation

After the section returned to Paris, Summers found work with the Red Cross at twenty-five dollars a week and, by the second day, a steady girlfriend. Within a week he was holding two Red Cross jobs at that rate and being supported by a middle-aged French woman who owned a large house in Neuilly. When Savage ran out of money, Summers borrowed some from her for him. He kept the woman from the other men, explaining that he did not want them to know what he was involved in. The episode gives his joking sociability a practical counterpart: he helps a friend materially, while drawing a boundary around his own private arrangements.

Summers’ attitude toward the work was as irreverent as his approach to wartime danger. He called the war the century’s greatest graft, then added that he was for it and the Red Cross nurses. The contradiction is characteristic of the account’s portrait: his cynicism about the enterprise coexists with his readiness to take up another job within it. When he learned that the Red Cross was sending an American ambulance section to Italy, he announced that everything had been arranged and that he had jobs for all his former companions. He was temporarily in charge of recruiting and had put their names down. Savage responded that his Italian would make him useful to morale; the next morning the group assembled at the Red Cross office and enrolled in Section 1 for Italy.

The road to Italy

The convoy of twelve Fiats and eight Fords traveled south through the Forest of Fontainebleau and then east. Savage drove a Ford alone, concentrating on how to work the pedals. By Montélimar, the war and the earlier worries about jail, protest, and sedition seemed remote. Over supper, with mushrooms, garlic, and red wine, Summers announced that the war was a Cook’s tour. In the morning, a schoolboy ran after Savage’s car shouting Vive l’Amerique and gave him a box of local nougat. Summers’ remark captures the convoy’s transformation of an official journey into a pleasurable excursion; the gift to Savage makes that shift concrete, even though it was not Summers who received it.

The next day, the convoy’s discipline dissolved on the road to Marseilles. Drivers stopped at wine shops to drink and play craps; the publicity man and a newspaper correspondent were drunk and shouting in the staff car, while a lieutenant hurried anxiously along the line. Once the cars reached the city, a driver named Ford looked into his gasoline tank with a match and blew up his car. The fire department put out the burning vehicle and then turned its hoses on the others. This episode does not establish Summers as the cause of the disorder, but it extends the comic disorder that his Cook’s-tour description had anticipated: an official Red Cross convoy becomes a ramshackle procession of drink, gambling, and an avoidable explosion.

Humor amid suspicion

Later, after Savage, Warner, Ripley, and Schuyler had encountered trouble in their section, they returned to find orders sending the four to Rome for removal to the United States. The men around them were nervous and suspicious; Sheldrake said he had heard talk of seditious utterances and an Italian intelligence officer’s inquiries. The four left without saying goodbye. At Vicenza station, their superior handed over movement orders and hurried away without shaking hands. In this strained departure, Summers was the exception among the former comrades: he said he did not understand what was happening and that the whole business was a madhouse anyway.

Summers’ repeated use of the madhouse image links the front, the section’s social life, and the sudden suspicion surrounding his friends. His humor offers no evidence that he can control the war or its institutions; instead, it names the absurdity of experiences that keep changing register, from shelling and sickness to drinking, recruitment, and abrupt orders. His willingness to find work for the group and lend Savage money makes him more than a comic voice. He is a resourceful companion whose levity persists even when the organization that brought the men together turns opaque and distrustful.