Marseille is a hinge in the book’s wartime geography: the southern destination of an ambulance convoy that has begun to shed military discipline, a harbor city whose pleasures are rendered as both comic spectacle and commercial transaction, and a brief stop where Eveline Hutchins’s postwar expectations meet J. Ward Moorehouse’s impatience. The city is not a place of settled arrival so much as a passage into a different register—away from the front, but not into uncomplicated peace.

Arrival by convoy

The convoy approaches Marseille after travelling south through the Forest of Fontainebleau and the wine-growing country of central France. For Richard Ellsworth Savage, driving a Ford alone, the journey first makes the war feel remote: by Montélimar, worry about jail, protest, and sedition seems to belong to another century. The route’s ease and abundance stand in deliberate contrast to the danger and political anxiety that have shaped his service. A quiet supper of mushrooms, garlic, and strong red wine, followed by a night in a comfortable hotel, gives the passage the air of a holiday; a schoolboy even runs after Savage’s car with a box of local nougat and a cry of welcome to America.

The mood breaks into farce as the convoy nears Marseille. Drivers stop at wine shops to drink and gamble, and the orderly line of vehicles falls apart. A publicity man and Montgomery Ellis, the famous writer accompanying the section, become conspicuously drunk in the staff car, while the small lieutenant runs between the cars, red-faced and puffing, trying to restore control. The convoy is eventually gathered up and enters the city in formation, but the discipline is already more performance than command.

That performance ends in the main square. As the men settle into nearby bars and cafés, a driver named Ford looks into his gasoline tank with a lit match and blows up his car. The fire department arrives and, after the car is burned out, turns its high-pressure hose on the other vehicles as well. Ed Schuyler, whose French is the best in the section, is pulled away from the cigarette girl at a corner café to plead with the fire chief to stop. Marseille’s arrival scene compresses the convoy’s larger change: military order has loosened into drink, gambling, flirtation, and accidental destruction, with authority reduced to frantic attempts at damage control.

Harbor, nightlife, and the limits of pleasure

The convoy’s stay moves from the square toward the harbor’s nightlife. After dining at the Bristol with Sheldrake, a folk-dancing expert newly added to the group, the men go to the Apollo promenade, so crowded with women that they scarcely see the show. The city is presented as a succession of bright café and cabaret streets and darker lanes behind the harbor, where sailors and women are caught in a bluntly physical economy of rooms and sex. The contrast is not simply between respectable and disreputable Marseille: the same passage that offers spectacle also makes its commercial terms hard to ignore.

Late in the night, Richard Ellsworth Savage and Steve Warner find themselves alone in a small restaurant, eating ham, eggs, and coffee, drunk and drowsy enough to quarrel. Their middle-aged waitress tells them to leave the tip on the table, then picks up the coins by lifting her skirts. The gesture turns the transaction into a grotesque punch line and gives the men’s next reaction its force: Warner insists that sex is a hoax, a slot machine. They try to explain their amusement to a bartender, who does not understand and instead writes down the name of a supposedly respectable establishment where they can find sex. Their laughter carries them up endless stairs and out into the cold, in front of a cathedral overlooking the harbor, ships, and the Mediterranean. The city’s commercial promise has produced neither intimacy nor clarity; the men end the night staring out at a sea that suddenly feels larger than the joke.

A proposed refuge, and a different Marseille

In another strand, Marseille enters the story from the sea. During a voyage up the French coast toward Genoa, the second mate proposes putting into Marseille after a red glare appears ahead and a rumor spreads that the enemy has captured the city and is burning it. The skipper dismisses the suggestion and orders him to keep quiet until asked for his opinion. The apparent threat proves to be a Standard Oil tanker burning outside Genoa’s breakwater, not a fire in Marseille. The episode makes Marseille a possible retreat in a moment of maritime alarm, but not an actual stop on this voyage; the distinction matters, because the city’s role here is as a feared alternative rather than a destination reached.

Eveline and J. Ward Moorehouse on the coast

Marseille also serves as a lunch stop on Eveline Hutchins and J. Ward Moorehouse’s fast drive down the coast. After setting off in a long Italian car, they reach the old harbor stiff and covered in dust, having travelled through a rising north wind. For Eveline, the speed of the journey—wind, dust, vines, olive trees, grey mountains, and glimpses of slate-blue sea—forms a vivid present. At lunch, she says that the war was terrible but that it is a great time to be alive because things are happening at last. Moorehouse responds with little enthusiasm, muttering about a surge of idealism and returning to the practical complaint that the fish has been served with all its bones.

Eveline tries to turn the conversation toward what will happen to the oil situation, but Moorehouse says he does not know and redirects them toward making their next destination before nightfall. The scene makes their difference legible through the setting and the meal: Eveline looks outward toward political and economic change, while Moorehouse remains disengaged from her questions and focused on immediate comfort and movement. Marseille does not resolve that divide. It gives them a table beside the old harbor and a few minutes in which their competing orientations toward the postwar moment can be heard, before the car carries them on.