Milan

Milan is a winter stopping place for Richard Ellsworth Savage and his ambulance section, caught between the city’s crowded urban life and the uncertain movements of a wartime unit. The section waits there, passes its time at cards, and then leaves for the Venetian plain; a shortage of cocoa and breakfast foods turns Milan into the starting point for Savage’s journey toward Venice.

A crowded winter city

The section reaches Milan after a difficult journey, finding a vast city in raw winter weather. Its overgrown cathedral rises above a Galleria crowded with people, restaurants, newspapers, and prostitutes; Cinzano and Campari Bitters add to the impression of a place full of movement and diversions. The city is presented less as a destination than as a temporary refuge where the men can wait amid civilian life while the military situation remains unsettled.

Waiting and departure

During the halt, most of the section settles into an apparently endless crap game in the back room at Cova’s. The pause does not last: the men move on to Dolo, a place on a frozen canal in the Venetian plain. Reaching their quarters there requires crossing the Brenta River, where British sappers have prepared the bridge for demolition in case the retreat resumes. They promise to let the ambulance section cross before blowing it up, bringing the threat of military withdrawal directly into the geography of the route out of Milan.

Supplies and Savage’s opportunity

The section’s commanding lieutenant is worried that they have no cocoa and that the Red Cross commissary in Milan has sent no breakfast foods. Savage proposes a practical solution with a personal advantage: Venice, he points out, is one of the world’s great cocoa markets, and an Italian-speaking man should be sent there to buy supplies. On a frosty morning, equipped with papers and seals, he boards a small steamboat at Mestre. Milan’s role in the episode is therefore both logistical and narrative: its commissary’s shortage prompts the assignment that gives Savage a legitimate reason to travel toward the city he wants to see.