Rome

Rome is more than a destination in the novel: it is a city where the detours and compromises of wartime life collide with the monumental past. Richard Ellsworth Savage and his companions arrive under orders, but turn the journey into an unauthorized tour; later, Rome becomes the setting for an uneasy reckoning with the American Red Cross, the arrival of Woodrow Wilson, and the private attachments that persist into the peace. Its ancient stones lend grandeur to scenes in which modern authority appears fallible, compromised, or painfully remote.

A destination turned into a detour

The first journey toward Rome begins under constraint. At a railroad station, a Red Cross superior hands the men movement orders, wishes them luck, and departs without shaking hands. Steve Warner reads the rebuff as if they had been treated as pariahs; Ed Schuyler, by contrast, sees an opportunity. He recasts their transport as a free tour of Italy, and the group’s decision to wander turns the official route into a comic evasion of its purpose.

They board a first-class compartment despite orders specifying second class, relying on their inability to understand Italian when the conductor tries to correct them. At Verona, they leave their bags and cots for Rome and spend the night in town. The following day brings the ancient theatre and the marble church of San Zeno; after waiting at the station, they take a crowded train toward Rome, then break off at Bologna to see the leaning towers. Their itinerary keeps expanding: Pistoja, Lucca, Pisa, and Florence lead to Assisi, Siena by way of San Gimignano, and finally Orvieto. In Florence, a station master forcibly puts them on the express for Rome. They slip off after it starts and board a local train instead.

By the time they reach Orvieto, they are saturated with painting, architecture, food, and landscape. They spend the day before the fresco of the Last Judgment, drinking wine in the sunny square. Rome is still the official destination, but the journey has already become its own reward: military orders have furnished the occasion for a rambling passage through Italy. At Rome’s station beside the Baths of Diocletian, the men expect to surrender their passes. Instead, an employee stamps and returns them, explaining that they remain valid for the return trip. The small bureaucratic surprise preserves their freedom to keep moving—and makes their elaborate evasion seem, for the moment, almost sanctioned.

Ruins, appetite, and exhaustion

The first night in Rome is a last expenditure of money and energy. After cleaning up at a hotel, the men pool what they have left for a lavish meal, Frascati wine, asti, a vaudeville show, and a cabaret on Via Roma. There they meet an American woman they call the baroness, who offers to show them the city. By the end of the evening they cannot afford to go home with her or her companions. Their last ten lire buy a cab ride to the Colosseum by moonlight instead.

The excursion joins ancient grandeur to ordinary commerce. The ruins’ inscribed stones and imposing Roman names rise around the group, while their cabdriver, wearing an oilcloth stovepipe hat, recommends brothels. The masonry, arches, and columns seem to prolong the name of Rome into the past; the men return to bed with the city still throbbing in their ears and cannot sleep. Their encounter with antiquity is neither a quiet museum visit nor a stable lesson in history. It overwhelms them, arriving as spectacle, noise, and bodily fatigue after an evening spent trying to stretch their last money into pleasure.

The following morning brings a sharp reversal. Richard Ellsworth Savage goes to the Red Cross office suddenly nervous and unable to eat breakfast. There he challenges the Major he finds in charge to explain the trouble. The Major speaks of indiscretion, Italian sensitivity, and the need for discretion, while refusing Richard Ellsworth Savage’s request to explain his position or face a court-martial. Richard Ellsworth Savage argues that accepting useful work now that the United States is at war does not mean believing in the war. The Major insists that the incident is closed and offers transport to Paris if he wants to pursue it there. Richard Ellsworth Savage leaves baffled and sore: the city that had offered an exuberant release now contains the administrative machinery that can define dissent as a minor indiscretion and then deny it a hearing.

The difference between the men’s circumstances becomes visible in their empty pockets. Richard Ellsworth Savage and Steve Warner spend the afternoon hungry, napping on the warm ground of the Pincian and returning to their room depressed. Schuyler, meanwhile, has met Colonel Anderson, who is investigating the Red Cross. After Schuyler complains about small-scale graft in the Milan office, Anderson treats him to lunch and highballs, lends him a hundred dollars, and arranges a publicity job. The same city holds two contrasting outcomes: one man leaves an official interview with his grievance unresolved, while another turns access to a well-placed acquaintance into money and employment.

A Red Cross city and a departure

Rome remains connected to the American Red Cross even when the action shifts back to Paris. J. Ward Moorehouse goes to Italy to reorganize its publicity work, and, a couple of weeks later, Eleanor Stoddard receives orders from Washington to join the Rome office. Her departure leaves Eveline Hutchins alone with Yvonne in their apartment. In Paris, the winter feels chilly and lonely, and Eveline finds work among the relief workers tiresome; occasional evenings out with Raoul Lemonnier offer some diversion. Rome’s administrative pull thus separates companions as well as assigning work: a posting that promises an important role in the relief organization changes the intimate arrangements left behind in Paris.

The city also frames a later leave from Paris. In March, Eveline Hutchins and Eleanor Stoddard plan to travel together to Rome while spending a few days in Nice. Eveline is excited by the prospect of leaving the damp cold behind. At the Gare de Lyon, Mr. Rasmussen sees them off over dinner, Paul Johnson arrives to help with the bags, and Jerry Burnham turns up drunk with roses. The hurried departures and flustered goodbyes expose the emotional complications surrounding Eveline even before the train leaves. In this episode Rome is the intended destination and the reason for the journey, while the actual leave takes the women to Nice; the difference between plan and stopover makes the city part of a wider geography of work, desire, and postponement.

A returning city after the war

When Richard Ellsworth Savage returns to Rome after the fighting, the city reconnects him with earlier companions and carries him toward new entanglements. On the journey he meets Anne Elizabeth Trent and G. H. Barrow. Anne Elizabeth Trent tells him of her efforts to get overseas during the war, her brother’s death while learning to fly at San Antonio, and her discomfort with G. H. Barrow’s advances. By the time they reach Rome, the travelers are on first-name terms. Richard Ellsworth Savage must hurry to the embassy with his dispatch cases, but arranges to call on Anne Elizabeth Trent at Near East Relief. The city is again a point of arrival and institutional business, though the overnight train has also turned strangers into companions.

Schuyler is now living comfortably, with an apartment on the Spanish Steps and the habits of a man who has taken many trips. Yet his ease is precarious: the husband of an Italian woman with whom he has been involved threatens to challenge him to a duel, and Schuyler fears a public row could cost him his Red Cross job. He is tired of Italy and the organization, wants to go home, and is also drawn by the possibility of witnessing an Italian revolution. His situation echoes the earlier disparity between official service and private appetite, but no longer in the form of a travel pass or a disputed letter. The war has ended; personal scandal, institutional insecurity, and political expectation have not.

Richard Ellsworth Savage has several days to wait while preparations are made for Woodrow Wilson’s January 3 arrival. He walks through the city as bands practice The Star-Spangled Banner and flags and viewing stands go up. On New Year’s Day, he, Schuyler, G. H. Barrow, and Anne Elizabeth Trent drive to Hadrian’s Villa and Tivoli for lunch. The outing offers a winter landscape and fine Frascati wine, but also an awkward social contest: Richard Ellsworth Savage notices Anne Elizabeth Trent flirting with G. H. Barrow and is hurt when the older man draws his chair close to hers. Later, Anne Elizabeth Trent runs down the slippery path toward the waterfall, with Richard Ellsworth Savage following; the Roman excursion gives their attraction room to emerge without resolving the competition around it.

The Forum and the scale of political ideals

Woodrow Wilson’s visit turns Rome’s monumental setting into a stage for modern political rhetoric. Richard Ellsworth Savage attends official functions, hears speeches in Italian, French, and English, and spends hours saluting in a stiff military posture. In the Roman Forum, close enough to hear the presidential party, he watches an Italian guide point out the Temple of Romulus and connect the ruins to the events of the war. Woodrow Wilson answers that the stones should be understood as immortal symbols, not merely remains. The exchange then shifts from Rome’s past to American national identity: the guide suggests that America possesses something greater, hidden in its people’s hearts, and Woodrow Wilson replies that Americans take pride in their love of humanity.

From among the Italian generals’ plumed helmets, Richard Ellsworth Savage sees the President’s long, grey face beneath his silk hat. The solemn language of humanity and the physical image of a face described as stony sit uneasily together. Rome makes that dissonance legible: the speech is delivered among weathered columns and courses of dressed stone, where claims of permanence and greatness are difficult to separate from the accumulated weight of history. Across the novel’s episodes, the city likewise holds incompatible meanings at once—an ancient spectacle, a wartime posting, a site of official ceremony, and a place where hunger, flirtation, bureaucratic evasion, and political disappointment continue beneath the monuments.