The removal of Dick Norton’s ambulance section from Italy

The removal of Dick Savage’s ambulance section from Italy turns an apparently unexplained transfer into a confrontation over pacifism and institutional authority. Orders direct Savage, Steve Warner, Ripley, and Ed Schuyler to report to the American Red Cross head office in Rome before being sent back to the United States. No clear explanation accompanies the order. In the following days, Savage tries to establish what prompted it and to explain why his opposition to the war does not mean he is unwilling to serve. His effort to return to Red Cross work instead exposes the limits the organization and the military place on that distinction.

Orders and Suspicion

When the men return to their section, the order to go to Rome has already arrived. The section’s manager will not tell them what the trouble is. Their fellow workers look at them suspiciously and seem uneasy about speaking with them; Fred Summers is the exception, saying that he cannot make sense of the business. The atmosphere changes before the men receive any formal account of what they are accused of doing.

A section member who has moved his bedding into another room approaches with an air of vindication. He reports having heard the phrase “seditious utterances” and says an Italian intelligence officer had come asking about the men. That information supplies a possible political context, but not an official explanation: the order itself remains unexplained to the men, and the reported inquiry and allegation reach them indirectly. They leave the section without saying goodbye to anyone. The transfer therefore takes effect amid suspicion, hearsay, and a sudden break with their former coworkers.

Savage Seeks an Explanation

The next morning, Savage gets up while the others are still asleep and goes to the American Red Cross office. He is anxious enough that he cannot eat breakfast. There he questions a Bostonian major who appears to be in charge. The major discusses indiscretions, Italian sensitivities, and the censor’s objection to the tone of certain letters, but presents the matter as a satisfactorily resolved incident rather than specifying a charge that Savage can answer.

Savage insists that he ought to be allowed to explain his position. If the organization believes he has failed in his duty, he says, it should court-martial him. He describes himself as a pacifist who, despite the country being at war, is willing to perform whatever work he can. His objection to the war, in his account, does not cancel his willingness to help. The major answers in soothing, general terms about discretion and says the incident is closed; he does not offer the hearing Savage is asking for. The mismatch is central: Savage seeks a chance to account for himself, while the official treats further discussion as unnecessary. Savage leaves baffled and sore, though the major offers transportation to Paris if he wishes to raise the matter with the office there.

Paris and the Effort to Return

On the first day in Paris, Steve Warner goes to the Red Cross office to arrange passage home and says he intends to become a conscientious objector. Ripley takes a different course, enlisting in the French artillery school at Fontainebleau. Their choices make clear that the group does not respond to the removal as a single unit. Savage, by contrast, takes a cheap room on the Île Saint-Louis and spends his days going from one Red Cross superior to another, trying to secure an opportunity to explain himself and return to front-line Red Cross work.

Savage has obtained names for these interviews through a guarded reply from Hiram Halsey Cooper, whom he had contacted from Rome. Yet the introductions do not give him a hearing: the officials send him from one person to the next. In one luxurious office at the Hôtel de Crillon, an official dismisses Savage’s opinions as cowardly and says that the American people are committed to defeating the Kaiser. The exchange contrasts the scale of the official’s patriotic rhetoric with Savage’s narrower, practical request: he wants to explain the work he has done and be allowed to continue serving with the Red Cross.

Administrative Closure and Military Rejection

Savage continues to state that he had been doing useful work, wants to return to the front with the Red Cross, and should be given the chance to explain his position. A captain responds by berating him. The captain declares that a man who remains a pacifist after the President’s declaration of war has no place in the American Expeditionary Forces, and says he will ensure Savage is sent back to the United States and barred from returning in any capacity. The episode thus moves from an unclear order and indirect reports of an intelligence inquiry to an explicit rejection of Savage on political grounds.

The two official responses differ in manner but converge in effect. The major in Rome calls the matter closed and redirects Savage toward Paris; the captain in Paris makes the consequence unmistakable by threatening his removal from the forces and future exclusion. Neither gives Savage the procedure he asks for—a formal chance to defend his conduct and beliefs. The action’s significance lies in that narrowing passage: an allegation whose details remain obscure becomes an institutional judgment in which pacifism itself disqualifies him. The available account establishes the order, the reports surrounding it, and the hostility Savage encounters, but does not provide a complete account of the original decision to remove the section from Italy.