Tours

Tours is a place where military life turns on paperwork, rank, and the uncertain news of peace. In its leafy streets, Joe Williams makes a civilian exit from the Army, while Dick Savage builds a useful position in the dispatch service and works to improve Henry Savage’s prospects. The town’s cafés, quarters, and headquarters register not a clean break with wartime life but its uneven transformation: a discharge can be signed before the war’s routines have ended, and an armistice rumor can make the town celebrate before the real news arrives.

Setting and Military Routine

Tours is described through its cream-colored stone buildings and the dense blue-green foliage surrounding them. For Dick, the town is also a comfortable posting. He receives commuted rations and boards with an agreeable older woman, who brings him café au lait in bed each morning. These domestic comforts sit alongside the administrative work of the Army: the town offers a home base, but also access to personnel officers, command staff, and the machinery of transfer and promotion.

Dick makes himself valuable in the social world around headquarters as well as in its formal hierarchy. He dines frequently with Colonel Edgecombe and other officers, and his ease in ordering meals, choosing wines, speaking with French women, and making limericks helps establish him among them. His family connection to the late General Ellsworth also forms part of how he is presented in this company. Tours thus brings together military service and social fluency: Dick’s position grows through both his work and his ability to move comfortably among officers.

Joe Williams’s Departure

In a July passage, Joe’s discharge is described as signed and delivered while his uniform still chafes him beneath the chin. The contrast makes the document feel like the first tangible sign of a changed status, although the change becomes complete only through a sequence of ordinary acts. He walks past the headquarters of the SOS to a bathhouse with a flowered courtyard, washes, and puts on civilian clothes borrowed from someone he knows.

The passage makes the shift from soldier to civilian concrete by placing it in clothing and routine. Joe’s Army uniform and remembered serial number give way to borrowed civilian clothes; he leaves the bathhouse and walks through the linden-scented afternoon. At a café, he orders cognac, which is not served to men in uniform, and sits in long trousers while waiting for the train to Paris. The restriction on service in uniform marks the boundary he has crossed. Tours is not presented as the end of his journey, but as the place where he can leave military status behind and prepare to travel onward.

Dick Savage and the Dispatch Service

Dick uses his access to the personnel department to try to have Henry transferred out of the infantry. When the Post Despatch Service is organized as a separate unit under Colonel Edgecombe, Edgecombe brings Dick over as one of his assistants, with the rank of captain. The new appointment changes Dick’s place in the Army’s organization and gives him a direct opportunity to act on Henry’s behalf: he arranges Henry’s transfer from officers’ school to Tours. The effort improves Henry’s situation, though it comes too late for him to receive more than a first lieutenancy.

Tours also becomes a proposed destination for another serviceman. When a man described as weak on his pins gives Dick his service information, Dick says he will try to have him transferred there as a courier, judging him suitable for the work. The brief exchange shows Dick applying his influence beyond his family. In this setting, transfers are practical decisions with human consequences: a posting can move someone out of one role and into another, but timing limits what the change can deliver.

False Alarm and the Armistice

News of a supposed armistice sets Tours in motion. Officers and enlisted men drink, slap one another on the back, and dance through and around the office buildings. When the report proves false, Dick feels almost relieved. The response complicates the apparent joy: even in a town primed for celebration, he does not simply welcome the news as a release from uncertainty.

In the days that follow, people around the dispatch headquarters wear an air of knowing more than they will say. When the actual armistice comes, Dick has supper with Colonel Edgecombe and other officers. Afterward, he encounters Edgecombe in the courtyard behind the building. The colonel’s exuberant remark about the day is answered by Dick’s shy question about what race he means; Edgecombe clarifies that he means the human race. The exchange makes the moment larger than a military announcement, even as the earlier false alarm and subsequent secrecy have shown how difficult it is to distinguish expectation from fact. In Tours, the armistice arrives not as an abstract date but amid headquarters life, private reactions, and a celebration that has already once begun too soon.