Fatherland and belonging

Fatherland and belonging describe an attachment Richard Cantwell treats as both a source of identity and something repeatedly endangered by war. The idea moves between country, military duty, and intimate symbols of home: loving a country means admitting that love, even when its history includes loss and the decisions made in its name bring further costs.

Love of Country and Repeated Loss

Richard privately acknowledges that loving a country is something to admit rather than conceal. He measures that attachment through a compressed account of having loved and lost three times, while two of those losses have been reversed. His resolve to recover the remaining country turns belonging into an unfinished commitment: the lost place is not simply mourned but imagined as recoverable, despite the absurd and bitter political imagery through which he pictures its ruler, Franco.

The account makes patriotism neither uncomplicated pride nor a claim of secure possession. Its grammar is loss followed by attempted return. Cantwell’s insistence that two have been retaken gives his hope a record of partial success, while his determination concerning the third leaves the idea of home suspended between memory and a future that has not arrived.

A Personal Ground for Belonging

In a quiet moment with Renata, Cantwell rests his head on her black sweater and identifies it in thought as his fatherland. The gesture brings a large political idea down to an immediate, personal attachment: belonging is not only a country on a map, but also the closeness and refuge represented by someone beside him. His insistence that a person needs some fatherland makes the moment sound less like a formal declaration than a recognition of dependence on a place—or a person—that can be claimed as home.

Renata’s relation to country is marked by a different history. She explains that her father was killed, their villa by the Brenta River was burned, and she saw a German officer shooting pigeons in Piazza San Marco. Those losses help explain why she cannot share Cantwell’s tolerant attitude toward the enemy. Their exchange sets personal grief against his effort to understand the other side without hatred; the disagreement shows that belonging is shaped not only by attachment, but by the injuries a person associates with its violation.

War, Enemies, and the Limits of Hatred

Cantwell’s own experience complicates any clean separation between defending a homeland and taking enemy lives. During a winter of attacks on the Piave front, he commanded troops resisting enemy soldiers and taught his men to shoot effectively. He recalls the combat as deadly work, yet says he did not hate those they fought. When Renata asks how many he has killed, he gives a count of 122 confirmed kills, excluding possible ones, and answers her anger by arguing that having killed so many should leave room for kindness.

That reasoning does not erase the violence; it places mercy beside it. Cantwell’s account distinguishes the act of defending his people from hatred of the individual enemy, while Renata’s memories explain why such emotional distance is difficult for her. The contrast makes tolerance an earned and contested position, not a universal response to wartime loss.

Orders, Service, and the Cost of Belonging

Cantwell’s military service also exposes the conflict between loyalty to a cause and the consequences of decisions made in its name. He recalls a bombing in which the Valhalla Express marked enemy positions with colored smoke before later sections bombed them. He describes the operation as effective, noting that prisoners taken afterward shook uncontrollably. His account presents military success in the language of force and justice, even as the prisoners’ reaction makes the human cost visible.

A more bitter memory concerns a regiment he had hoped to command and then lost. As his men worked toward high ground, Cantwell believed the opposing professionals might have negotiated if given the chance. Instead, orders from above demanded an assault after the town’s name appeared in newspapers. The regiment was destroyed. His repeated qualification that this happened under orders places obedience at the center of his account of belonging to the military: service binds a commander to an institution, but does not make the institution’s decisions wise or their consequences less devastating.

That conflict sharpens in his description of another attack. The division’s patches had been removed to conceal the identity of the force, yet orders committed one regiment before the attack began, making capture likely and concealment futile. Cantwell describes the planned advance as three soldiers in line with no reserve, in woods already known to be unfavorable. He compares the fighting to “Passchendaele with tree bursts” and says the regiment was destroyed. His anger is directed not toward the man who commanded it, whom he respects, but toward a chain of decisions that exposed soldiers to ruin. In this account, fatherland and belonging carry a double obligation: loyalty to those who serve, and an unwillingness to mistake obedience for proof that a decision was right.