First World War

The First World War remains present in the novel not as a distant date but as a system of personal and geographical memories. For Richard Cantwell, its battles along the Piave River shaped his youth, left lasting losses within his family, and gave the roads and waterways near Venice a history that the peacetime landscape could not erase.

The War as Recalled Experience

As the car passes San Dona di Piave and crosses the Piave River, Cantwell’s present journey repeatedly opens onto the war he fought there as a young lieutenant. Fossalta, unlike the cheerful newer town nearby, remains in his mind a place marked by bombardment: it had been shelled before the June 1918 offensive and shelled again when it was retaken. Weeks before the drive, he had gone back along a sunken road to locate the riverbank where he had been wounded. The river’s bend and the former machine-gun position allowed him to identify the site, though the crater had long since become a smoothly grassed depression. His return makes the old battlefield both recognizable and changed: the ground preserves enough of its shape to locate the past, while ordinary growth has softened its visible traces.

The landscape along the road recalls a wider cost. During the fighting, the dead were put into canals beside the positions and road; because the gates downstream remained in enemy hands, the water moved too little to carry them away. Labour troops later removed and buried them near the road, and Cantwell thinks of their eventual reburial in the large ossuary near Nervesa. In the present, ducks and geese occupy the canals and people fish there. The contrast brings wartime death into the same environment as everyday travel and wildlife, without making the landscape a simple monument: it has resumed ordinary uses, but Cantwell reads those uses alongside what happened there.

The Piave Front and the Cost of Survival

The fighting Cantwell recalls took place where the old bed of the Piave and the Sile formed successive defensive lines. If the first line failed, the Sile offered a fallback, but beyond it lay open plain and roads leading into the Veneto and Lombardy. Austrian attacks came repeatedly through the winter, following bombardments that were lifted and shifted ahead of the advancing troops. Cantwell, then a lieutenant in a foreign army, spent much of the season in water and developed a persistent sore throat. The attacks were poorly coordinated but relentless; after each bombardment, his men had to check their positions and count who remained before the next assault.

Cantwell remembers the fighting as a sequence of immediate calculations rather than a distant strategic abstraction. He had to establish how many men could still fire, and he trained his troops to shoot accurately and face the enemy as they advanced through the marshes. He did not hate the men he fought. Three wounds that winter were slight, and he came to feel that he was personally beyond harm because he had survived the artillery that preceded the attacks. The later wound that seriously injured him ended that confidence. In retrospect, he treats the loss of presumed invulnerability as a profound consequence of the first major wound, not merely a change in his physical condition.

The war also reduced Cantwell’s family to a ledger of absences. His brother was killed on Monte Grappa in 1918, after volunteering before his class was called; he had been stirred by hearing Gabriele d'Annunzio speak, and the family had scarcely known him before he went away. Cantwell says that six people were in the family: two were lost beyond the Isonzo, one at Bainsizza, another on Carso, and the brother on Grappa. He was the one who remained. The brother’s burial place later became a destination Cantwell visited from Bassano, linking the family’s private losses to the region’s military memorials.

Venice, Memory, and a Changed River

The First World War also shapes Cantwell’s sense of who may call Venice home. During the winter fighting, he and his men defended the approaches along the canals, yet the city itself remained out of sight. On a clear, cold day near Noghera, he finally saw it across the water without reaching it. Decades later, as the car nears the lagoon, the view comes into focus through familiar landmarks: the church tower of Torcello, the campanile of Burano, and sailing barges moving toward Venice. The remembered distance between defending the city and seeing it gives the present approach the force of a delayed arrival.

Cantwell understands his claim on Venice through that service. Though he had not entered it during the winter campaign, he considers it his city because he fought for it as a boy; now, he reflects, people recognize that history and treat him as a part owner. This belonging is neither simply inherited nor detached from military experience: it has been made through a defense whose purpose was to keep the city beyond the front line.

The river that once served as part of that defense has itself been altered. In a later conversation, Cantwell observes that the Piave River no longer contains its former flow because water has been diverted for hydroelectric projects. The contrast links wartime recollection to a changed infrastructure: the landscape through which he reads the First World War is not fixed, but has been reshaped by subsequent human uses of water.

Service and Its Institutional Afterlife

Cantwell’s First World War service carried a consequence beyond the battlefield: he had been a lieutenant in a foreign army, a fact that later made him seem slightly suspect within his own army and did his career no good. The novel sets this professional penalty beside his claim to Venice, which rests on having fought to defend its approaches. His service could therefore establish a lasting bond with the city while complicating his standing in the military institution to which he later belonged.