Toughness and keeping one’s commitments

Toughness and keeping one’s commitments is a standard by which Across the River and Into the Trees measures both individuals and communities. For Richard Cantwell, toughness is not simply hardness, rank, or a reputation for violence: it involves taking a position and standing behind it. The story tests that ideal against military obedience, the costs of command, compassion for enemies, and the vulnerability that remains beneath a soldier’s self-command.

A Definition Tested in Venice

Cantwell calls Venice tough despite its politeness and good manners. He compares it with towns in the American West, revising his examples as Ronald Jackson challenges him, and finally insists that toughness can coexist with courtesy. The disagreement is not just about which town is roughest. Cantwell and Jackson have different definitions: visible aggression is not, for Cantwell, the only evidence of resilience. Venice’s inhabitants have endured and sustained a city whose former power as a maritime center is part of its identity. Their manners do not cancel their toughness.

Cantwell privately develops the definition through his thoughts about a Venetian family and its history. The family’s house had once been lent to Lord Byron; the unused beds associated with him are neither sacred relics nor objects of formal worship, but ordinary furnishings left unused. Cantwell contrasts the town’s lasting affection for Byron with its lack of regard for Robert Browning and Mrs. Robert Browning. His distinction is that being admired for writing about Venice is not the same as belonging to it or earning the city’s love. In his judgment, the tough person is the one who makes a play and backs it up. Toughness becomes a test of action and follow-through, not mere display.

His reflections on Gabriele d'Annunzio sharpen that distinction. Cantwell recognizes d'Annunzio’s talent, bravery, and public appeal, but doubts that moving among military services made him an infantryman in the full sense. He recalls him speaking to troops while Cantwell, then a lieutenant, stood with an assault platoon in the rain. For Cantwell, the difference is between making heroic gestures and sharing the particular obligations of infantry service. The scene makes commitment a matter of exposure to the work and its consequences, not just the appearance of courage.

Combat, Restraint, and the Enemy

Cantwell’s memories of winter fighting on the Piave River give that definition practical weight. As a young officer, he faced repeated attacks by soldiers carrying heavy equipment and explosives. His unit relied on the weapons still usable after bombardment, and he taught his soldiers to shoot effectively and to look at the approaching enemy rather than turn away. After each bombardment, they had to count quickly to determine how many shooters remained. Cantwell was hit several times, and the experience eventually ended his sense that he was personally immune to death.

Yet the fighting did not, in his account, require hatred of the enemy. He says he could not hate the men who attacked his position. Later, when Renata speaks of her father’s death, the burning of her family’s villa on the Brenta River, and a German officer shooting pigeons in Piazza San Marco, Cantwell asks her to understand his own attitude: after killing so many, he says, he can afford to be kind. He gives the number as 122 confirmed kills, not counting possible ones. That accounting makes his appeal to kindness morally complicated rather than self-congratulatory. His restraint exists alongside what he has done, not instead of it.

A later bombing illustrates another tension between competence and judgment. Cantwell describes the Valhalla Express marking German positions with coloured smoke before the following sections attacked them. The prisoners taken afterward were brave soldiers, though they shook with fear. Cantwell presents the bombing as effective, and the prisoners’ reaction as evidence of its force. In the same recollection, however, military success does not erase the human cost or settle the question of what force is justified. Toughness may mean enduring fear and completing an objective, but the scene does not make fearlessness a condition of courage.

Command and the Cost of Orders

The distinction between commitment and obedience becomes especially painful in Cantwell’s account of losing a regiment. He had received it after a younger commander was relieved; it was the regiment he had hoped for, until he lost it. Cantwell explains that the loss followed an order to take a position by assault even though, in his view, the German defenders were professionals who might have surrendered if approached with a flag and given the opportunity to discuss terms. A higher command demanded the assault after the town’s name had appeared in the newspapers. Cantwell emphasizes that the decision arrived through the chain of command and that he acted under orders.

His recollection does not turn the incident into a simple story of individual villainy. Cantwell explicitly resists assigning blame to Walter Bedell Smith, whom he says made promises and explained how events would unfold, though Cantwell judged those explanations badly wrong. The distinction matters: military responsibility is distributed through orders and institutions, but the consequences fall on the people sent to fight. Calling obedience an explanation does not make the regiment’s loss less real, or make the decision sound. For Cantwell, keeping one’s commitment to command can collide with the obligation to recognize what the command will cost.

That collision appears again in his description of an attack planned with three units in line and none held in reserve. Patches had been removed so that the enemy would not identify the attacking force, but a regiment was then committed before the attack began, making that concealment pointless. The terrain and expected conditions were already alarming; the neighboring American division had been stalled in the woods long enough to provide warning. Cantwell calls the planned fighting a familiar kind of disaster and reports that the regiment was destroyed. He refuses to make its commander a scapegoat, describing him as a man he would willingly spend time with even in hell. His loyalty to the commander does not conceal the failure of the plan; it makes the loss personal while preserving the distinction between a disastrous order and the character of the officer who carried it out.

Toughness and Vulnerability

Cantwell’s own body also complicates the ideal. At fifty, he is still a colonel in the United States Army, and before coming to Venice he took a substance in an effort to pass a physical examination. The surgeon questioned whether it was medically appropriate, but recorded the readings after taking them twice. The episode shows a man trying to remain fit for duty while aware that passing an examination is not the same as being free of physical limits. His persistence can be read as resolve, but the circumstances also expose the strain behind his military identity.

Other people recognize a gentleness that his martial reputation might obscure. After an encounter with Ettore, Renata puts both hands on Cantwell’s injured hand and tells him that he was gentle. He answers by telling her that she is beautiful and that he loves her. The exchange places tenderness beside injury without treating tenderness as a refutation of toughness. Later, after Cantwell has fought two sailors, Renata asks whether he still cares for her. He replies that he loves her even more; she says that seeing the fight has increased her love for him. The moment shows that physical courage can intensify attraction in their relationship, while her attention also turns the scene back toward their bond rather than leaving the fight as a self-contained display of force.

A conversation with the Gran Maestro similarly links toughness to shared memory rather than solitary boasting. Cantwell recalls the two of them as young men in wartime, and they agree that they had been tough and badly behaved. Cantwell asks Renata to forgive the way they had been. The recollection allows him to acknowledge the past’s reckless conduct while preserving the comradeship formed within it. Across these episodes, toughness is not a stable badge that excuses every action. It is a standard Cantwell applies to himself and others: courage must be carried through in action, but responsibility, kindness, and the recognition of human limits determine what that courage is worth.