France

France enters the novel through the Colonel’s memories of war, recalled years later while he is in Venice. His account moves from a landing and the capture of Cherbourg to episodes of air support and ground command, making the country not a single battlefield but a sequence of operations in which success and catastrophic loss remain inseparable. The distance between the remembered campaigns and the present conversation gives France a double significance: it is territory once fought over, and a landscape through which the Colonel examines what orders can cost.

Setting and Place in the Narrative

The Colonel recalls France during a private conversation with Renata, looking out over the Grand Canal as he tells her about his military past. The frame holds two places together without confusing them: Venice is where he speaks, while France is the setting of the wartime episodes. His memories arrive by stages, prompted by Renata’s request that he continue, so the country takes shape through particular operations rather than through a general description of its landscape or society.

The account begins with an invasion landing. The Colonel says that his force met little opposition on its own beach, while the principal resistance was encountered at another. The troops then linked up with airborne forces, took and secured several towns, and moved on to Cherbourg. This sequence establishes France as a theater of rapid, connected objectives: landing, joining forces, securing towns, and capturing a major port.

The Landing and Capture of Cherbourg

Cherbourg was difficult to take and had to be captured quickly. The Colonel credits the orders of a general he calls Lightning Joe, whom he remembers approvingly. His recollection therefore presents the advance not as an isolated feat by one regiment but as an operation dependent on speed, coordination, and command decisions. The contrast between the limited opposition at his own landing point and the hard fighting at the other beach also keeps the story from reducing the invasion to a single, uniform experience.

After Cherbourg, the Colonel recalls the abundance of German-marked cognac and French francs circulating among the troops. He says he took only an admiral’s compass, partly because he had owned a small boat on Chesapeake Bay and wanted the instrument. He drank the cognac, but describes the compass as an object he tried to understand by working out its corrections when time allowed. In the same memory, the telephone is essential to his life in command, and the amount of wire laid for communications becomes a measure of the scale of the operation. France is thus remembered through both the material aftermath of capture and the practical apparatus needed to direct an army.

Air Power and the Cost of Misidentification

The Colonel’s recollection of the air offensive begins with aircraft still taking off from England. Their line stretched across the sky, and he gave it the name “Valhalla Express.” The first planes dropped coloured smoke to mark the German positions; following formations then bombed those positions. The prisoners taken afterward, members of the Sixth Parachute Division, shook uncontrollably, an aftermath that the Colonel treats as evidence of the bombing’s force.

The operation then turned against his own men. An east wind carried the smoke marker back over their positions, and the bombers followed the shifting line: heavy aircraft struck first, then medium bombers attacked those left behind. The troops made their breakthrough after the aircraft had withdrawn. The movement from apparent success to friendly fire is central to the Colonel’s account: the marking system that had identified the enemy became, as the wind changed, a guide to the attackers’ own positions. His inward reflection on whether a commander with a conscience should consider air power gives the episode a moral consequence beyond its immediate military result.

Ground Orders and Regimental Loss

The Colonel also recalls receiving a regiment after its previous commander, a younger officer he had known for years, was relieved. He had hoped for such a command, but later lost it under orders. The episode exposes the distance between a commander’s judgment on the ground and decisions transmitted through higher headquarters. As the Colonel explains it, his force was working toward high ground where negotiation might have secured the opposing position; instead, an order came down to take the town by assault, prompted, in his account, by its appearance in newspaper reports.

The resulting attack was prepared under severe disadvantages. The Colonel says the force was to advance three abreast in line with nothing held in reserve, into woodland he considered an especially dangerous place to fight. The nearby Twenty-eighth Division had already been bogged down, providing warning of the conditions. Divisional identification patches had been removed far behind the front, but an order to commit one regiment before the attack began made that precaution ineffective: an enemy prisoner could reveal which unit was coming. The regiment was destroyed. The Colonel rejects a simple villain in explaining the loss, but his insistence that it happened under orders leaves the central question intact: responsibility does not disappear merely because command is distributed across a chain of headquarters.

France as Memory and Moral Reckoning

The Colonel’s France is assembled from sharp reversals: an initially light landing followed by the difficult capture of Cherbourg; an effective bombardment that shifts onto friendly positions; and a desired regimental command that ends in destruction. Objects and systems recur as part of that history—the compass he kept, the telephone that sustained command, the extensive field wire, the smoke used to mark targets, and the orders that sent troops into an assault. Each connects the large scale of the campaign to decisions and losses experienced by particular soldiers.

Because these episodes are spoken from Venice rather than narrated as a continuous campaign, France becomes a place the Colonel revisits to explain what military success conceals. The breakthrough follows the friendly-fire bombing, but does not cancel it; the regiment’s destruction is described without a single convenient culprit, but remains a consequence of decisions made above the men who carried them out. His recollections make France both the ground of an advance and the setting of an unresolved reckoning with air power, obedience, and command.