The high ground

The high ground is a recurring landscape and image in Richard Cantwell’s speech and actions, joining his wartime past to his intimacy with Renata and his thoughts about death. It first appears as something to be held in the close quarters of a gondola: a bodily effort that accompanies their lovemaking and their silence. Later, it becomes the place where he wants to be buried, on a slope where his side once beat its enemies. The phrase thus moves between touch and terrain, present desire and remembered combat, without ceasing to carry the weight of either.

Landscape, memory, and the body

In the gondola scene, the high ground is not introduced as an abstract military principle. Under a blanket that shuts out the cold wind, Richard Cantwell’s ruined hand searches for an island in the great river, finding and losing it before finding it for good. The movement makes the landscape intimate: his search is rendered through touch, and the island is something discovered only through persistence. The passage links the bodily vulnerability of his damaged hand with an image of elevated ground and difficult passage, rather than separating the soldier’s body from the terrain remembered through war.

Renata’s request to hold the high ground turns that image into a shared effort. She asks Richard to hold her tightly and to hold it too; the words bring the military-sounding phrase into the immediate physical scene. The image remains open to both meanings. It refers to the ground he knows from battle, but in this moment it is also something he must maintain through closeness and attention. The novel lets that double sense stand without explaining it away: the remembered landscape enters the lovers’ private language, and the language of combat acquires a tenderness that its usual strategic meaning does not contain.

The gondola and the moment of shelter

The surrounding details make holding the high ground feel precarious rather than triumphant. Outside the blanket, the wind lashes their faces; underneath it, the couple are sheltered. After the great bird has flown far out through the gondola’s closed window and disappeared, neither speaks. Richard holds Renata’s head with his good arm, while the other arm holds the high ground. The contrast between his good arm and ruined hand keeps bodily damage present even in a moment of closeness. His gesture is at once care for Renata and an effort to sustain the image that has entered their encounter.

The gondola’s turn gives the scene another change of position. It swings sharply to the left, the wind reaches Richard’s right cheek, and his old eyes make out the Palace as they turn. He tells Renata that she is now in the lee. This brief observation places their private shelter within the moving city and the exposed weather outside it. The high ground is not literally located in the gondola; rather, the scene makes holding it part of the lovers’ physical experience, surrounded by wind, movement, and a landscape glimpsed from the water. Richard’s military memory and his attention to Renata occupy the same moment without becoming identical.

A remembered victory as a chosen resting place

When asked where he would like to be buried, Richard decides quickly: up in the hills, on any part of the high ground where his side beat the enemy. The preference gives the phrase a direct connection to battle and to the place from which he understands victory. Yet his imagined grave is not a monument or a claim to glory. He specifies a shell-pocked slope where cattle could graze in summer. He accepts the marks of bombardment as part of the ground he would choose, while imagining ordinary use continuing above him.

His account of the hills extends that image into a seasonal rural life. There is good grass for summer cattle; in fall, girls from the highest houses trap foxes after bringing the cattle down; the houses and the girls are described as strongly built and able to resist winter snow. Pole-stacked hay sustains the pastoral scene. These particulars make the high ground more than a military vantage point: it is also a lived landscape, shaped by weather, work, animals, and the return of the seasons. Richard’s wish to lie there brings his remembered victory into contact with this continuing life rather than isolating the battlefield as a place of death alone.

Intimacy, endurance, and mortality

Across the two scenes, the high ground changes scale but retains its association with endurance. In the gondola, it is something Richard tries to hold while Renata asks for closeness; in his burial decision, it is the terrain he chooses as his final resting place. The first use is immediate and bodily, the second retrospective and mortal. Together they make the phrase carry both the effort of staying present with another person and the recognition that a life marked by war will end.

The image’s force depends on its unresolved doubleness. The hills are where Richard’s side beat its enemies, but they are also slopes where cattle may graze and grass grow. The high ground is a military memory, yet the most concrete image of its future is pastoral life continuing over a shell-pocked surface. In the gondola, the phrase passes into the language of love without losing its history; in the burial scene, the battlefield remains, but Richard imagines himself beneath the seasonal work of the living. The concept binds these scenes by making terrain at once contested, held, inhabited, and finally chosen as home.