World War II

World War II is the force that carries the novel’s characters out of familiar orchard life and into military service, but its significance is measured less through campaigns than through choices, separations, and changed relationships. The attack on Pearl Harbor marks the chronology; after it, Aidan Givens is drafted, Ben Givens is drawn into the mountain troops, and Rachel Lake enters military nursing. As the war moves from recruitment and training to Italy, the narrative sets the demands of service against private attachments and sharply different ideas about what it means to serve.

The War Reaches Home

Fifteen months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Aidan Givens is drafted into the United States Army. Three days before leaving, he packs his bag and asks for one last ride in Colockum Country. At dawn he and Ben Givens saddle their horses, cross the river at Coleman’s Landing, and ride through the day. Aidan shoots two blue grouse at dusk; they camp near Spring Gulch and, the next day, ride back to the orchard. Their tired return, leading the horses between the trees, gives the departure a domestic measure: military service interrupts a life organized around land, work, and family closeness.

The war’s approach also arrives by letter. In May, Willard Anderson, president of the Leavenworth Ski Club, writes to Ben Givens about the mountain troops being raised by the United States Army. Anderson recalls that Ben had once passed on a jump at Ski Hill. The 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment was activated at Fort Lewis the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor and trained on the slopes of Mt. Rainier; the 10th Mountain Division followed and began recruiting with help from the National Ski Patrol. Anderson presents enlistment as a way for men with an enthusiasm for the high country to meet military obligation on their own terms. Ben Givens’s father accepts that, if his son must go, mountain service is preferable, but also tells him that he wishes he could stay and that he needs him. The appeal of the mountains does not cancel the cost of leaving.

Enlistment and Competing Convictions

An order from the adjutant general’s office later directs Ben Givens to report for active service in the 10th Mountain Division. He reads it twice, feels his heart pound, and seeks out his father in the south orchard, where the older man is laying irrigation pipe. His father stops the Farmall and reads the order; Ben tells him he has been accepted. The scene joins a formal military decision to the ongoing work of the orchard, placing the departure amid the labor and family obligations it will interrupt.

At Camp Swift, Texas, the mountain troops are stationed in flat, arid country far removed from the terrain for which they were organized. Ben Givens writes to Rachel Lake about the fear that war may bring death or permanent wounds. Rachel Lake, who has seen the consequences of war in her training, replies that she thinks he should reconsider what kind of service he wants to offer. She asks whether he could serve as a medic and challenges his willingness to participate in killing. Ben Givens answers that he has been made a gunner and feels compelled to fight the war directly. Their exchange gives the wartime setting a personal moral dispute: Rachel Lake argues for healing, while Ben Givens regards direct combat as a responsibility he cannot turn aside.

Rachel Lake’s own path into the war is not simply a response to Ben Givens’s enlistment. In mid-June she finishes her classes and is sworn into the Army Nurse Corps. She volunteers for overseas service and is accepted despite her inexperience. After orientation at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and leave to visit her family, she waits with her unit in Manhattan for orders to embark. By mid-August she is on a transport ship headed for the coast of France. The two characters therefore move toward the same conflict through distinct forms of service, their letters sustaining a connection across separate military routes.

From Training to the Italian Front

In the fall, Ben Givens receives orders to deploy. After Thanksgiving, the Third Battalion of the 86th Mountain Regiment travels by train across the South for three days, then moves through Norfolk, Virginia, to Camp Patrick Henry. The group’s passage from barracks and training grounds to a troop convoy makes the change in scale unmistakable: Ben Givens sails aboard the SS Argentina with thousands of other men, crossing the winter sea in a convoy escorted by destroyers. Seasickness and the crowded conditions of the crossing give the journey a bodily, immediate reality, before the soldiers reach the war’s damaged terrain.

Ben Givens enters Italy on December 24, 1944. The docks at Naples are a staging ground crowded with new arrivals; bomb damage marks the port and city. His company spends Christmas Eve in a cold, damaged school building at Bagnoli, where he tries to sleep wrapped in his blankets and thinks of home and Rachel Lake. The following days carry the soldiers onward through Livorno and Pisa toward the Apennines. On January 8, in heavy rain that turns to snow, the battalion travels toward the front. At San Marcello, Ben Givens’s platoon occupies an abandoned girls’ school. Snow covers the valley, distant artillery falls silent, and the men wait in a tense stillness. The sequence moves from the scale of military transit to a close, suspended interval before combat.

Combat, Aftermath, and Narrative Significance

The campaign does not make Ben Givens a straightforward combatant. As the regiment advances across the Po plain to liberate Bomporto, San Benedetto Po, Villafranca, and Verona, he makes no pretense of fighting and is not often called upon. At Torbole, where fighting does occur, he crouches behind a wall and does not participate. These choices distinguish his military presence from the expectation that enlistment will resolve his earlier conviction that he must fight directly. When surrender comes, he is sent to Bolzano. Men from his company take shotguns and pistols from the Beretta factory and guard a warehouse holding paintings plundered from Florence’s galleries; the Dolomites rise in the distance.

On the train back toward Livorno, other soldiers are loud with the expectation of going home, while Ben Givens has little to say. Their route passes battlefields, shelled towns, shattered farmhouses, and burned tanks, even as the men drink wine and wave to people in the fields. The return journey thus holds celebration and visible devastation side by side. Ben Givens writes to Rachel Lake in Marseilles, and she comes to Livorno aboard a hospital ship for a twenty-day leave. The war has separated them, but her arrival brings their earlier exchange about fighting and healing into the same landscape their service has carried them through.

Across these episodes, World War II is both a historical chronology and a pressure on intimate life. Aidan Givens’s final ride, the father’s reluctant acceptance of Ben Givens’s orders, and the letters between Ben Givens and Rachel Lake keep military mobilization attached to family, work, and love. The movement from orchards to training camps, ships, and Italian battle zones enlarges the setting without displacing those personal stakes. The contrast between Rachel Lake’s healing vocation and Ben Givens’s stated intention to fight remains unresolved in the evidence of his service: he goes to the front, yet does not become the uncomplicated combatant that his enlistment might suggest.