Rhodesia is the setting of Creasy’s final effort to find a place within another war, and of the recognition that ends that effort. He trains young white recruits and leads them in the bush, but the conflict feels to him like another turn in a history of futile battles. The experience brings his past into focus and makes continued service seem less like a purpose than a repetition without end.

Creasy’s service and the war

Creasy tries to fit into Rhodesia by training recruits and leading them in the bush. He does not reduce the war to a simple division between right and wrong, and feels sympathy for the white settlers: he regards them as people overtaken by historical change rather than as inherently bad. Their pioneer self-image, however, belongs to an earlier era. The conflict cannot be resolved by repeating the conquest of Indigenous peoples elsewhere; some black fighters possess land mines, grenades, rocket launchers, and Kalashnikovs. For Creasy, those circumstances make the old assumptions about power and victory impossible to sustain.

His view is shaped by a sequence of earlier wars: from the Battle of Dien Bien Phu to Algeria and Katanga, then back to Vietnam and onward into what he sees as endless cycles of futility. Rhodesia does not stand apart from that history. It gathers it into one place. While others can still speak of patriotism, final stands, and refusing to give up, Creasy sees the prospect of more deaths without a meaningful end. Futility, the narrative suggests, describes both the wars behind him and the future he expects.

Withdrawal from Rhodesia

Creasy’s loss of interest becomes physical as well as professional. He drinks heavily, lets his body grow slack and lethargic, and is removed from operations to serve only as an adviser. His colleagues might have dismissed him, but gratitude for his earlier service keeps him on; once he recognizes that their tolerance is charity, pride drives him to leave.

He first goes to Brussels to look for a woman he once knew, but she has moved on. He then takes a train to Marseilles and, on impulse, a ferry to Corsica, where the main contingent of the French Foreign Legion is based. The Legion’s forgiveness of the 1st R.E.P.’s long-past mutiny suggests that he may still have a place there. Rhodesia thus leads not to a new campaign but to a retreat from the cycle of operations that has defined his life.

Narrative significance

The Rhodesian episode turns Creasy’s history of service into a reckoning with its cost. Rather than giving him a decisive battlefield victory or a renewed cause, the setting exposes the gap between the language of patriotic sacrifice and his accumulated knowledge of what repeated wars have produced. His departure is a consequence of that recognition: he can no longer accept another role in the same pattern.

The possibility of leaving that pattern remains tentative. In Calvi, Creasy hears the Legion’s marching hymn and watches young recruits perform their drill, feeling a thousand years old beside them. The next day, in Bastia, he waits for the ferry to Livorno and considers going to see Guido. The contrast links Rhodesia’s exhausted military future to a fragile alternative: not another war, but the hope of renewed companionship.