Dick and Steve went out to pick up some feriti to evacuate to the hospital. Behind the barn where they parked the cars, they found the ordinanza sitting on a stone with his head in his hands, tears had made long streaks on the dirt of his face. Steve went up to him and patted him on the back and gave him a package of Mecca cigarettes, that had been distributed to them by the Y.M.C.A. The ordinanza squeezed Steven’s hand, looked as if he was going to kiss it. He said after the war he was going to America where people were civilized, not bestie like here. Dick asked him where the girl had gone. “Gone away,” he said. “Andata via.”
When they got back to the section they found there was hell to pay. Orders had come for Savage, Warner, Ripley and Schuyler to report to the head office in Rome in order to be sent back to the States. Feldmann wouldn’t tell them what the trouble was. They noticed at once that the other men in the section were looking at them suspiciously and were nervous about speaking to them, except for Fred Summers who said he didn’t understand it, the whole frigging business was a madhouse anyway. Sheldrake, who’d moved his dufflebag and cot into another room in the villa, came around with an I told you so air and said he’d heard the words seditious utterances and that an Italian intelligence officer had been around asking about them. He wished them good luck and said it was too bad. They left the section without saying goodby to anybody. Feldmann drove them and their dufflebags and bedrolls down to Vicenza in the camionette. At the railroad station he handed them their orders of movement to Rome, said it was too bad, wished them good luck, and went off in a hurry without shaking hands.
“The sons of bitches,” growled Steve, “you might think we had leprosy.” Ed Schuyler was reading the military passes, his face beaming. “Men and brethren,” he said, “I am moved to make a speech… this is the greatest graft yet… do you gentlemen realize that what’s happening is that the Red Cross, otherwise known as the goose that lays the golden egg, is presenting us with a free tour of Italy? We don’t have to get to Rome for a year.” “Keep out of Rome till the revolution,” suggested Dick. “Enter Rome with the Austrians,” said Ripley.
A train came into the station. They piled into a first class compartment; when the conductor came and tried to explain that their orders read for second class transportation, they couldn’t understand Italian, so finally he left them there. At Verona they piled off to check their dufflebags and cots to Rome. It was suppertime so they decided to walk around the town and spend the night. In the morning they went to see the ancient theatre and the great peachcolored marble church of San Zeno. Then they sat around the café at the station until a train came by for Rome. The train was jampacked with officers in pale blue and pale green cloaks; by Bologna they’d gotten tired of sitting on the floor of the vestibule and decided they must see the leaning towers. Then they went to Pistoja, Lucca, Pisa and back to the main line at Florence. When the conductors shook their heads over the orders of movement they explained that they’d been misinformed and due to ignorance of the language had taken the wrong train. At Florence, where it was rainy and cold and the buildings all looked like the replicas of them they’d seen at home, the station master put them forcibly on the express for Rome, but they sneaked out the other side after it had started and got into the local for Assisi. From there they got to Siena by way of San Gimignano, as full of towers as New York, in a hack they hired for the day, and ended up one fine spring morning full up to the neck with painting and architecture and oil and garlic and scenery, looking at the Signorelli frescoes in the cathedral at Orvieto. They stayed there all day looking at the great fresco of the Last Judgment, drinking the magnificent wine and basking in the sunny square outside. When the got to Rome, to the station next to the baths of Diocletian, they felt pretty bad at the prospect of giving up their passes; they were amazed when the employee merely stamped them and gave them back, saying, “Per il ritorno.”
They went to a hotel and cleaned up, and then pooling the last of their money went on a big bust with a highclass meal, Frascati wine and asti for dessert, a vaudeville show and a cabaret on the Via Roma where they met an American girl they called the baroness who promised to show them the town. By the end of the evening nobody had enough money left to got home with the baroness or any of her charming ladyfriends, so they hired a cab with their last ten lire to take them out to see the Colosseum by moonlight. The great masses of ruins, the engraved stones, the names, the stately Roman names, the old cabdriver with his oilcloth stovepipe hat and his green soupstrainers recommending whorehouses under the last quarter of the ruined moon, the great masses of masonry full of arches and columns piled up everywhere into the night, the boom of the word Rome dying away in pompous chords into the past, sent them to bed with their heads whirling, Rome throbbing in their ears so that they could not sleep.
Next morning Dick got up while the others were still dead to the world and went round to the Red Cross; he was suddenly nervous and worried so that he couldn’t eat his breakfast. At the office he saw a stoutish Bostonian Major who seemed to be running things, and asked him straight out what the devil the trouble was. The Major hemmed and hawed and kept the conversation in an agreeable tone, as one Harvard man to another. He talked about indiscretions and the oversensitiveness of the Italians. As a matter of fact the censor didn’t like the tone of certain letters, etcetera, etcetera. Dick said he felt he ought to explain his position, and that if the Red Cross felt he hadn’t done his duty they ought to give him a courtmartial, he said he felt there were many men in his position who had pacifist views but now that the country was at war were willing to do any kind of work they could to help, but that didn’t mean he believed in the war, he felt he ought to be allowed to explain his position. The major said Ah well he quite understood, etcetera, etcetera, but that the young should realize the importance of discretion, etcetera, etcetera, and that the whole thing had been satisfactorily explained as an indiscretion; as a matter of fact the incident was closed. Dick kept saying, he ought to be allowed to explain his position, and the major kept saying the incident was closed, etcetera, etcetera, until it all seemed a little silly and he left the office. The major promised him transportation to Paris if he wanted to take it up with the office there. Dick went back to the hotel feeling baffled and sore.
The other two had gone out, so he and Steve walked around the town, looking at the sunny streets, that smelt of frying oliveoil and wine and old stones, and the domed baroque churches and the columns and the Pantheon and the Tiber. They didn’t have a cent in their pockets to buy lunch or a drink with. They spent the afternoon hungry, napping glumly on the warm sod of the Pincian, and got back to the room famished and depressed to find Schuyler and Ripley drinking vermouth and soda and in high spirits. Schuyler had run into an old friend of his father’s, Colonel Anderson, who was on a mission investigating the Red Cross, and had poured out his woes and given him dope about small graft at the office in Milan. Major Anderson had set him up to lunch and highballs at the Hotel de Russie, lent him a hundred dollars and fixed him up with a job in the publicity department. “So men and brethren, evviva Italia and the goddamned Alleati, we’re all set.” “What about the dossier?” Steve asked savagely. “Aw forget it, siamo tutti Italiani… who’s a defeatist now?”
Schuyler set them all up to meals, took them out to Tivoli and the Lake of Nemi in a staff car, and finally put them on the train to Paris with the rating of captain on their transport orders.