Across the River and into the Trees

“So there was little movement to the water, and the dead had stayed there a long time, floating and bloating face up and face down regardless of nationality until they had attained colossal proportions.”

The colonel’s memories are infused with trauma. The sight of a river is enough to trigger memories of bloated corpses, for example, illustrating why the drive through Italy is such an emotional experience. That the dead soldiers weigh as heavily on the colonel’s mind whether they were allies or enemies also speaks to the universality of death—a key concern for the colonel while Coming to Terms with Mortality and Illness.

“This country meant very much to him, more than he could, or would ever tell anyone and now he sat in the car happy that in another half hour they would be in Venice.”

Even as he interrogates his own mortality, the colonel struggles to be honest about the true significance of Italy in his life. The country means more than he is willing to tell anyone, both for better and for worse. This fear of vulnerability is exacerbated by traveling the same roads that, for the colonel, are marked by death.

“Sad, self-righteous, over-fed and under-trained. If they are under-trained, it is my fault. But we’ve got some good ones, too.”

Sharing his thoughts on the latest generation of American soldiers, the colonel shows his empathy. He sees good and bad in the soldiers but also recognizes his own role—and the role of his generation—in producing them. They simply lack the brutal experiences that shaped the men of his generation and, since the colonel does not wish his trauma upon anyone, he does not blame the men for their difference. These reflections demonstrate war’s complex place in the colonel’s sense of identity and develop the theme of Masculinity and Authority Under the Pressure of Physical Decline. There is a faint sense that the colonel regards these new soldiers as less masculine than his own generation, but this exists alongside recognition of the drawbacks of defining masculinity in terms of violence.

“But I like them very much and I have never known finer people nor people more as we are.”

When asked his opinion on the Russians, the colonel refuses to condemn them. Cold War politics are insignificant to the colonel, who values personal valor and experience far more. He acknowledges the bravery and grit of those who have fought in any war, which further establishes that, for the colonel, the past is more significant than the present.

“They are only something to wear like a dress from Paris. You don’t like to wear your dress uniform, do you?”

Renata, the privileged child of a wealthy Venetian family, helps the colonel to understand the constraints of her position. Wearing her emeralds may seem glamorous, she suggests, but they are just as much a part of social conformity and etiquette as the colonel’s dress uniform. Just as the colonel resents being made to wear his dress uniform, she resents being forced to adhere to expectations of glamor and luxury, as these do not align with the way in which she views herself. Renata’s complexity as a character frequently spurs the colonel’s character development by bumping up against his tendency to idealize her.

“This bathroom had been cut, arbitrarily, from a corner of the room and it was a defensive, rather than an attacking bathroom, the colonel felt.”

As much as the colonel wants to focus on the immediate moment with Renata, his military experience seeps into everything. Even something as innocuous as the layout of a hotel bathroom is subtly categorized as defensive rather than offensive; he couches the floorplan in militaristic terms without any conscious effort, suggesting that, as much as the colonel would like to leave his past behind, it colors his interpretation of the world.

“This is the place where the German shot the pigeons.”

The echoes of World War II are evident throughout Venice, even if little fighting or bombing took place in the city. The shooting of the pigeons is a stark memory that contrasts with the colonel shooting ducks at the beginning and the end of the novel, underscoring the hunt’s relationship to war. More broadly, the passage affirms that while the war may have ended, the memories and the actions endure beyond the historical moment.

“It was really home, if a hotel room can be so described.”

Throughout the novel, the colonel makes scant references to his actual home. Rather, he has a series of facsimile homes across the world that are tied to his memories and experiences. The hotel staff’s preparation of his room in his preferred style is the closest the colonel has to feeling at home and demonstrates why he is so keen to return to these places. However, the final phrase qualifies the statement, revealing the colonel’s recognition that he can never truly be “home” in Venice.

“Did you ever read King Lear, Daughter?”

In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the titular character is an aging figure raging at the passage of time as his relationship with his beloved daughter crumbles before him. The colonel’s tendency to refer to Renata as his daughter clarifies why he relates to the play. He fears Lear’s fate, not only as he confronts his own mortality but also as he confronts his relationship with Renata, whom he fears alienating.

“The Colonel breakfasted with the leisure of a fighter who has been clipped badly, hears four and knows how to relax truly for five seconds more.”

The simile describing the colonel’s attitude to breakfast hints at the extent to which violence is a fundamental part of his life. He has taken a beating, but he feels that he still has time to recover before he is counted out of the fight. He breakfasts with the ease of an experienced fighter, recuperating more than relaxing and invested with the knowledge that the fight is far from over.

“Tell me, my Colonel, what do you really think about Tito?”

At the time the novel is set, Josip Broz Tito was the president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The city of Venice, close to the Yugoslavian border and close to the disputed territories, has a preoccupation with Tito, but the colonel does not share the hall porter’s interest. The colonel may consider Venice to be his second home, but he cannot bring himself to see Tito as a potential enemy.

“They are on their way to work, he decided. Maybe they are former Fascists or maybe they are something else, or maybe it is just the line that they are talking.”

The colonel fought against Italian fascists in World War II, though he tells Renata that he could never bring himself to hate enemy soldiers. After the war, however, he must confront the possibility that many civilians were fascists in one form or another. His anxiety about this reveals his difficulties adjusting to postwar existence; stripped of their uniforms and the shared traumatic context of war, these potential fascists are more threatening to the colonel.

“This very young lady wants a breakfast to end breakfasts.”

The colonel’s joke with the gran maestro hints at a desire to indulge in his final days. Renata is young (a point the colonel here underscores); she will have many more breakfasts in her life. She will not have many more with the colonel, however, so the “breakfast to end all breakfasts” is not so much about the food as it is the company.

“Deader than Phoebus the Phoenician. But she doesn’t know it yet.”

The colonel assures Renata that his ex-wife is dead to him. He alludes to T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to illustrate just how little she means to him. Eliot’s poem is among the most famous literary responses to the mass death and destruction of World War; the allusion thus emphasizes the role of war in shaping the colonel’s identity, as it permeates even the cultural signifiers that he reaches for. His words also hint at a vulnerability he does not directly express. His concession that she may not know his thoughts about her reveals an asymmetry in the relationship; as intensely as he may dislike her, she has evidently moved on from him, and his castigation, he feels, will matter little.

“They lay on the pleasantly hard, new-made bed with their legs pressed tight against one another, and her head was on his chest, and her hair spread across his old hard neck; and he told her.”

Renata pleads with the colonel to tell her about his experiences of war. He struggles with what to tell her, knowing the bleak, brutal reality of what he has experienced. As he prepares to tell her what he knows, the novel creates a sharp juxtaposition between the peaceful romance of their immediate moment and the darkness that the colonel may choose to unleash. The syntax mirrors the effect, the blunt statement “and he told her” contrasting with the longer, more winding phrases that precede it.

“Don’t you see you need to tell me things to purge your bitterness?”

Renata urges the colonel to speak to her about his experiences, revealing that her motivation is not only interest in her lover’s past. She hopes to offer him relief from his pain, easing his bitterness by hearing his informal confession. His reluctance to accept this offer mirrors his reluctance to accept her material gifts; he is both unwilling to discomfort Renata and protective of his own sense of masculinity, even as it isolates him.

“You might even say it was a beautiful regiment until I destroyed it under other people’s orders.”

The colonel refrains from criticizing his superiors explicitly, but his raw rage can be glimpsed in his words. He loved the men under his command; through combat, they had developed a brotherly understanding that is difficult for him to explain to Renata and that his superiors failed to recognize. At the same time, the colonel emphasizes his own responsibility in the debacle, making himself, not his superiors, the subject of the verb “destroyed.” The word choice, too, is significant, signaling his sense that the deaths served no military purpose but were mere “destruction.” This is at the heart of his guilt, as he was skeptical of the orders at the time but obeyed them anyway.

“We will lunch at Harry’s, or we’ll come back here and I will be packed.”

Chapter 34 switches the narrative mode, beginning with the colonel narrating from a first-person perspective. He employs the simple future tense, imagining the immediate future with Renata as she sleeps beside him. The scope of his future is limited, however, so his private perspective is practical and realistic, abandoning the shared fantasies of trips to America or Rome. They may go to Harry’s, but then he will leave. This internal monologue illustrates the extent to which the colonel has accepted his own mortality.

“Let us play that you are you and I am me.”

As the moment of departure draws near, Renata suggests that they play a game. Rather than be their true selves, they will perform versions of themselves as they would like to be. They can avoid the emotional reality of the imminent goodbye through the performance of happier versions of themselves. This deflection from the reality of the moment, she hopes, will allow them to enjoy their final hours together, and it is part of a broader pattern of escapism that defines their relationship and, more broadly, the colonel’s trip to Venice.

“The wind is from the wrong direction and how lucky I would have been to have had this girl instead of the woman that I pay alimony to, who could not even make a child.”

In his final hours with Renata, the colonel cannot help but compare her favorably with his ex-wife. Looking at Renata, he is filled with melancholy and regret. With the end of his life approaching, he feels as though he wasted many of his years with a woman he did not love; that they were unable to have children is another regret that contextualizes his paternal demeanor toward Renata and Jackson. The comparison between the women in his life fills him with a sense of waste and regret that the direction of the wind symbolically echoes.

“He had come close to lying twice himself [while drinking the night before] and had held it up and merely exaggerated.”

In the final days of his life, the colonel refuses to shift from his moral code. He claims to have lied only four times in his life and regrets doing so. Even in a jovial environment, he is unwilling to indulge in lies, though he acknowledges privately that he was tempted to stray. This battle between principle and temptation offers insight into the strength of the colonel’s character.

“The shooting’s over.”

The final day of the shoot ends with the colonel having shot few ducks, though he is satisfied with his performance. His words have figurative resonance, suggesting that the colonel now accepts that the end is drawing near. The shooting—something that has defined so much of his life—is now over. He is moving toward death, sensing his own mortality in the rhythms of everyday life, but his emphasis on the violence, specifically, drawing to a close suggests that he has found a measure of peace.

“When the Moroccans came through here they raped both his wife and his daughter.”

Throughout the novel, the colonel has been aware of the lingering effects of the war, but his sense of those effects has mostly been confined to the possible presence of fascists in civilian society. The surly attitude of the boatman, however, now makes sense to the colonel. He recognizes the validity of the boatman’s anger, retroactively empathizing with the trauma and pain that was inflicted by Allied soldiers as well as fascist troops. This is in keeping with the colonel’s established respect for those who suffered on both sides of the war, but it still marks a moment of character growth by prompting further reckoning with his service—a source of both pride and shame.