In springtime, the narrator returns to Gorizia. His roommate and friend, a surgeon and lieutenant in the Italian army named Rinaldi, is introduced. Rinaldi asks the narrator about his leave and reports on the presence in the occupied town of what he calls “beautiful English girls,” particularly a Miss Barkley. At the officers’ mess in the evening, the narrator apologizes to the priest for not visiting the latter’s home region of Abruzzi. Instead he spent his leave drinking and consorting with prostitutes. The baiting of the priest by his fellow Italian officers resumes.
