In this chapter, the writer introduces another dichotomy paralleling that of the mountains versus the plains: the church and the brothel. The two dynamics intersect when the priest invites the narrator to visit his mountain hometown while on leave. The officers scoff at this suggestion: "He doesn't want to see peasants," one says. "Let him go to centres of culture and civilization." Another officer then offers the addresses of whorehouses in Naples. To these men, civilization and sex are one and the same, but the priest is offering the narrator a different, more spiritual, way of living.
It was a fact of pre- and early-modern warfare that fighting became impossible when it snowed. Therefore snow equals peace to Henry and his compatriots, as it will late in the novel — although that peace is never more than temporary. Here snow covers the bare ground and even the artillery, but the stumps of the oak trees torn up by the summer's fighting continue to protrude from the blanket of white. Thus snow is merely a reprieve, a cease-fire.
