Rinaldi is a humanist whose sensual values will be contrasted with the spiritual values of the priest. Battle is therefore inevitable: "Next week the war starts again," Lieutenant Rinaldi reports. And yet the snow, the only thing that truly halts the fighting each year, has melted. The absence here of the novel's primary symbol of death would seem to bode well.
Upon the narrator's return to the front, what he earlier referred to as the "permanent rain" of winter is over for the time being, and in its place are warm sunshine and spring greenery. The baiting of the priest by his fellow Italian officers resumes. Instead he spent his leave drinking and consorting with prostitutes. At the officers' mess in the evening, the narrator apologizes to the priest for not visiting the latter's home region of Abruzzi. 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. His roommate and friend, a surgeon and lieutenant in the Italian army named Rinaldi, is introduced.
In springtime, the narrator returns to Gorizia.
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