France in "Knight's Gambit" (Location)

France appears in two very different contexts in the story: as the Western Front during the First World War, and as part of Gavin Stevens' romantic biography. Gavin himself serves for "three years as a stretcher-bearer in the French army" (154), and gives his nephew a pretty grim description of what the war itself was like, for both the soldiers in the trenches ("the groundling") and "the airman" who fought in the skies above them: "a four-year tunnel of blood and excrement and fear" (242-43). Paris, the capital of France, is where Gavin Stevens "knew" the Russian emigre he was involved with in 1919 (247), one of the European locations from which Mrs. Harriss sends postcards to her girlhood friends, and where Gavin later finds Mrs. Harriss living in a "select" and "discreet" street within spitting distance "of the Bois de Boulogne" (255).