In 1940, Dorrigo is in Adelaide training with a Casualty Clearing Station. He plans to go to a Red Cross dance to meet with some doctors, but first, he goes to a bookstore to kill time. There is a modern poet reading downstairs, and Dorrigo can’t make sense of the poem he is reciting. He browses the shelves looking for a copy of the Aeneid:

It wasn’t really the great poem of antiquity that Dorrigo Evans wanted, though, but the aura he felt around such books—an aura that both radiated outwards and took him inwards to another world that said to him that he was not alone (56).

Four people come up the stairs where he is browsing: two women and two soldiers. Dorrigo thinks of a woman named Ella whom he met in Melbourne while completing his surgical training. She comes from a powerful family and he assumes that he will marry her, although he finds her boring. While he thinks about her, he realizes that the small, red-haired woman from the group of four has walked over and is standing before him.