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Life at the Devon School moves on after graduation, and Gene Forrester reflects on the events of the previous year and the changes he has undergone since the Summer Session of 1942. Much has happened, including the death of Phineas. The war has come and the school's campus is to be utilized during those summer months as a Parachute Riggers' school to support the war effort. While watching the Air Force vehicles drive across the school's property, Gene and Brinker Hadley watch their surroundings transform. The two young men are thoughtful and Brinker recalls the name of Leper to Gene, although he quickly changes the subject out of respect for their old friend who has been given a Section Eight discharge.

Despite the transformation that is occurring before him, Gene sees only the purity and innocence of Devon. He recalls the playfulness of his own time there during the previous summer.

"Peace lay on Devon like a blessing, the summer's peace, the reprieve, New Hampshire's response to all the cogitation and deadness of winter. There could be no urgency in work during such summers....Or perhaps that was only true for me and a few others, our gypsy band of the summer before." Chapter 13, pg. 189

The Devon that Gene knows lives on in his memory along with the image of Finny himself. Nothing has gone away or died for Gene.

Topic Tracking: War 24

Brinker invites Gene to meet his father, Mr. Hadley who is smoking a cigar down in the Butt Room. Upon meeting Gene, the man listens expectantly as to what branch of the armed services he has signed up for and is dissatisfied by Gene's pacifism. Gene has joined the Navy and plans to be kept busy training in the United States for quite a long time without actually going to fight in the war. Brinker, too, has avoided the trenches by joining the Coast Guard, in spite of his earlier thoughts of being much more active in the war and fighting on the front lines. He had always been aggressive and insistent about the war around Devon's campus. Now when its reality intrudes, Brinker, like Gene, stays as far from the war as he can. Mr. Hadley tries to hide his disappointment in both of them, talking about supporting the country and how important their memories of the war will be in future years. He himself fought in World War I and wishes to be young enough to enlist again like his son. However, Brinker and Gene hardly share in his enthusiasm. After Mr. Hadley leaves, Brinker apologizes for his father's overbearing behavior, claiming that it was his father's generation that caused the war, while the youths had to fight it. Gene secretly disagrees with his friend and is wiser than he was in the past, "Because it seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart." Chapter 13, pg. 193 He has more insight about human nature, a thing he has struggled to understand during the course of the past year.

Topic Tracking: War 25

Now Gene walks alone, observing the school's campus as it continues to change. Arriving at the locker room near the gym, he removes the last of his things from the locker, as soldiers in a platoon undress around him. Gene continues to think about everything and, here in Finny's favorite place, he recalls how his dear friend still lives on inside of him, absorbed into a part of his personality.

"During the time I was with him, Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, letting its rocklike facts sift through and be accepted only a little at a time, only as much as he could assimilate without a sense of chaos and loss. No one else I have ever met could do this....When [others] began to feel that there was this overwhelmingly hostile thing in the world with them, then the simplicity and unity of their characters broke and they were not the same again." Chapter 13, pg. 194

Gene assimilates the carefree nature Phineas had exuded. Finny had given him a unique understanding of the world. Only through Finny's loss and decline was Gene able to grow into a wise and compassionate man.

Topic Tracking: Envy 17
Topic Tracking: Religion 13

While walking outside again to return to his dormitory, preparing to leave Devon School for good, Gene thinks about the silliness of war and insists that an enemy is only fear inside the human mind, based on hatred. Finny alone forgave his friend before he died. Gene had envied this boy for a while, and it is envy that had caused him to shake the tree limb during the previous summer. He had viewed Phineas as an enemy. This fear he had experienced and overcame is projected on others, which he sees as dealing with this human fear in different ways. Finny's name is recalled again as Gene's savior, the only one who was able to release him from this state of mind.

Gene goes to serve in the Navy because of the draft laws, but never sees war fought abroad. He lives on with Finny's free-spiritedness and learns to live in a twisted world--he twists his perspective of the world to keep him comfortable and sane, in order to avoid the fate of Leper. The enemies of any war, whether a war between nations or a war between two friends, are the same; they are not enemies. They are merely one group of people who have set themselves apart from another and declare themselves righteous and the other side, the "enemy," who threaten their survival. Paranoia, fear, and insecurity inside the human mind cause the "war". Gene has already waged a war and has destroyed Finny in the process. He has grown up to become a mature man, but, more importantly, he has found his innocence again. The selfishness and envy that had so often plagued him is gone, because of the great and good things he has learned from Phineas.