Septimus Smith - Which "crosses" & why Italy ?

[RodB]

I've been reading Mrs Dalloway, and trying to make sense of the fictional Septimus Warren Smith - I realize he is a fictional creation but :-

1. He is said to have been promoted, and awarded "crosses". I understand this could be the Military Cross and/or the Italian Croce de Guerra, or the Belgian Military Cross or Croix de Guerre - was it common for France, Belgium or Italy to award their decorations to British troops ?

2. He is said to have been billeted in Milan when hostilities ended - well away from the war zone further East. Would this be a typical posting - performing some role on the supply route to France - or were units already being withdrawn from the line for r & r before the end ? As he was a volunteer I would place him in the 23rd Division, which doesn't seem to include any London units.

3. Why would Woolf place her shellshocked hero ending the war in Italy ? Was there anything unusual about conditions of service there which were known to the public at the time (1920s) ? If she wanted to create a typical shellshocked survivor she didn't need to go to the trouble of singling him out as one of the relatively few to have ended the war on the Italian front - he could just as easily have met a nice French girl as an Italian one. Indeed, if she wanted a touch of the exotic for artistic purposes she coyuld have placed him in Thessalonika, in fact she invokes Greek imagery quite often.

It's difficult to to put oneself into the place of a reader in the 20s, when I'm sure the world and its peculiarities looked a bit different to today - i.e. if somebody then was told "so and so served in the xyz theatre" what imagery would spring to mind then but which is lost now ?

thanks, Rod