He is regarded, and with good reason, as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century,
but before that - years before his fame, he was an ambulance driver on the Italian Front
in the Great War; Ernest Hemingway.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War bio special about Ernest Hemingway and the
First World War.
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, a well-to-do suburb of Chicago.
He graduated High School in June 1917, but did not go to university, taking a job instead
with the Kansas City Star newspaper.
He only worked there for a few months, but would use the paper’s style guide as a foundation
for his later writing.
“Use short sentences.
Use short first paragraphs.
Use vigorous English.
Be positive, not negative.”
The US had just joined the war at that point and young Ernest was eager to serve.
He aspired to join the Marines, but was rejected because he was too nearsighted.
He did join the National Guard that fall, but when representatives of the Italian Red
Cross came to Kansas City recruiting ambulance drivers, he falsified his birth certificate
to make himself a year older, memorized the eye chart, and joined up, arriving in Paris
in May 1918, and then in Italy the following month.
His first experience there was treating victims of a munitions factory explosion near Milan,
which he would write about for the Star, as well as later, in his non-fiction book “Death
in the Afternoon”.
Now, he left Milan for Schio June 9th, which was near the Italian front line in the Veneto
region, on the Pasubio sector of the front.
He and his crew stayed in a mill where they slept on a row of cots, and he was frustrated
that he was not allowed up to the front lines and the action.
Still, Schio was awash with taverns and Ernest began his practice of hanging around the taverns
with the Italian soldiers and hearing color and detail about the war that would later
turn up in his novels and stories.
He would also spend a lot of time reading Italian trench newspapers once he learned
Italian, which he did over the summer.
There were other American drivers there, including novelist John dos Passos, but many of them,
especially those who’d served in France, did not very much like Hemmingway, considering
him a young hothead spoiling for a fight.
The Italian ambulance drivers looked down on the American drivers in general, as “impulsive
children who would endanger them”.
In mid June 1918, the Austrian Army launched the Second Battle of the Piave River, also
known as the Battle of the Solstice.
They attacked toward Monte Grappa in the mountains and along the lower Piave River.
By the 20th, though, the Austrians were in full retreat, but the fighting had been fierce
and extra Red Cross help was called in to assist the 38 ambulances already there.
Around June 25th, though possibly July 1st, Hemingway and the other American drivers arrived
from Schio in Fiat ambulances.
He was billeted near where the Piave empties into the Venetian Lagoon, a marshy area home
to dysentery and malaria.
There he went out on a bicycle borrowed from the bersaglieri, bringing news from position
to position and delivering small comforts like cigarettes to the Italian soldiers, by
whom he was well liked.
This could actually be quite dangerous, for though fighting had slowed, there was still
sniping in the region and a predecessor of his had been killed by a grenade.
He soon became friends with an Italian officer, Lieutenant Edoardo Lanzetti, and the priest
Don Minozzi.
These two ran the Casa del Soldato, the Soldiers’ Home, a Catholic recreational organization
that provided things like showers, writing materials, literacy classes, and stuff like
that.
Hemingway worked with them, and they would be the models for several characters in his
books.
The other Americans returned to Schio, but Hemingway managed to remain behind, and took
to wearing a Bersaglieri uniform.
He was wounded July 7th.
The day before, the Italians had destroyed an Austrian bridgehead, and the Austrians
responded by beginning to throw grenades at targets that had previously been “off limits”,
like medical posts.
Okay, on the 7th, amid rumors of an impending Italian attack, Hemingway went out to a machine
gun nest/listening post along the river.
The Italian bombardment began at midnight and a blast from a mortar shell arrived and
knocked Hemingway flat.
“Then there was a flash, as when a blast furnace door is swung open, and a roar that
started white and went red on and on in a rushing wind... my breath would not come,
and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out all the time bodily
in the wind.
I went swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead... then I floated and instead of
going on and on I felt myself slide back.
I breathed and I was back.”
The blast tore the legs off a man near him.
Another man had shrapnel in his chest; Hemingway carried him away for 40 meters before being
hit by machine gun fire in his left thigh and falling.
He got up and carried the man another 50 meters before being hit again and fainting.
He lay in shock for two hours before he was taken to a dressing station.
Eventually, he was found by an American who got him to an operating table.
There, a doctor removed 227 pieces of shrapnel from him, mostly from his legs.
He was then taken to a temporary hospital in an elementary school where a priest baptized
him and gave him last rites, but he did not, of course, die.
He would be awarded the silver medal of honor and the Italian War Cross for his actions
that day.
On July 15th, he was transferred to Milan, arriving the 17th where he would stay in a
Red Cross Hospital.
His experiences there would be central to “A Farewell to Arms”, his first best seller,
which would be published in 1929.
The character of Catherine Barkley was inspired by the nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, who took
care of Hemingway, and with whom he fell in love.
She was 26, he would turn 19 a few days after arriving in Milan, and though the bottles
of chianti, cognac, and cinzano he smuggled into the hospital were real enough, the sex
part was the fruit of his imagination.
He also had a rival for her affections, one of the Arditi who became the basis for the
character Rinaldo Rinaldi.
Operated on again in August, he remained in Milan for physiotherapy.
In October he went back to Schio, hoping to rejoin the action as the Battle of Vittorio
Veneto heated up.
However, he contracted dysentery and was sent back to Milan.
He had plans to marry von Kurowsky and after the armistice went to see her in Treviso before
returning to the states.
Like many others, he had trouble adjusting to civilian life, even though he was a local
celebrity and made speeches at schools and clubs around Oak Park.
In March 1919, after dropping several hints, Agnes von Kurowsky wrote him a letter telling
him she was leaving him and marrying a Neapolitan Duke.
She never actually did that.
Hemingway was devastated, though he married Hadley Richardson two years later.
Also in 1921, former Italian Army Chief of Staff Armando Diaz came to Chicago and awarded
Hemingway the War Cross.
In 1922, Hemingway returned to Europe as a correspondent for the Toronto Star covering
the Greco-Turkish War, and all that followed, Paris in the 20s, bullfights, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
world fame and a Nobel Prize, well, that’s history.
The war and his experiences would turn up frequently in his writing, often even depictions
of things he heard about second hand but was not there for first hand, like Gorizia, which
he described though he never went there, or the Caporetto retreat in “A Farewell to
Arms”.
He is considered by many to be a war writer, and death, in images and themes, is prevalent,
even as his stories were rich with identifiable details.
He would be involved with the Spanish Civil War and World War Two, and committed suicide
in 1961, but that is beyond the scope of this channel.
You are encouraged not only to look that up for yourself, but to read his stories, as
they are some of the most influential - and good- books of the 20th century, and many
were heavily influenced by his brief service in the Great War.