Ernest Hemingway, World War I, and Agnes von Kurowsky

Hemingway, World War I, and Agnes von Kurowsky

Hemingway's World War I experiences were the source of much of the legend that later surrounded him. Brave and masculine, he was the writer who really got out there and experienced everything. Wounded in the trenches, decorated for his valour, he then threw himself into a wartime romance with the nurse who was responsible for bringing him back to health, his first love, who later jilted him for an older, aristocratic, man. This report will examine the background to these myths and assess their veracity.

It was not long after the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917 that 17 year-old Hemingway, not yet finished high school, first expressed an interest in seeing some action. However his father, keen for him to follow his sister to college, settled for a compromise that saw his brother fix young Ernest up with a job in the Kansas City Star. That November, he told his family that he could not possibly wait more than another year before enlisting, saying "it will be hard enough to stay out until then". Biographer Kenneth S. Lynn argues that for the young Hemingway, the war was like a championship football game, a huge event not to be missed.1

Hemingway's letters of that winter contain references to him attempting to join the army but being refused because of a bad eye. Nobody has been able to find any evidence that such a claim is true. Lynn points to the likely falsity of the claim by mentioning the fact that Harry Truman, who was helpless without his glasses, got past the same army doctors in Kansas City that Hemingway would have had to deal with, and suggests that the prospect of squalor and danger in the trenches did not accord with Hemingway's vision of the great event of his time. At the same time, his reading of Hugh Walpole's The Dark Forest the previous year made him aware of another, heroic, and far less dangerous way of seeing the war - the Red Cross.

Ernest and his friend Ted Brumback volunteered for the Red Cross in early January and in April they were assigned as second lieutenants in an ambulance unit in Italy. They were issued a regular US Army officer's uniform with full insignia, and Ernest made the most of the fact that real army privates and non-commissioned officers had to salute him, in one instance counting 367 salutes as he walked up and down Broadway.