“We found and carried to an improvised mortuary a good number of these,” he wrote, “and, I must admit, frankly, the shock it was to find that these dead were women rather than men.”ĭays later Hemingway was posted to an ambulance unit near Schio, east of Lake Garda, on the border with Austria-Hungary. ![]() He and fellow drivers helped recover the remains of workers killed in a munitions factory explosion. In early June Hemingway arrived in Milan, where he got his first glimpse of war’s carnage. So he joined the American Red Cross ambulance corps in early 1918, when he was not yet 19 years old. He had wanted to serve in the Marines or the fledgling Army Air Service but was turned away due to his nearsightedness (in fact, he never served in any of the armed forces). World War I was the most important war in Hemingway’s development. Along with bullfighting, hunting, drinking and love, war is one of the enduring motifs of Hemingway’s writing and his legendary life. And yet these vague stories are indeed illuminating, because quite often they represent pivotal events in his development as a man and as an artist. These sundry lies and half-truths are pure poison for Hemingway biographers, because often as not the stories are so good the biographer doesn’t want to doublecheck the facts for fear of losing a real gem. Sometimes the inaccuracy stems from a tendency by Hemingway’s friends, acquaintances or witnesses to exaggerate his feats. “Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie.” “His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities,” Hemingway wrote in “Soldier’s Home,” a short story about a soldier named Krebs returning to the United States after the war. The need to recite manufactured war stories even appeared in his fiction. ![]() And while anecdotes from each appear in his biography, there is a vagueness about many of them, usually brought on by Hemingway’s tall tales about his own exploits. He visited five battlefronts in his life: the Italian-Austrian front in 1918 the Greco-Turkish War in 1922 the Spanish Civil War in 19 the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1941 and the Allied march through France in 1944. Hemingway’s 1918 wounding typifies his experiences in war. Yet despite serious wounds he had rescued a wounded soldier and been shot while carrying the man to safety. He had been a Red Cross ambulance driver, and when he was injured on July 8, 1918, he’d been handing out chocolate and cigarettes to the Italian troops. Hemingway had not fought with the Arditi in World War I. He would later learn, of course, after Hemingway became one of the world’s most famous authors, that his suspicions had been well founded. The editor, himself a veteran of the 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge, immediately offered young Ernest Hemingway a job. It contained two medals-the Croce di Guerra and Medaglia d’Argento al Valore Militare.Ĭlark lifted the silver medal, Italy’s second highest award for valor, from its box and read the recipient’s name etched along its edge: TENENTE ERNESTO HEMINGWAY. The guy must have sensed the features editor’s incredulity, for one day he showed up with a small cardboard box. The tall, beefy lad with a limp showed up at the Star Weekly in January 1920 and started telling tales about fighting with Italy’s famed Arditi commandos in World War I and suffering wounds from mortar explosions and machine-gun fire. Greg Clark didn’t believe the war stories told by the American kid who’d wandered into his cluttered Toronto office looking for work. ![]() War gave the legendary novelist his best stories-and a lifetime of trouble.
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