July 8, 1918: Ernest Hemingway Is Severely Wounded In Italy
Ernest Hemingway, American Red Cross volunteer, WWI. Portrait by Ermeni Studios, Milan, Italy. Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. Click any photo to enlarge.
What a difference a year makes. In June of 1917, Ernest Hemingway had just graduated high school, a kid enjoying the rounds of parties and celebrations and hijinks that marked the conclusion of his secondary education, an event that was the subject of a post here on Buckeyemuse. By October of the year he would be a reporter for the Kansas City Star, a young man covering the news in a major American city and learning the newspaperman’s craft. But one year after his graduation his life taken yet another turn: Hemingway had joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver after being rejected by the U.S. armed services because of his eyesight.
Hemingway during World War One.
Hemingway was posted to Italy, which had entered the war in 1915 on the side of the Triple Alliance (France-Britain-Russia) in hopes of acquiring regional territory. The war in Italy has become a part of our literature thanks to Hemingway’s important novel A Farewell To Arms (1929) and a number of his short stories—and because of the Hemingway legend itself. An important part of the legend is Hemingway’s fabled romance with the American Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, who would be transformed in the fictional world of A Farewell To Arms into the English nurse Catherine Barkley, who falls for Frederic Henry, the young American ambulance driver wounded on the Italian front. The real life romance of Hemingway and von Kurowsky was the subject of the film In Love and War (1996) starring Chris O’Donnell and Sandra Bullock.
Chris O’Donnell and Sandra Bullock in the film “In Love and War” (Image: Rotten Tomatoes).
Agnes von Kurowsky (Image: Pinterest).
Hemingway’s “A Farewell To Arms” (1929), one of the great novels of the First World War and one of Hemingway’s best.
Hemingway had seen a thing or two growing up as the son of a doctor and later when he worked as a newspaperman in Kansas City. But the young writer hadn’t seen anything that could have prepared him for one of his first experiences after landing in Italy. In June of 1918, Hemingway was part of a detail assigned to retrieve bodies and body fragments after an explosion in a munitions factory. Many of those killed were women. Hemingway writes some about this experience in his bullfighting book Death In The Afternoon (1932) The student at graduation one year before had come face to face with the stark reality of mass casualties in a wartime setting. He would see much more of this in the years to come as a war correspondent covering the Spanish Civil War and World War II.
Ernest Hemingway around the time of his high school graduation (Pinterest).
One of the central experiences of Hemingway’s life—we might even go so far as to say it was the most important thing that ever happened to him, given his subsequent pursuit of extreme experience and fascination with war and death—was his wounding on the Italian Front on July 8, 1918. It occurred shortly after midnight at a forward listening post in the Piave river valley. Hemingway was wounded in both legs with shrapnel from an Austrian mortar, but still managed to lift another man and was carrying him to safety when Hemingway was struck in the right knee with machine gun fire. He still got the other man to an aid station.
Italian Alpine troops during World War One.
Hemingway was on canteen duty during this time in his service: delivering items such as chocolates and cigarettes to the Italian troops. It was a hot and moonless night. Sporadic small arms fire had occurred throughout the day, and now the night was periodically illumined by the light of star shells. Shortly after midnight the Austrians lauched one of their Minenwerfer trench mortar rounds. Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker described the round as “about the size of a five gallon tin” that was “probably of 420 caliber.” These were nasty weapons that were loaded with shrapnel in the form of metal rods, old bed springs, screws and other assorted metal items. Hemingway and the other men heard the mortar’s notorious “chuh-chuh-chuh” sound as it flew through the air before exploding at ground level.
Photo of a 26 cm Minenwerfer mortar on display at the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in Vienna, Austria. This mortar is probably similar to the one Hemingway encountered in 1918 (Photo by Christoph Tietz; Creative Commons).
Hemingway described it like this:
“Then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and then went red. I tried to breathe, but my breath would not come…The ground was torn up and in front of my head there was a splintered beam of wood. In the jolt of my head I heard somebody crying….I tried to move but I could not move. I heard the machine guns and rifles firing across the river.”
Austro-Hungarian trench in the Ortler Alps during World War One.
Hemingway’s boots filled with blood, but he picked up the man who was crying out beside him and carried him a number of yards before the machine gun slugs tore into his right knee. Despite the severity of his wounds, Hemingway carried the man for a total of about 150 yards—the length of one and a half American football fields. Stretcher bearers transported him to an aid station where he laid on the ground for two hours praying and watching the star shells trace across the sky. Hemingway debated shooting himself with his own pistol. He was finally transported near dawn to another field station where he received morphine and antitetanus medication and was anointed by a priest who made his way up and down among the wounded. Field surgeons removed twenty-eight pieces of shrapnel from his legs, then he was bandaged and taken to a field hospital where he spent five days. On July 15, 1918, Hemingway was put on a train for Milan, which he eventually reached on July 17, 1918, four days before his nineteenth birthday.
Handsome young Hem recovering from his war wounds.
Hemingway underwent a successful surgery here to remove a bullet in his knee and another that had lodged in his right foot. It was here at this hospital that Hemingway met Agnes von Kurowsky. Meanwhile, word had reached his hometown of Chicago—Hemingway was a native of the Chicago suburb of Oak Park—and he was lauded as a hero in the local press as he was the first American to be wounded in Italy. Hemingway also became one of the first Americans to receive Italy’s Silver Medal of Military Valor.
The Silver Medal of Military Valor.
Hemingway recovering from his wounds.
The account of Frederic Henry’s wounding in A Farewell To Arms is quite similar to Hemingway’s. Here’s some of Hemingway’s description of the wounding of Henry, who is sitting eating with some other men when the Austrian mortars come raining down:
“I ate the end of my piece of cheese and took a swallow of wine. Through the other noise I heard a cough, then came the chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh —then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died. Then I floated, and instead of going on I felt myself slide back. I breathed and I was back. The ground was torn up and in front of my head there was a splintered beam of wood. In the jolt of my head I heard somebody crying. I thought somebody was screaming. I tried to move but I could not move. I heard the machine guns and rifles firing across the river.”
The scene continues with Henry assisting a wounded man and eventually being transported back to an aid station where he is treated by an English surgeon. There is actually a bit of comedy in this scene as the English surgeon, who apparently feels a sense of kinship with the American boy in this Italian setting, looks after Henry, telling some Italian stretcher bearers that Henry is “the legitimate son of President Wilson” and then telling an Italian surgeon that his patient is “the only son of the American ambassador.”
“The legitimate son of President Wilson”–more than 21,000 soldiers at Camp Sherman in Chillicothe, Ohio posed for this “living photograph” of President Wilson. This kind of thing was a sort of craze in America during the war, but an impressive one all the same. This particular copy of the photo was recently on display at Ohio History Central in Columbus, Ohio. Click photo to enlarge (author’s photo).
This wartime wounding of Hemingway’s was probably his worst experience of physical trauma, but there would be others, including surviving a plane crash in Africa and experiencing a skylight falling on his head, among other incidents. Hemingway’s medical history has become an academic cottage industry of sorts. There has long been interest in the pattern of suicide in the Hemingway family, and the famous writer likely suffered from bipolar disorder. But what has been a discussion of late is whether Hemingway’s behavior was seriously affected by traumatic brain injuries since he suffered so much physical punishment, starting with possibly suffering some kind of concussion when this trench mortar landed near him. These questions are intriguing.
Ernest Hemingway (Image: A&E Biography).
But there is no doubt that this experience of wounds in combat was an important experience in his life, as it is and has been for other veterans. Like others before him and others since, the young man from Oak Park learned firsthand how quickly life could be lost in combat—100 years ago, on a battlefield near Fossalta, Italy in the debacle of the First World War.
Patrick Kerin
Sources:
A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway. Scribner Paperback Edition published by Simon and Schuster, New York, 1995. Originally published in 1929.
Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story by Carlos Baker. A Bantam Book published in agreement with Charles Scribner’s Sons. Paperback edition. October, 1970.