Dubious Battles: Ernest Hemingway's Journeys to War

By Kelley Dupuis

In the movie Patton, George C. Scott, playing the role of the legendary-infamous World War II general, surveys a column of tanks advancing over rough terrain and says exultantly, "Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance!"

That statement might have been taken directly from the mouth of Ernest Hemingway. While it would be wrong to say that Hemingway approved of war as a thing-in-itself the way Patton seems to have, (and by the way, Hemingway spent part of World War II with one of Patton's armored divisions and thought little enough of the general to have one of his later fictional characters all but call Patton a pathological liar) the fact remains that violent death was one of Hemingway's lifelong fascinations, and if contemplating violent death is what you're after, war is as good as it gets.

Throughout Hemingway's life, timing was to be a key factor in what happened to him and in how he reacted. Hemingway's timing was always very good, whether with regard to external events or to his own endeavors first at becoming a writer and then at promulgating his career as one. With regard to timing, war was one of the areas in which history accomodated Hemingway-his lifetime spanned four major wars, three of which he saw close-up, though never as a soldier, and he often embroidered his war experiences for presentation to the home audience to make them look as "soldierly" as he possibly could. In his youth this would take the form of getting himself seriously wounded and then playing a form of "dress-up;" on a later occasion the play-acting almost got out of hand. But young or old, "playing soldier," whether in real-life or vicariously, through his fictional characters, was something Hemingway found nearly irresistible.

When he was young, it was part and parcel of his natural desire to be where the action was. Contemporaries who worked with the teenage Hemingway during his days as a cub reporter on the Kansas City Star reported that he would dash around the city compulsively, wanting always to know where the ambulance went, where the crime had occured, and to get there quickly.

His tenure at the Star was to be a short one for precisely this reason. He had graduated from high school in 1917 and, turning down the chance to go to college, proceeded directly into newspaper work after an uncle pulled some strings and helped him get the job in Kansas City.

But 1917 was also the year that America entered World War I. Hemingway, like many young American males at the time, heard the stories coming back from Europe and was determined to get into the war somehow. He would have liked to enlist as a soldier, but his father was opposed to that idea and in any case Hemingway's famously poor vision in his left eye probably would have gotten him a 4-F. But while working on the Star, he struck up a friendship with 22 year-old Ted Brumback, who just the previous summer had enlisted in the American Field Service and spent four months in France as an ambulance driver. Since it was unlikely that he would get into the war as a combatant, Hemingway decided to go this route, and after persuading his father to drop his objections, he, Brumback and another friend, Wilson Hicks, signed on with the Red Cross and by the following spring were on their way to the war. They ended up serving in northern Italy, not far from Milan.

The world knows the rest of this story. On the night of July 8, 1918, while he was passing out chocolate bars, cigarettes and magazines to Italian soldiers on the Piave River near Fossalta, Hemingway's dream of being where the action was came true in nightmarish fashion. The Austrians launched a mortar attack and Hemingway was badly wounded by shrapnel. His later recuperation in a Red Cross hospital would include a brief romance with a nurse several years his senior, Agnes von Kurowski. This romance, in turn, would result a decade later in his novel A Farewell to Arms, and many decades later, in 1996, in the movie In Love and War, although to the end of her life Kurowski kept denying that it ever happened.

Hemingway's natural flair for self-dramatization never had a better opportunity than this one. The relative gullibility of Americans on the home front during the First World War gave him a clear playing field for his love of pose. It was after all an era in which there was no CNN to bring the horrors of war right into everyone's living room. Even newsreels were in the future. The war was an ocean away, and the domestic attitude toward it was shaped by patriotic songs, jingoistic slogans and romantic stories of faraway Europe. Nineteen year-old Ernest Hemingway wasted no time in creating the image for the folks back home of himself as Warrior. He wrote extravagant letters claiming, among other things, that his wounds had been caused by machine-gun bullets as well as shrapnel. (This is still being argued.) He got himself all dolled up in a tailor-made uniform and had his picture taken wearing military insignia that he was not entitled to, and when he returned to Oak Park, Illinois the following winter, hobbling on a cane, his romantic tales of war were made more plausible by the soldier's cap and boots that he wore, not to mention the custom-made Italian cape.

Hemingway's next trip to war was a short one. In 1922 he was Paris correspondent for the Toronto Star and that newspaper sent him to Constantinople to cover the war between Greece and Turkey. He was there only for a few weeks, but the result was two striking pages of fiction, On The Quai at Smyrna, the "opening note" in his first book of short stories, in our time. He would not see war again for 14 years.

To outline the political and military chaos that brought about the Spanish Civil War (1936-38) would be beyond my purposes here, not to mention my space. Although this is a gross oversimplification, the war between those who supported the left-wing Popular Front in Spain and those who supported the right-wing National Front is often seen as having been a "dress rehearsal" for World War II, with Hitler backing one side and Stalin backing the other. Stalin's side lost the actual war, but won the propaganda war, not least because it was supported by a solid international phalanx of writers and intellectuals, not the least of whom was Ernest Hemingway.

In 1937-38, Hemingway went to Spain four times, the first three as a reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA.) By now an international celebrity with a hairy-chested image to maintain, he sent back reports from Madrid and from the countryside filled with details suggesting that he was constantly in danger from artillery bombardments as well as machine-gun and automatic rifle-fire. He was indeed in harm's way his share of times, and the evidence suggests that he always kept his composure in such situations. But as usual, his embroidering is never far away. He boasted that he was even in danger when he went to bed in his room at the Hotel Florida in Madrid, because as he explained to his readers, his room was on the front side of the building, facing the Nationalist guns two miles away. Here we find two of Hemingway's biographers offering different stories. In his groundbreaking 1969 biography, Carlos Baker tells us that Hemingway's roommate at the Hotel Florida was his old friend the American bullfighter Sidney Franklin. Franklin was indeed there, but Kenneth S. Lynn, in another biography published 17 years after Baker's, reveals that Hemingway's roommate at the Florida was actually his fellow journalist and soon-to-be third wife Martha Gellhorn, adding that he probably would not have been living there under those circumstances if it were as dangerous as he claimed.

Hemingway's involvement in the Spanish Civil War ended certain of his friendships, notably with fellow novelist John Dos Passos. Dos Passos was among those intellectuals who were initially sympathetic to the Loyalist cause, (another was George Orwell) but who, upon observing that the Communists and the anarchists were murdering people with no less alacrity than the fascists, became disillusioned with the cause (and in Dos Passos' case, with left-wing politics generally.) The politically-naive Hemingway, whose pride moreover dictated that he always seem to have more and better information than anyone else, refused to acknowledge the atrocities being commited on the Loyalist side and reported the war in a one-dimensional, one-sided manner. (Happy to the point of lionizing Hemingway at first, the political left would eventually turn against him when he recovered enough equanimity to write For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which he not only maligned such loyalist icons as Andre Marty, commander of the International Brigades, but also, in the book's "massacre" chapter, committed the heresy of depicting fascists as victims.)

But if his first two major wars had served as canvases on which Hemingway drew sketches of what he wanted his own legend to look like, his third and last war was to be the biggest such, and this time he pulled out all the stops as promoter of his own image, to the point where he came very close to getting into serious trouble.

Shortly before D-Day in 1944, Hemingway arrived in London as a correspondent for Collier's magazine. He was to cover the invasion of Normandy, and he accompanied a number of armored and infantry battalions as they moved across France.

He was present on D-Day, was in fact aboard an LCVP landing craft as it advanced on Omaha Beach. Having dropped off its troops, the LCVP then returned to its ship with Hemingway still sitting astern. But what Hemingway subsequently wrote not only implied that he had gone ashore with the troops, but that he had played a vital role in helping to locate the beach. The Hemingway legend being what it was by then, few questioned his assertions.

And he was only warming up. Later came his claim to have entered Paris with the first troops, which led to the still-persisting myth that he personally liberated the Ritz Hotel. (Neither is true.)

And in fact this time Hemingway's military play-acting caught up with him. Other reporters resented his flamboyant showboating, which included travelling around to all appearances in command of a group of French Resistance irregulars and keeping firearms, bazookas, grenades and other ordnance in his Rambouillet hotel room. A complaint was filed that his activities were violating the Geneva Convention's rules regarding the conduct of news correspondents. In what must have been a particularly galling moment for him, Hemingway, at the risk of losing his reporter's credentials and being expelled from France, had to appear before a military panel and deny ever having taken part in any actual fighting himself. He offered deft excuses for some of the other things he was accused of, claiming for instance that weapons and ammunition had been kept in his hotel room only because storage space was in short supply.

But such was the Hemingway myth by 1944 that few concerned themselves with such niggling details. Hemingway had done such a good job for so many years as his own press agent, inflating his public persona to gargantuan proportions, that much of the world was prepared to accept his tall tales of war at face value. What few realized at the time was that Hemingway's real war, the one between his desire to go on living and his deep-seated desire not to, was even then being lost. Much of what passed for combat- zone bravery on Hemingway's part was in fact suicidal behavior, a point he would drive home at the end of a shotgun barrel 17 years later. Kelley Dupuis May 2000

MORE GREAT WORK FROM KELLEY. Kelley Dupuis is one of the most informative people on Hemingway we have ever come across. He can help American students with their studies on Hemingway, but please respect his immense literary insight and knowledge and do not ask him to do your homework. Your understanding of Hemingway comes from your own personal research. Kelley Dupuis can help with his literary insight of Hemingway but his help is for serious students of Hemingway. Thanks. kelley@kelleydupuis.com

General enquiries to ernest@hemingway.com

Kelley Dupuis May 2001

Kelley Dupuis is one of the most informative people on Hemingway we have ever come across. He can help American students with their studies on Hemingway, but please respect his immense literary insight and knowledge and do not ask him to do your homework. Your understanding of Hemingway comes from your own personal research. Kelley Dupuis can help with his literary insight of Hemingway but his help is for serious students of Hemingway. Thanks. Kelleydupuis@yahoo.com.

General enquiries to ernest@hemingway.com

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