Dearest Hem,
Well, as they say back home, "In for a dime, in for a dollar."
You write of your arrival in Paris, "We heard our first shell arrive soon after Breakfast. Nothing but a dull boom (like blasting at Summit). We had no means of knowing where it hit but it was a long way away."
Paris was starting to feel the pressure of the enemy shelling, but there was still room for levity and fun for those newly arrived and unaware of the pending danger, "Have seen all the sights. The Champs Elysee. Tuilleries, Louvre Invalides Arc D'Triomphe etc... Ted Jenks and I are having Le Grande Time. Tonight we went to the Follies Bergert. Hot puppums... We leave for Milan tomorrow - Tuesday - night. Travel first class all way. Tis Ye gay life."
You follow with a brief note to your father, "Everything Lovely. We go to the Front tomorrow. I'm in the mountains. Ted and I were split up. Everything quiet now they say. We've been treated like Kings. Been two days here. Wonderful in Alps." Dated that same day as the note to your father was a note to a friend in Kansas City, "Having a wonderful time!!! Had my baptism of fire my first day here, when an entire munition plant exploded. We carried them in like at the General Hospital, Kansas City. I go to the front tomorrow. Oh Boy!!! I'm glad I'm in it. They love us down here in the mountains."
Later in July you wrote your friend, Ruth in Oak Park, Illinois, "It all seems about a million miles away and to think that this time last year we had just finished graduating. If anybody had told me when I was reading that damn fool prophecy last year that a year from date I would be sitting out in front of a dug out in a nice trench 20 yards from the Piave River and 40 yards from the Austrian lines listening to the little ones whimper way up in the air and the big ones go scheeeeeeeek Boom and every once in a while a machine gun go tick a tack a tock I would have said, 'Take another sip.'"
You go on to tell Ruth about a shell that came right through the roof of the house where you were staying, but it's the description of what you are doing in the war effort, and for whom that I find most interesting,"What I am supposed to be doing is running a posto Di ricovero. That is I dispense chocolate and cigarettes to the wounded and the soldiers in the front line. Each aft and morning I load up a haversack and take my tin lid and gas mask and beat it up to the trenches. I sure have a good time but miss their being no Americans. Gee I have darn near forgot the English language."
Dear Hem, what a mess you are in. The local paper in Oak Park, Illinois was ablaze with your story, "Ernest Hemingway, son of Dr. and Mrs. C.E. Hemingway and a member of the Red Cross Ambulance Corps in Italy, received his baptism of fire just five weeks after his arrival overseas and, moreover, has won a citation for bravery."
Hem, how did you do it? With over 200 pieces of shell lodged in your body you managed to rescue and carry a fellow soldier to the first aid dug-out. Your friend Ted writes to your parents, "An enormous trench mortar hit within a few feet of Ernest while he was giving out chocolate. The concussion of the explosion knocked him unconscious and buried him with earth. There was an Italian between Ernest and the shell. He was instantly killed while another, standing a few feet away, had both his legs blown off. A third Italian was badly wounded and this one Ernest, after he had regained consciousness, picked up on his back and carried to the first aid dug-out."
You later wrote your parents about the event, "You know they say there isn't anything funny about this war. And there isn't. I would say it was hell, because that's been a bit overworked since Gen. Sherman's time, but there have been 8 times when I would have welcomed Hell... F'rexample. In the trenches during an attack when a shell makes a direct hit in a group where you're standing. Shells aren't bad except direct hits. You just take chances on the fragments of the bursts. But when there is a direct hit your pals get spattered all over you. Spattered is literal."
You, who just turned 19 in July, now laid up for months in a military hospital in Italy would struggle for much longer than you expected in order to recover from your wounds. At the end of August you wrote your mother to tell her that your still awfully weak yet, that your right leg was taken out of the cast and that there's still more "carving" that has to happen to repair the damage.
As always a romantic, you also wrote her that you have fallen in love with an American nurse who works at the Hospital, though you try to play it down as you know your Mother has a habit of getting worked up over news like that.
You write your parents, at the end of September, that you're getting out and about a bit and that you are enjoying your recovery time in Italy now that you are more mobile. One of the most poignant things that you wrote your parents about the war has to do with death and dying, "There are no heroes in this war. We all offer our bodies and only a few are chosen, but it shouldn't reflect any special credit on those that are chosen. They are just the lucky ones. I am very proud and happy that mine was chosen, but it shouldn't give me any extra credit. Think of the thousands of other boys that offered. All the heroes are dead. And the real heroes are the parents. Dying is a very simple thing. I've looked at death, and really I know. If I should have died it would have been very easy for me. Quite the easiest thing I ever did. But the people at home do not realize that. They suffer a thousand times more. When a mother brings a son into the world she must know that some day the son will die. And the mother of a son that has died for his country should be the proudest woman in the world, and the happiest. And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered."
How has your view of the world and yourself changed, Ernest? Is the burden of these events weighing on you? Do you dream of your prewar life and does it now seem forever lost in the stark light of war and death?
As I look ahead to your own eventual aging and death I wonder if you still felt that way when you were older - if you still felt that dying in a youthful "blaze of light" outweighed old age and death. In your mind did aging exclude youthfulness? I may have thought that in my 20s, but I've discovered that the mind ages differently than the body and that it's possible to remain youthful in thought and view well into the more advanced years of life. That discovery, for me was a revelation, as I had assumed, aging precluded a youthful mind. I am hard-pressed, at times, in marrying the thoughts of "growing old gracefully", however, I don't necessarily see youth as an advantage either. Each stage of life comes with its upside and its downside.
What I see, for you, is that the idea of adventure as lived by inexperienced youth has been seriously wounded by the reality of war. It will be interesting to see what comes out the other side of recovery.
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