Hemingway, the Red Cross, and the Great War

Steven Florczyk

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781612776941
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ernest Hemingway's initiation into war

Ernest Hemingway's enlistment with the American Red Cross during World War I was one of the most formative experiences of his life, and it provided much of the source material for A Farewell to Arms and his writings about Italy and the Great War. As significant as it was, Hemingway's service has never been sufficiently understood. By looking at previously unexamined documents, including the letters and diary of Hemingway's commanding officer, Robert W. Bates, official reports of the ambulance and canteen services, and section newspapers published by volunteers, author Steven Florczyk provides crucial insights into Hemingway's service.

The book opens by sharing tales of the volunteer ambulance units from the Western Front, which also led to the involvement of the American Red Cross in Italy. This was where Hemingway came to know many of the experienced drivers from France. In the spring of 1918 the young writer enlisted, serving first with an ambulance unit in Schio and then as a canteen worker at the Piave River until he was wounded. After the war when the volunteer outfits disbanded, Hemingway returned home where he took up his plan to earn a living as a writer.

Hemingway's Red Cross experience was a major influence on his development as a writer and a thinker. Through the power of words, Hemingway's journalism, short stories, and novels exposed the falsehoods of World War I propaganda. His involvement with the Red Cross led to some of the finest American literature on the Great War.

One Esprit de Corps

The story of Ernest Hemingway’s involvement in the Great War begins with the formation of volunteer ambulance services at the outbreak of hostilities in August of 1914. During the summer before Hemingway’s sophomore year in high school, Americans in charge of the hospital in the Paris suburb of Neuilly instituted a plan to provide aid for wounded soldiers on the Western front.¹ As Arlen Hansen explains in Gentleman Volunteers: The Story of the American Ambulance Drivers in the Great War, August 1914–September 1918, the service eventually developed into three separate groups operating in France. Each one of them came to be led by influential figures: H. Herman Harjes, Senior Partner of the Morgan-Harjes Bank in Paris; Richard Norton, archeologist and son of the esteemed Harvard professor of art history, Charles Eliot Norton; and A. Piatt Andrew, a former assistant professor of economics at Harvard who went on to direct the United States Mint and later assumed the role of assistant secretary of the Treasury. The volunteers affiliated with the Harjes and Norton corps eventually merged under the sponsorship of the American Red Cross in 1917, and Andrew’s organization developed into the American Field Service, by far the most extensive group of volunteers aiding wounded soldiers in France.²

The ambulance service, as James Nagel has commented, “had a literary and academic dimension that is at times astonishing.”³ Not only did the corps eventually include John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, Malcolm Cowley, Harry Crosby, Dashiell Hammett, and Louis Bromfield among other writers, but literary figures were also instrumental in its inception. In 1914, Henry James volunteered to write a pamphlet praising the work of Richard Norton to help enlist others in the cause. James’s essay appeared as an “open letter” in “a variety of journals in the United States,” and the esteemed novelist offered to write additional tracts to promote the service as well.⁴ In early 1917, prior to emerging as one of the most influential figures in the postwar Parisian literary milieu, Gertrude Stein volunteered to drive her Ford, nicknamed “Auntie,” to cart supplies and soldiers along the Western front.⁵ When the Red Cross developed their ambulance corps in Italy in the fall of 1917, the American Poets Committee was among the first groups to offer its support, donating fifty vehicles.⁶ Afterward, Robert W. Bates recorded an anecdote about an Austrian’s response of disbelief when, after having been captured by the Italians, the prisoner of war noticed insignia on vehicles affiliating the Red Cross workers with writers. As Bates explained, an Italian captain responded to his enemy’s surprise by assuring him that his observation was correct: “So you see,” the captain told him, “you have the entire world against you, even the American poets.”⁷ The goading comment, delivered partly in jest, nonetheless calls attention to a significant distinguishing feature of the volunteer organizations that derived major support from a wide array of writers.

The backing for ambulance services reflects important values related to the Allied cause that were instrumental in leading to Hemingway’s involvement. The men who formed the units often exhibited, as Charles Fenton has explained, “a spirit of humanitarianism” that compelled them to ameliorate the horrific conditions endured by wounded soldiers who waited for medical treatment.⁸ After Richard Norton accepted Bates for service in France, for example, the latter notified his family to say that his “ambulance dream has been realized,” explaining that

I cannot bear to sit by idly while the greatest conflict man has ever known and probably will know is devouring the world. I cannot bear to be part of this oasis of peace while the world is suffering and struggling madly about me. I have got to take some small part in it and if I cannot be of the world as well as in it my life is not worth thinking much about.⁹

Bates, like many other volunteers, was inspired by the writings of Leslie Buswell, a driver from France whose publications during the war served to characterize ambulance work as “grandly” altruistic and in vital need of support from ambitious philanthropists.¹⁰ Despite later cynicism expressed by some writers toward the units, the contemporaneous documents overwhelmingly show, as Fenton has discussed, that “the vast majority of volunteers sustained throughout the war and into the peace a firm belief in the validity and necessity of their conduct.”¹¹ Hemingway later came to identify with similar ideals as he became involved with the Red Cross in Italy.

Fenton’s emphasis on the selflessness associated with ambulance driving is well-founded, but volunteers were also undoubtedly inspired by the opportunity for thrill-seeking. In addition to expressing his desire to offer assistance abroad, for example, A. Piatt Andrew, well before he took charge of the largest outfit serving on the Western front, wrote his parents about an opportunity to haul wounded men, telling them about “the possibility of having even an infinitesimal part in one of the greatest events in all history” as well as the chance for “witnessing some of the gravest scenes in this gravest of spectacles.”¹² Malcolm Cowley, who served as camion driver in Andrew’s Field Service, noted that many college students volunteered “feeling certain that it would bear us into new adventures.”¹³ Although his account of the experience in Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s is steeped in postwar disillusionment, Cowley was, like several others, “eager to get into action.”¹⁴ Stories relating the daring work undertaken by drivers, such as those published in The Harvard Volunteers in Europe (1916), motivated potential recruits as much as the testimonials describing the work as a chance to perform acts of good will.¹⁵

Even so, when Hemingway began exploring possibilities for involvement in the Great War in the fall of 1917, the ambulance service in France was not an option. Several months after the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, the units that operated along the Western front were militarized.¹⁶ Because of his defective vision, he was ineligible for enlistment according to army regulations; moreover, he was too young to join an armed force without parental consent, which his father and mother were unwilling to provide.¹⁷ At the same time he began his assignment as cub reporter for the Kansas City Star in October, however, front-page headlines reported the disastrous outcome of the Battle of Caporetto that led to the need for a new corps of ambulance drivers on the Italian front.¹⁸

Beginning on October 24, 1917, a week after Hemingway arrived for work at the Kansas City Star, the changing conditions in Italy commanded the world’s attention. German and Austrian soldiers broke through the lines on the Isonzo River, and soon the enemy was in control of a significant amount of territory in the vicinity of the Bainsizza Plateau. “It is Italy’s Verdun,” one article announced.¹⁹ The ensuing retreat of Italian soldiers developed into a wholesale evacuation of the region. Italy’s third and second armies were separated, and the Austrians who occupied the breach employed a “cunning device.” Similar to the sequence of events that leads to suspicion of Frederic Henry as an enemy infiltrator in A Farewell to Arms, soldiers were

dressed in Italian uniforms so as to permit them to spread out over the country or mingle with the Italian forces on both sides of the gap. The Austrians thus garbed were enabled to advance unopposed and then opened fire with machine guns on retreating parties. Some of the Austrians were smuggled forward in motor lorries and then turned against the westward-moving forces.²⁰

Refugees dispersed through points south, and estimates indicated that the population in Rome had increased by one million as a result of the displaced people from towns above the Piave River, where the Italians finally hindered the enemy’s advance. By November 10, the newspaper had published a map of Italy’s new front. General Luigi Cadorna had been replaced by General Armando Diaz, and British and French troops arrived to help reinforce the new positions. The Piave was expected to be the site of the next major battle of the war.²¹ At the end of November, an article reported that the threat was still a grave one, but German forces were digging in for the winter. Over the next several months, Italy continued to suffer from the aftermath of the tremendous defeat, and the Allies were required to plot a new course of action for the coming year.²²

By the first week of November, Italian officials petitioned the United States to declare war on Austria-Hungary, asking Americans to lend the “greatest service to Italy and to the cause of the Entente during the critical events of the present time.”²³ Officials grew increasingly concerned that the Central Powers might achieve continued success in Italy, gaining a significant advantage over the Allies. Maps were printed in the Kansas City Star indicating that if the Piave line did not hold in the coming battles of 1918, the enemy might advance to Vicenza and eventually the Po River, a position that would enable them to conquer the entire northern region.²⁴ Meanwhile, Austria had been showering the countryside with “peace bombs,” propagandistic leaflets suggesting that Italy was a mere pawn, disregarded by the United States and controlled by the interests of Great Britain and France. Using a phrase that Hemingway later employed about protagonists who renounce their commitment to war, the newspaper reported that the tracts encouraged Italian soldiers to declare a “separate peace,” a tactic that had also been employed with Belgium and Russia. The Central Powers were attempting to capitalize on internal strife within enemy states by debilitating them to the point of complete failure, leading those countries to negotiate their own truces independent of the Allied Cause. Such an agreement in Italy, war strategists feared, would allow Germany to concentrate forces more effectively on the Western front.²⁵

These concerns proved influential in the findings of the American Senate Foreign Relations Committee as its members weighed potential strategies for the coming months. Their report, printed on the front page of the Kansas City Star, announced that “as a result of this situation, the Allies have rushed aid to Italy, and the United States is sending ships, money and supplies, and will probably send troops, who will be facing and making war on Austrian soldiers.”²⁶ The following day, December 7, the United States issued a formal declaration of war on Austria-Hungary. Thomas Nelson Page, American ambassador to Italy, promised an enthusiastic crowd, who gathered at the U.S. embassy in Rome, that “it is to Italy, lover and champion of liberty, in her hour of distress, that my people come as one man, pledging every resource for her relief; and be sure we will not stop until we have won.”²⁷ Although members of the Allied Cause had not yet agreed upon a specific timetable for the commitment of armed forces in Italy, even the promise of troops carrying the Stars and Stripes into the region had increased optimism throughout the war-torn country.

Headlines announced news of the disastrous circumstances during the retreat from the Isonzo River, while at the same time feature articles in the Kansas City Star romanticized the Italian front. Burris Jenkins, a local minister who had spent time in Europe, published a series of essays describing the theater of operations as “the most dramatic, the most spectacular battle line in Europe.”²⁸ Unlike the topography of the Western front, “the Alps lift the whole line up and hang it in festoons over their shoulders. You can look down upon the evening’s guns, watch their fire, trace their projectiles, hear and see them fall and explode.”²⁹ Indeed, the mountainous combat zone seemed “hung like a picture on the wall.”³⁰ According to one article, King Victor Emmanuel III made frequent visits to the “common man” in the trenches, and the transports full of soldiers motoring to the lines resounded with song, details that would also appear in A Farewell to Arms minus the exuberance of Jenkins’s account. Another report describes a field hospital under the able command of an exemplary and high-spirited surgeon overseeing the wounded, bloody, and bandaged that are well-served by British Red Cross workers, who “lend a hand to brothers in arms.”³¹ Perhaps “America can lend a hand” too, he suggests.³² The “most romantic of the battle fronts,” Jenkins maintained, “here war retains something of its old glamour.”³³ Steve Paul writes that Hemingway could have been “primed by” these remarks, not only as they might have inspired him to enlist but also because the writings suggest an influence on later portrayals of landscapes in his fiction.³⁴ Hemingway never referred to the articles as an inspiration, but the features nonetheless demonstrate how idealized accounts about the emerging significance of the Italian front served to promote U.S. involvement in aiding her distressed ally. Publicity asserting the validity of that cause was a major factor resulting in Ernest’s involvement with the American Red Cross.

Three months before the Battle of Caporetto, Americans had already initiated a plan for aid to Italy. Henry P. Davison, chairman of the Red Cross War Council, dispatched a temporary commission in late July of 1917 under the direction of George F. Baker Jr. vice president of the First National Bank. Baker’s group included philanthropic businessmen, experts in health-related professions, and, according to the Red Cross Bulletin, “one of the leading authorities in this country on Italy,” Harvard professor Chandler R. Post.³⁵ Their mission was “to investigate conditions” and report “how activity can best be utilized to meet needs of the suffering soldiers and the civilian population of Italy.”³⁶ After a tour of several cities and the frontline trenches, the men returned to the United States on October 2.

As Charles Bakewell recal...