"Where Do We Go From Here?": Ernest Hemingway's "Soldier's Home" and American Veterans of World War I

Criticism on Ernest Hemingway's "Soldier's Home" has emphasized the story's autobiographical dimension; however, the story also examines the problems encountered by a group to which Hemingway did not actually belong: the combat veterans of the American Expeditionary Forces (A.E.F.). Hemingway's title, a play on the term "soldiers' home," evokes the Veterans' Bureau scandal of 1923, an event that symbolizes the mistreatment of Americans who fought in the Great War. Krebs's service in the casualty-ridden Second Division and the story's setting in rural Oklahoma (a region that contributed relatively few soldiers to the A.E.F.'s hardest-hit units) also contribute to the story's central theme—that in its post-war pursuit of normalcy, the United States had failed to provide a "home" for its most tested soldiers.