Hemingway, the Red Cross, and the Great War

Chapter 5: Dopo la Guerra

98 HEMINGWAY, THE RED CROSS, AND THE GREAT WAR Five Dopo la Guerra As the war came to a close, the men who formed the ambulance units moved on to other endeavors. After Richard Norton had a falling-out with U.S. officials during militarization on the Western front, he took an assignment with the French government to investigate rumors of German espionage. In December of 1917, he returned to his home in London and died of meningitis the following August. Robert W. Bates was on leave from Vicenza at the time and assisted as a pallbearer at the funeral . A. Piatt Andrew and several of his drivers converted the American Field Service into a charitable organization supporting students from the United States studying in France. In 1921, Andrew was elected to the House of Representatives by the people of the Sixth Congressional District in Massachusetts and held his seat for seven consecutive terms. Herman Harjes served in the American Expeditionary Force under General John Pershing and was wounded in August of 1918. He was discharged as a lieutenant colonel in May of 1919 and returned to his position as Senior Partner of Morgan, Harjes & Co. in Paris.1 After peace was declared in Italy, the Red Cross commission was demobilized by March of 1919. Colonel Robert P. Perkins, formerly president of the Bigelow-Hartford Carpet Company and a director in the National Park Bank, took up residence once again in New York City and resumed his activities among various social clubs in Manhattan. Friends of his claimed that “he sapped his strength during the war,” and Perkins died after a long illness in April of 1924.2 Major Guy Lowell went to Brookline, Massachusetts, where he continued as an architect until his death on February 5, 1927. A week later, officials paid tribute to his “supreme and final achievement” at the dedication ceremony for the New York County Court House.3 In October of 1918, Captain Bates declined an offer from Perkins to stay on as an administrator. Instead, he went to Paris and married Juliette Marchand, a French nurse who cared for him after his appendectomy at the American Hospital in Neuilly. Bates 98 DOPO LA GUERRA 99 returned to Boston and later moved to California where he took up farming.4 Before heading the canteen units, Captain James Gamble had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. After the armistice, he remained abroad for several months until he went home to Philadelphia and resumed painting.5 In late January of 1919, Lieutenant Ernest Hemingway returned to Oak Park, Illinois, and embarked on his career as a professional writer. His adventure abroad had a profound impact on his work, and he drew from each phase of his experience for a substantial amount of material over the course of his entire career. Hemingway never published a fictional account that closely follows his journey to war, but his writing incorporates many related aspects, albeit from a different point of view. One of the most obvious parallels is apparent in portrayals that depict the youthfulness of participants at the front. The injured narrator of “In Another Country,” for example, frequently refers to himself and the wounded soldiers with whom he associates as “boys.”6 In A Farewell to Arms, Catherine Barkley mentions her deceased fiancé as “a boy” killed at the Battle of the Somme.7 When Frederic Henry is convalescing in Milan, he describes three of his fellow patients likewise, referring to a “thin boy,” a “nice boy,” and a “fine boy” (107–08). Even though Henry appears somewhat older and more experienced , he also thinks of himself in youthful terms, as when he leaves the action on the battlefront to enjoy his idyll with Catherine in Switzerland: “I had the feeling of a boy who thinks of what is happening at a certain hour at the schoolhouse from which he has played truant” (245). Colonel Cantwell, in Across the River and Into the Trees, frequently describes his younger self as a “boy” when recalling his World War I adventures, and Hemingway remembered himself likewise, as evident in his comments in the introduction to Men at War suggesting that he was “a boy” who “was very ignorant” in 1918.8 As James Steinke has observed on “In Another Country,” the fictional stories indicating youthful idealism are not “fictionalized personal history,”9 but they demonstrate the influence of a key feature of Ernest’s departure for war considering that numerous volunteers...