Hemingway, the Red Cross, and the Great War

Chapter 2: Journey to War

JOURNEY TO WAR 17 Two Journey to War Ernest Hemingway describes the naïve disposition of a novice heading off to combat in his introduction to Men at War: “When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. It can happen to other people; but not to you. Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you.”1 On the night of May 11, 1918, Hemingway himself was a boy leaving for war holding many of his romantic illusions intact. After being accepted for Red Cross service in Italy, he boarded a train to New York where he took passage on the Chicago on his way to the frontlines via Bordeaux, Paris, and Milan. Although scholars have provided several chronicles of the burgeoning writer’s entry into the Great War, additional documents help clarify aspects of Hemingway’s enlistment process and the early stage of his adventure abroad. The portrait of Hemingway that emerges reaffirms the ways in which his fiction contrasts with the personal experience on which it was based. Indeed, the beginning of Ernest’s involvement with the Red Cross shows him to be an eager participant amid wartime fanfare promoting the cause in Europe , a point of view that he later altered significantly in his fiction. At the end of October, 1917, as Red Cross organizers were responding to the needs in Italy in the aftermath of the Battle of Caporetto, Hemingway was writing about an idea he had for entering the military despite his defective vision. As Steve Paul has pointed out, within a few weeks of joining the staff at the Kansas City Star, Ernest wrote his sister about an unlikely option for volunteering on the Western front.2 He explained that I intend to enlist in the Canadian Army soon but may wait till spring brings back Blue days and Fair. Honest kid I cant stay out much longer, the Canadian Mission Down here are good pals of mine and I intend to go in. Major Biggs and Lieut. Simmie are the officers in charge. If you enlist in the Canadian forces you are given as much time as you 17 18 HEMINGWAY, THE RED CROSS, AND THE GREAT WAR specify and then go to either Toronto or Halifax and then to London and in three months you are in France. They are the greatest fighters in the world and our troops are not to be spoken of in the same breath. I may even wait untill the summer is over but believe me I will go not because of any love of gold braid glory etc. but because I couldnt face any body after the war and not have been in it.3 His plan was being conducted on the sly. The circuitous route Hemingway suggested for entering the trenches via the “greatest fighters” of the Canadian Army was not “for Family consumption,” he wrote, but it never materialized just the same. His comment explaining that he would join because “I couldnt face anybody after the war,” however, equates a lack of participation in the conflict with a mark of dishonor that he seemed unwilling to bear. By the week after he had written, Hemingway had chosen another option. The Missouri Guard, with origins like those of the regiment in which his grandfather Anson had served in the Civil War, offered men a chance to receive martial training in addition to performing domestic duties such as the “guarding of the water works.”4 A temporary force authorized by the governor to operate until the return of the National Guard, which had been called up on August 5, 1917, the state militia was a provisional army regulated by the same laws of the federal service, “in so far as the same may be applicable,” but with one notable exception: in addition to the increase of the maximum age limit to fifty years, the “rigid physical qualifications required for enlistment in the National Guard were not insisted upon.”5 This meant that Hemingway, poor eyesight notwithstanding, could become a soldier, albeit temporary and unable to serve in Europe.6 The alternative to foreign duty was also more amenable to his parents, who were opposed to Ernest’s plan to enter the conflict overseas.7 Hemingway’s letters indicate that he signed up with the Home Guard in early November of 1917...