by Richard Owen
With the rain came cholera, “but it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army”.
In Hemingway’s much later novel Across the River and Into the Trees his alter ego Richard Cantwell recalls being an 18-year-old at the front in a cold winter, the mountains white beyond the plain, with the Austrians trying to break through
where the Sile River and the old bed of the Piave were the only lines of defence. If you had the old bed of the Piave then you had the Sile to fall back on if the first line did not hold. Beyond the Sile there was nothing but bare-assed plain and a good road network into the Veneto plain and the plains of Lombardy, and the Austrians attacked again and again and again late through the winter to try to get onto this fine road they were rolling on now which led straight to Venice.
With the natural curiosity of a budding journalist fascinated by history, Hemingway now began to collect detailed information about Italy, Austria and the war which would later emerge in his fiction. He was gripped by the story of Cesare Battisti, a journalist who had been born in Trento – at the time part of Austro-Hungary – but had become an Italian patriot, fleeing to Italy in 1914 and joining the Alpini at the front to fight on Italy’s behalf. Captured in 1916 during the battle for Monte Corno di Vallarsa (now Monte Corno Battisti) and taken back to Trento, Battisti was hung as a traitor. Hemingway kept a photo of him in his pocket, and also took his own photographs of the battlefront (now preserved at the Kennedy Library in Boston).
But other men’s tales of war were not enough and despite his gruesome experiences at the munitions factory, Hemingway was still hungry for action. “I’m going to get out of this ambulance section and see if I can’t find out where the war is”, he told Theodore (Ted) Brumback, a former colleague on the Kansas City Star and fellow Red Cross volunteer. The Americans of the ‘Schio Country Club’ drove their Fiat and Ford ambulances up the hairpin bends to Pasubio and back to evacuate the wounded: it was now that Hemingway first met Dos Passos, at least according to both writers’ later accounts.
He asked to be moved to Section II of the American Red Cross at Roncade, but was itching to get even closer to the front, and volunteered to help Red Cross mobile canteens to deliver cigarettes, cigars and chocolates by bicycle to Italian Arditi special forces further up the frontline at Fossalta di Piave, some forty miles from Venice. The operation was based at Casa Botter, a three storey whitewashed villa in its own grounds near the Piave River at Fornaci, a village within the environs of Monastier. The villa – though closed – still stands up a driveway on a straight country road lined with deep ditches, and still bears the coat of arms of the Botter family, a shield displaying an eagle with a lamb in its claws.
Hemingway felt lonely there. Other Red Cross drivers returned to Schio, but he stayed on, sometimes joining fellow American volunteers on the second floor of the Villa Albrizzi, a silk factory in San Pietro Novello near Monastier, a setting he would later use in ‘Now I Lay Me’, one of his short stories about the war. Though closed, unoccupied and somewhat dilapidated both Casa Botter and the Villa Albrizzi now display information boards proudly recording Hemingway’s stays there. Also still standing, but partly converted into flats, is the nearby former Benedictine Abbey of Monastier, Santa Maria del Pero (meaning ‘river port’), which served as a military hospital, its courtyard full of ambulances. The abbey’s belfry served as a lookout tower and as a result was a favourite target for Austrian artillery.
Hemingway ate at the Italian army officers mess of the 69th and 70th regiments of the Ancona Brigade, and here he met the army chaplain, Don Giuseppe Bianchi, from Florence, who was to play a key role in his later life and would feature in A Farewell to Arms. Another priest who played a prominent part in the war effort was Don Giovanni Minozzi, from Abruzzo, who with help from the YMCA had set up the soldiers’ rest and recreation refuges (‘Case del Soldato’) in Veneto villas such as Casa Botter and Villa Albrizzi, with the aim of giving troops a respite from war which did not involve alcohol or brothels.
“I dispense chocolate and cigarettes to the wounded and the soldiers in the frontline”, Hemingway wrote to a friend back in Chicago in June 1918. “Each aft and morning I load up a haversack and take my tin lid and gas mask and beat it up to the trenches”. It was a brave gesture, but also foolhardy: the Austrians were mounting an onslaught across the Piave River. The conditions were appalling, the problem now being not ice and snow but mud, with the ground on either side of the river sodden after repeated rainstorms.
Hemingway was aware that a fellow American volunteer, Lieutenant Edward McKey, had been killed on a canal in the Piave area earlier in June during a previous Austrian onslaught known as the Battle of the Solstice, which lasted from 15–23 June. He even took a photograph of the spot where McKey had died. But he went ahead anyway. While helping to recover wounded Italian troops around midnight on 8 July – American Red Cross units from Roncade, Schio and Fanzolo rescued over 10,000 injured Italians during the battle – Hemingway was hit when Austrian troops on the other side of the river opened up with mortar and machine gun fire.
Wounded by shrapnel in both legs from a trench mortar bomb (Minenwerfer) which exploded next to him, Hemingway nonetheless somehow helped an Italian soldier who had been wounded in the chest to safety despite his own pain and shock. Limping from his own wounds, Hemingway hoisted the injured soldier on his shoulders and headed for his ambulance some distance away. He had only covered fifty yards when machine gun bullets tore into the knee of his already wounded right leg. He dragged himself and the soldier a further hundred yards before fainting.
A monument, erected in 1979, records the event: “On this embankment”, the inscription reads, “Ernest Hemingway, a volunteer with the American Red Cross, was wounded on the night of 8 July 1918”. Underneath is inscribed his remark “Io sono un ragazzo del Basso Piave” – “I am a boy of the Lower Piave”. Beside it is a 1970s chapel dedicated to the “Ragazzi del ’99”, a reference to Italian youngsters who had been born in 1899 (as Hemingway himself was) and who were called up as teenagers to reinforce an increasingly desperate struggle to keep the Austrians at bay. A toll bridge crosses the Piave here, the successor to a bridge repeatedly blown up during the conflict. Spent cartridges and shells, even soldiers’ remains, are still sometimes found in the area during building work.
What the memorial does not record is the searing impact of the explosion on Hemingway, a trauma which would remain with him forever. The actual spot where Hemingway was blown up was some 500 metres to the left of the monument, on a bend of the river where the Austrian troops were no more than sixty metres away on the other side. Standing there with Bruno Marcuzzo, a local military historian and Hemingway enthusiast, you can see clearly how close to danger Hemingway was. He had cycled there from the church of Pralungo, whose campanile you can still see across the fields from the nearby canals, which at the time were awash with bodies from both sides as the fighting raged back and forth across the frontier.
He left his bicycle at the house closest to the steep embankment and headed for the bunker cut into it, just below where the chapel now stands. Hemingway then made his way along the trench to a command post, and then down to the very edge of the river to a forward observation and listening post. He was not supposed to get so close to the frontline: very possibly he himself set off the Austrian barrage which followed, as Austrian watchers on the other side of the river heard suspicious movements and voices, and opened up.
In his story ‘The Way You’ll Never Be’ Hemingway recalls the vivid image of the “yellow house” he saw to his left as the explosions shook the ground he was standing on. It was not in fact yellow, nor is it yellow now (for it is still there, used as a holiday let): the shutters are blue, and the walls are made of what the Italians call cocciopesto, or opus signinum, a building material first developed in ancient Rome and made of smashed-up tiles and pottery mixed with lime mortar and then pounded into a kind of plaster. To Hemingway, however, it may
well have appeared yellow in the light of the flares the Austrians fired into the air to light up their targets.
Hemingway embellished and sometimes altered the story of his wounding in later years, and some biographers have cast doubt on his heroic actions, including reports that he had a silver plate put in his injured knee cap or that he was shot in the groin as well as the legs. The Red Cross report simply stated: “EM Hemingway was wounded by the explosion of a shell which landed about three feet from him, killing a soldier who stood between him and the point of explosion and wounding others.”
However he was later awarded the Italian Silver Medal for Bravery and promoted to First Lieutenant, and the citation reads: “Gravely wounded by numerous pieces of shrapnel from an enemy shell, with an admirable spirit of brotherhood, before taking care of himself, he rendered generous assistance to the Italian soldiers more seriously wounded by the same explosion and did not allow himself to be carried elsewhere until after they had been evacuated.”
Ted Brumback wrote to Hemingway’s parents that “an enormous trench mortar bomb” had exploded within a few feet of Ernest, and the concussion had knocked him unconscious and buried him in earth. The Italian standing between him and the explosion had been killed, another had had both legs blown off, and Ernest had carried a third badly wounded Italian on his back to the first aid post. “He says he does not remember how he got there nor that he had carried a man until the next day when an Italian officer told him all about it ... Naturally, being an American, Ernest received the best of medical attention.”
Ernest was being “showered with attention by American nurses”, Brumback assured the family back in Chicago. “Wounded in legs by trench mortar; not serious; will receive valor medal; will walk in about ten days”, Hemingway himself told them. He later described the experience to his friend and fellow journalist Guy Hickok, saying he had felt his soul coming out of his body “like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner. It flew all around and then came back and went in again and I wasn’t dead any more”.
“The 227 wounds I got from the trench mortar didn’t hurt a bit at the time, only my feet felt like I had rubber boots full of water on”, Hemingway wrote shortly afterwards to his still anxious family in Chicago, adding “Hot water. And my knee cap was acting queer.” The machine gun bullets which followed “just felt like a sharp smack on my leg with an icy snowball ... The Italian I had with me had bled all over my coat and my pants looked like somebody had made currant jelly in them and then punched holes to let the pulp out”. The doctors “couldn’t figure out how I had walked 150 yards with a load with both knees shot through and my right shoe punctured in two big places. Also over 200 flesh wounds”.
“Got hit with a Minenwerfer that had been lobbed in by an Austrian trench mortar”, Hemingway told his friend AE Hotchner many years later. “They would fill these Minenwerfers with the goddamnest collection of crap you ever saw – nuts, bolts, screws, nails, spikes, metal scrap – and when they blew you caught whatever you were in the way of ... They say I was hit with a machine gun afterward and that’s when the kneecap went, but I think the Minenwerfer did the whole job.”
The machine gun fire was not mentioned by Ted Brumback, nor for that matter in the Red Cross and Italian citations. Nonetheless, despite the fogs of war and memory, there is no doubt that Hemingway was badly wounded yet managed to help others. He was still only 18 years old. “When you go to war as a boy”, he wrote later, “you have a great illusion of mortality. Other people get killed, not you. Then when you are badly wounded for the first time you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.”
In A Farewell to Arms Frederic Henry suffers a similar trauma: he is eating cheese and drinking wine at the frontline when he hears a “chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh” noise and sees a flash “as when a blast furnace door is swung open” with “a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind”. Unable to breathe, he thinks he is dead, but then hears screaming and the sound of machine gun fire. Frederic, who narrates the story, describes how he saw “the star shells go up and burst and float whitely and rocks going up and heard the bombs, all this in a moment, and then I heard close to me someone saying “Mama Mia! Oh Mama Mia”. His legs are “warm and wet”: “I knew that I was hit and leaned over and put my hand on my knee. My knee wasn’t there.”
Hemingway was taken to a first aid post in the mayor’s house near the cemetery, and then carried three kilometres on a stretcher by Italian soldiers to a cowshed with no roof, the Casa Gorghetto, which has since been converted into a winery which offers ‘Hemingwine’ tours and bears a plaque in Italian, English and German recording that Hemingway “received his initial treatment in this house in the night on the 8th July 1918”. Here he lay until five in the morning, his uniform soaked in blood. Hemingway said later he was surrounded by so many dead and dying men that death seemed a more natural state than life, and told a friend that as the delayed pain of his wounds hit him in the middle of the night he considered shooting himself with a pistol he had taken from the battlefield.
Instead he was taken for emergency treatment at a first aid post housed in a primary school at Fornaci di Monastier (since demolished to make way for a housing estate), and given morphine and anti-tetanus injections. He was then treated for five days in a field hospital, Villa Toso, at Casier near Treviso, run by volunteers from the tiny republic of San Marino (now a private house), where doctors removed some of the shell fragments from his body and where he was almost certainly given penicillin against septicemia and gangrene, which killed many of those who had been badly wounded and often meant amputation for others who survived. “The doctors were working with their sleeves up to their shoulders and were red as butchers. There were not enough stretchers”, he wrote later in A Farewell to Arms.
On 15 July 1918 he was transferred by train to the newly established American Red Cross hospital in Milan, where he arrived two days later, and where he was cared for by an attractive, tall, bubbly and dark-haired nurse from Washington DC seven years his senior. Her name was Agnes von Kurowsky: the world knows her better as Catherine Barkley, the heroine of Hemingway’s first bestseller.
3
Agnes and Catherine
“I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows”
Hemingway interviewed by George Plimpton, The Paris Review 1958
“GOD KNOWS I had not wanted to fall in love with her. I had not wanted to fall in love with any one. But God knows I had and I lay on the bed in the room of the hospital in Milan and all sorts of things went through my head but I felt wonderful...” So thinks Frederic Henry, Ernest Hemingway’s alter ego in A Farewell to Arms, when Catherine Barkley comes to see him at the American hospital in Milan. “She looked fresh and young and very beautiful. I thought I had never seen anyone so beautiful”.
Agnes von Kurowsky was 26, and Hemingway by now just 19. He was a patient at the newly opened Red Cross hospital at 4 Via Cesare Cantu, in the centre of Milan near the ornate Duomo. His letters home bear the letterhead “American Red Cross, La Croce Rossa Americana, Via Manzoni 10, Milano”, leading biographers to suppose that Via Manzoni (closer to La Scala) was the scene of his romance with Agnes. But Via Manzoni was the Red Cross headquarters, where volunteers were given their training on arrival. A commemorative plaque at 6 Via Armorari, at right angles to Via Cesare Cantu and part of the same palazzo, records that this was the hospital where he recuperated, and where Agnes cared for injured soldiers as a wartime nurse.
Before the war it had been a small hotel or pensione: the Red Cross took over the third and fourth floors in June 1918. Hemingway recuperated in Room 106 on the fourth floor. The plaque on the building – today a bank – records Hemingway’s stay there in the summer of 1918 “after being wounded at the Piave front”, adding that this inspired the “true story” (favola vera) of A Farewell to Arms. On the back of one of his letters to
his sister Marcelline in November 1918, Hemingway wrote – despite the Via Manzoni letterhead – that his actual address was the American Red Cross hospital at Via Cesare Cantu 4. Marcelline had asked him whether a romance he had hinted at involved a Red Cross nurse. He replied that yes, it did, but he could not say more.
Henry Villard, a fellow ambulance driver and future US diplomat who was being treated for malaria and jaundice at Via Cesare Cantu in a room next to Hemingway on the fourth floor, later wrote that it was “a moderate-sized stone and stucco structure” which apart from the Red Cross emblem over the doorway had “nothing to indicate that it housed the first medical and surgical institution ever to be opened by Americans on Italian soil”. In the half light of the Milan street lamps, Villard said, it looked “as if it belonged to an era of horse carriages and opera lovers, of prosperous Lombardy bankers and businessmen”.
It still had the pensione’s furnishings, and the fourth floor, with its sixteen bedrooms, smelt of fresh paint and disinfectant. But it offered a view of red-tiled roofs and the “lofty spires” of the Duomo, with aircraft flying past from the landing strip in the suburb of Taliedo (one of the first airports in Italy, later abandoned) and now and then an airship, “a silver fish in an ocean of blue”.
The hotel terrace, which ran round two sides of the building, had striped awnings, comfortable wicker armchairs, flower boxes and potted plants, and a table with magazines and a hand-cranked phonograph which played popular wartime songs such as ‘Tipperary’ and ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’. The third floor below housed the ten bedrooms of the nurses’ quarters, as well as a dining room and a library that contained a piano and two singing canaries called George and Martha (after Washington and his wife), where patients gathered to socialise.
The patients also drank whatever alcohol they could find – brandy, vermouth, Cointreau – although not within sight or earshot of Katherine DeLong, the Canadian head nurse (the strict, even severe Miss Van Campen in the novel), who before the war had been nursing superintendent at the Bellevue Hospital in New York and was nicknamed ‘Gumshoe’, presumably because she moved quietly and kept an eye on things.