by Richard Owen
8
In Another Country
“God bless my brother gone to war”
American eighteenth-century bedtime prayer
DESPITE THE LURE of exotic Sicily, Hemingway remained attached to both the Veneto and Milan as he prepared to return to the US. “The memory of the north of Italy in 1918 would stay with him all the rest of his life”, as his biographer Carlos Baker observed. The memory of his wartime experiences in northern Italy produced enduring works of fiction, above all A Farewell to Arms, the title taken from a sonnet by the sixteenth-century dramatist George Peele. If the story has a sad ending, this reflects Hemingway’s disappointment over Agnes’ rejection of him rather than disillusionment with Italy as such.
Part of the power of A Farewell to Arms, as James Nagel has pointed out, derives from the fact that it reflects not Hemingway’s optimistic mood when he left Italy in 1918 “after the victorious conclusion of the war with the expectation of a life with Agnes”, but rather his subsequent, darker experiences – the loss of Agnes, the suicide of his father, his two marriages, and the near death of his second wife Pauline in childbirth. The novel’s hero, Frederic Henry, is older than Hemingway was, arrives in Italy much earlier, and therefore lives through the disaster of Caporetto rather than the triumph of Vittorio Veneto.
Frederic is taken for a deserter during the rout which follows the battle of Caporetto, and jumps into the Tagliamento River in Friuli to escape the firing squad. He is eventually re-united with the by now pregnant Catherine, but when they escape to Switzerland she dies in childbirth. Hemingway’s description of the Caporetto disaster was so vivid that many readers thought he must have witnessed it, when in fact the rout had occurred before he even set sail for Europe and the battlefront. He had however absorbed tales of Caporetto from the soldiers he spent time with in 1918 at Monastier and Fossalta, for whom it would still have been a recent – and traumatic – memory.
The biographer Michael Reynolds has suggested that Hemingway drew on the World War One articles and diaries of the Italo-American journalist Gino Speranza. He was also most probably familiar with the work of the historian GM Trevelyan, who was head of the First Ambulance Unit of the British Red Cross. Forced to evacuate the Villa Trento field hospital in Friuli after Caporetto, Trevelyan retrenched at Schio. There he wrote a detailed account of his experiences at the front in the run up to the retreat which was published in June 1918 in the Anglo-Italian Review, and which Hemingway must have seen either at Schio itself or later at the Anglo-American club in Milan, close to the hospital where he was treated.
After Caporetto, Trevelyan led relief operations both in the Piave basin and on the 7000-feet Pasubio massif above. In 1919 he published a book-length version of his reminiscences, Scenes From Italy’s War, praising Hemingway’s hero Cesare Battisti, whose “soul seemed to haunt the rocks of Pasubio, pointing down towards Trento, where they hanged him for a traitor”. With the war over, however, the Austro- Hungarian rulers had been “justly paid”, “trampled out of sight” by their subjects in the “ramshackled empire” they had filled with blood, wailing and oppression for too long.
In the same year Hugh Dalton – later to become a senior member of the Churchill and Attlee governments – issued his With the British Guns in Italy, in which the name Rinaldo Rinaldi appears. Hemingway may even have met the then Lieutenant Dalton, whose battery was positioned at a crossroads on the Altipiano of Asiago, which the American Red Cross ambulances passed every day as they picked up the wounded. Giovanni Cecchin has pointed out that another 1919 account of Caporetto, La ritirata dal Friuli by Ardengo Soffici, includes the story of a refugee who at a bridge on the Tagliamento was suspected of being a spy because of his foreign accent and dived into the river to escape arrest and execution.
The level of detail which Hemingway absorbed is extraordinary. Even in Across the River and Into the Trees, written over three decades later, his alter ego Richard Cantwell gives his driver Jackson an account of his youthful experiences on the frontline as they pass through San Dona, close to Fossalta, and reach a bridge over the Piave River: recalling the bloated bodies of dead soldiers floating in the water, and the difficulty of fighting in a flat landscape of ditches, hedgerows and canals, Cantwell recalls that the river had “very deep and tricky channels in the pebbles and shingles when it was shallow”, adding, “There was a place called Grave di Papadopoli where it was plenty tricky”.
Grave di Papadopoli may mean little or nothing to readers of Hemingway today – but it clearly meant a great deal to him, and indeed was a place all too familiar to those who lived through the Italian campaigns. An island in the Piave three miles long held by the Austrians as an advance post, it was overrun by the Italians (with British support) at the start of the final battle of Vittorio Veneto, marking the end of the war (and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire).
But then Hemingway’s skill was to take the details of war and forge them into a gripping broader narrative. The story was so successful that it was filmed twice, in 1932 with Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper, and again in 1957 with Jennifer Jones and Rock Hudson. In A Farewell to Arms Frederic Henry says he is “always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice”. But at the time Hemingway felt buoyed up by his experiences, writing from his hospital bed after being wounded that he had looked death in the face and had witnessed “a great victory” on the Piave, which had shown the world what wonderful fighters the Italians were.
Although he and other Red Cross personnel were given nominal officer rank as lieutenants, Hemingway clearly felt discomfort at not having been an actual soldier involved in combat. This is clear from ‘In Another Country’, one of his stories about another Hemingway alter ego, Nick Adams, published in 1927 in the collection Men Without Women. Nick is not actually named in ‘In Another Country’, but it clearly belongs in the sequence and was included in the collection The Nick Adams Stories published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1972 together with other war stories such as ‘Night Before Landing’, ‘Now I Lay Me’ and ‘A Way You’ll Never Be’.
In this story, narrated in the first person, Nick, like Hemingway himself, is a wartime ambulance driver being treated in hospital in Milan for leg injuries, with the army doctors proudly using up to date medical technology and experimental rehabilitation techniques. Nick suspects however that the photographs they are shown of recovered patients must have been manipulated since “I always understood we were the first to use the machines”.
The hospital was “very old and very beautiful”, Nick (or Hemingway) tells us, and when the street lights came on (“the dark came very early”), it was pleasant looking at the goods in shop windows and buying roasted chestnuts. But “it was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains”. The officers moreover were disliked and resented in the “Communist quarter” of the city by townspeople who jostled them as they went by. Their refuge was (of course) the Cova, “next door to the Scala”, where “the girls ... were very patriotic”. “I found that the most patriotic people in Italy were the cafe girls”, Nick says, adding “and I believe they are still patriotic”.
Like Hemingway himself, Nick has been given medals, but feels that his fellow patients are worthier of recognition than he is: the citations, he feels, “really said, with the adjectives removed, that I had been given the medals because I was an American ... I had been wounded, it was true; but we all knew that being wounded, after all, was really an accident”. For all his weaving of fact and fantasy, Hemingway is here being unduly harsh on himself (or at least on himself as Nick). As Fernanda Pivano, his Italian translator, once observed, “if there was one thing Hemingway did not lack it was courage”. Courage, Hemingway famously remarked, amounted to “grace under pressure”.
Even when Hemingway later settled at Key West in Florida – recommended to him by John Dos Passos – and in Cuba, the Italy of 1918 remained with him, and Nick Adams remained the persona through which he could deal with the traumas and ne
uroses which for all his bluster and bravado were the real legacy of his wartime experiences. In the case of the story ‘Now I Lay Me’, which like ‘In Another Country’ was published in 1927 as part of the Men Without Women collection, the legacy was insomnia.
The title derives from a familiar bedtime prayer for children first recorded in the eighteenth century:
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
His Love to guard me through the night,
And wake me in the morning’s light.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Hemingway, however, was no doubt thinking of the First World War poster for US government bonds or ‘Liberty Loans’, which shows a little girl kneeling in prayer while her mother sits on the bed, above them a framed photograph of her older brother in uniform:
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
God bless my brother gone to war
Across the seas, in France, so far.
Oh, may his fight for Liberty
Save millions more than little me
From cruel fates or ruthless blast,
And bring him safely home at last.
On the surface ‘Now I Lay Me’ is a story about two army men, a Lieutenant (addressed as ‘Signor Tenente’) and John, his Italian orderly from a Chicago family, sleeping – or rather, failing to sleep – in a tent, presumably a field hospital tent. Nick, or ‘Signor Tenente’, evidently with the child’s verse in mind, is afraid to go to sleep while it is dark and so forces himself to stay awake: he is suffering from wounds and shell shock after a night bombing raid. The story is in effect a powerful interior monologue by Nick as he lies awake and runs memories through his brain, including the sound of silkworms – a reference to Villa Albrizzi, the silk warehouse at San Pietro Novello near Fossalta di Piave where Hemingway had spent nights at the front.
He tries to recall the names of birds, animals, food “and the names of all the streets I could remember in Chicago”, but his mind strays to trout fishing, and then back to women: “Finally, though, I went back to trout fishing, because I found that I could remember all the streams and there was always something new about them, while the girls, after I had thought about them a few times, blurred and I could not call them into my mind and finally they all blurred and all became rather the same and I gave up thinking about them almost altogether.”
Women nonetheless weigh heavily on Nick’s consciousness, as indeed they did on Hemingway’s. After the ‘October offensive’ – the Vittorio Veneto campaign – John visits the recovering Tenente at hospital in Milan “and was very disappointed that I had not yet married, and I know he would feel very badly if he knew that, so far, I have never married. He was going back to America and he was very certain about marriage and knew it would fix up everything”.
‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ (1939) paints a memorable portrait of a writer recalling the Veneto battlefields of his youth such as the Pasubio mountains and the Asiago plateau as he lies dying in Africa. In Cuba in 1932, Hemingway wrote another of his 1918 Nick Adams stories, ‘A Way You’ll Never Be’, the heat of Havana reminding him of “the way it was on the lower Piave in the summer of 1918”. In this story Nick, distributing chocolates and cigarettes by bicycle like his creator, and wearing the same Spagnolini uniform, comes across the bodies of Austrians and Italians: “The hot weather had swollen them all alike regardless of nationality”. They are surrounded by scattered belongings: helmets, gas masks, medical kits, photographs, letters. “There was always much paper about the dead and the debris of this attack was no exception”.
At battalion headquarters Nick falls asleep and dreams of Fossalta di Piave: “Sometimes his girl was there and sometimes she was with someone else and he could not understand that, but those were the nights the river ran so much wider and stiller than it should and outside of Fossalta there was a low house painted yellow with willows all around it and a low stable and there was a canal...” For Hemingway it was a way of working through his war experiences, but also a way of reminding himself of the country he had left behind.
It is striking that several of the Nick Adams stories, written over a period of a decade or so, reflect not only Hemingway’s time at the front as a teenager but also his doubts about marriage, which he evidently hoped would “fix up everything” but which repeatedly failed to do so. In ‘In Another Country’, a wounded Italian major whose hand has been reduced to a stump advises Nick never to get married, because it will only lead to him being hurt. “A man must not marry ... He should not place himself in a position to lose.” Nick later learns from a doctor that the major’s wife has died unexpectedly of pneumonia.
When November 1918 brought the end of the war at last, Hemingway wrote to his family: “Well it’s all over! And I guess everybody is plenty joyous.” The American hospitals in Italy were closing down, and it was time to “cross the ocean”. His thoughts were turning to home. Despite the wounded major’s words, Hemingway did now get married – although not to Agnes, nor to one of the Bellia girls he had met on the lake at Stresa, nor to the mysterious Maria from Turin. He met his wife in Chicago, and her name was Hadley.
9
Genoa Correspondent
“If you want to travel gaily, and I do, travel with good Italians”
Hemingway, The Dangerous Summer
HEMINGWAY RETURNED HOME in early January 1919, sailing to New York from Genoa on the SS GiuseppeVerdi. He still wore his splendid Spagnolini uniform and cape, and despite being an aspiring author rather than an actual one – he was still not 20 years old – his impressive appearance made him a magnet for reporters who greeted Americans returning from the war. The New York Sun interviewed Hemingway and printed a story about his frontline wounds, saying he had “defied the shrapnel of the Central Powers”. He played on this image as a “war hero”, even claiming that he had been personally decorated by the King of Italy.
But the homecoming was also a time to catch his breath after his Italian war experiences. He had survived not only operations on his knees and legs but also the flu epidemic and bouts of jaundice, tonsilitis and Vincent’s angina, or “trench mouth”. He was returning home to earn enough money to marry Agnes, who he habitually referred to in letters as “my girl” and in a letter to his sister Marcelline in November 1918 simply called “the wife”. And it was now that he learned from Agnes that she was involved with someone else.
It remains unclear whether Agnes really ever thought of marrying him after the war: she referred to marriage several times in her letters, but later indicated she had only done so to stop Hemingway taking up Jim Gamble’s offer, which would have made him a “kept man” travelling at someone else’s expense. She was now at a hospital in Torre di Mosto, inland between Venice and the Adriatic coastal resort of Caorle, tending to wounded Italian soldiers.
“Dear Ernie, to me you are a wonderful boy”, she wrote in January 1919. “I only fear all the Chicago femmes will be willing you away from your night nurse.” But she was “not the perfect being you think I am”, she wrote to Hemingway just two months later, in March 1919. Her feelings for him were more those of a mother than a sweetheart, and “I can’t get away from the fact that you’re just a boy – a kid”. She was writing late at night after “a long think by myself ”, and “I am afraid it is going to hurt you”.
Then came the revelation that she hoped to marry the aristocratic Italian officer Domenico Caracciolo, who she had nursed at Torre di Mosto. “I hope and pray that after you have thought things out, you’ll be able to forgive me & start a wonderful career, & show what a man you really are. Ever admiringly and fondly, your friend, Aggie.”
He took refuge in trying his hand at short stories, putting the finishing touches to ‘The Mercenaries’, in which he mocked the Italian dare devil pi
lot Fulco Ruffo di Calabria, possibly because it was the pilot’s aunt, Rita Ruffo, a nursing colleague of Agnes’, who had encouraged her to take up with Caracciolo. The year 1919 also saw ‘The Passing of Pickles McCarty’, at first called ‘The Woppian Way’ – Hemingway (in less generous moods) sometimes referred to Italy as ‘Wopland’, and the title is a play on the Appian Way.
“I hate jazzing all over Europe when there is so much of my own country I haven’t seen”, he wrote to a friend in Michigan in August 1920. “But the Wopland gets in the blood and kind of ruins you for anything else.” The tale drew heavily on his time at Bassano del Grappa and at the front with the Arditi. It tells the story of Nick Neroni, a boxer who changes his name to Pickles McCarty, volunteers to fight with the Arditi on the Italian front and then joins Gabriele D’Annunzio, the equally self-promoting Italian poet, flying ace and war hero, at Fiume.
Another tale told the story of the wartime misbehaviour of the fat, drunken and cowardly mayor of Roncade, which Hemingway described as a “hot white town” fifteen miles north of Venice, where “dusty trains of camions tore through the town bound for the front”. ‘How Death Sought Out the Town Major of Roncade’ was only discovered in 2004 by the then mayor, Ivano Sartor, in the Hemingway archives at the Kennedy Library in Boston. It tells the story of a local man of noble origins named Vergara (we are not told his first name) who has pulled strings to get himself elected mayor (or ‘major’, after town officials were given military titles during the war).
Because the front is coming closer no one is left in Roncade except the mayor, the two young girls who run the trattoria and the whores at the Villa Rosa (brothel) who, however, are soon taken off to safety by a “smirking camion driver”. Vergara, who had somehow imagined holding the top public office in the town would save him from the war, finds fear eating into his stomach “like a cancer” and takes refuge in cognac, sleeping it off in a room at the trattoria. When a Sardinian soldier arrives from the front and stops by for a drink, the cafe girls begin crying and tell him the mayor is a “lover of young girls”.