“When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people die, not you.”
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On July 8, 1918, just two weeks before his 19th birthday, American Red Cross volunteer Ernest Hemingway was killed by an Austrian mortar shell while delivering chocolate to soldiers on the Italian front.
the ball landed about three feet From the teenage Hemingway, knocking him down and filling his legs with shrapnel. An Italian soldier standing between him and the explosion was killed; Another lost both legs in the explosion He later died of his wounds.. According to a letter his friend Ted Brumback wrote to Hemingway’s parents after visiting him in the hospital, Hemingway, once regaining consciousness, managed to carry a third wounded soldier on his back to the first aid station. Brumback wrote, “He says he does not remember how he got there, nor whether he took the man,” until the next day, when an Italian officer told him all about it and said that for this act he had been voted to give him the Medal of Valor.
Hemingway spent six months in Milan, before moving home to Oak Park, Illinois in January 1919, where he fell in love with Agnes von Kurowski, the American Red Cross nurse who cared for him.
Hemingway later wrote, “When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people die, not you.” men at war. “Then when you get badly injured for the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you too. After being seriously injured two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I discovered that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all the men before me. Everything I had to do was always done by men. If they had done it I could have done it too and the best part about it was Don’t worry.”
Despite some of the details being unclear, the incident quickly became part of the Hemingway mythos – and perhaps partly because of it. (How many wounds did he suffer? When did he get those medals, and for what? Did he actually rescue any other soldiers?) “Hemingway had confused the facts of the case during his convalescence days in Milan, and upon returning home, he gilded Lily (a sufficiently dramatic story for most veterans) with tall tales of battles with Italian infantry,” Robert W. Lewis wrote in 1982, explaining that his war experience There is no description. Only accounts of Hemingway’s youth have been shown to be not entirely accurate – “not out of his desire to deceive, but out of playfulness,” he says.
or possibly from his literary inclinations, since his experiences in Italy formed the backbone of his 1929 novel a farewell to Armswhich became his first best-selling book and cemented his reputation as a great American writer.
