Hemingway an Ambulance Driver - ARC Section Four. 1918

The Red Cross accepted Hemingway as an ambulance driver but recommended that he saw an optician and bought a pair of glasses.

Hemingway ignored the advice, underwent his indoctrination period of two weeks and by May 23rd he was aboard the ship, the Chicago, bound for Bordeaux, France and for onward journey to his final destination, Italy.

He had his friend Theodore Brumback and a new pal, Howell Jenkins, beside him.

The trip from America to Italy was a long and tiring one. The three men, Ernest, Thoedore and Howell stopped off in Paris en route to Italy.

High explosive shells from the German artillery, fell in the streets around them as they went sightseeing. They spent two days in Paris and then boarded a train for Italy.

On the morning of June 7, 1918, 18-year-old Hemingway stepped off a train at Milan's Garbaldi Station and assumed the duties of a Red Cross ambulance driver. Hemingway and his two pals were quickly sent to work in Milan.

There were many casualties in the First World War. Conditions were very bad for the soldiers, apart from falling sick with medical complaints such as trench foot and diseases derived from poor food and conditions, many soldiers were wounded and killed.

Ambulance drivers were important personel and played a very important part in the war. They had to risk their own lives and go into battlefields and pick up the wounded. Surrounded by gunfire they had to carry the wounded back to the ambulance and then drive them on to makeshift hospitals. Or in the worst case pick up the dead and take them to the mortuary.

As soon as Hemingway arrived in Milan an entire munitions factory exploded.

Hemingway's initiation into his new job was sharp and shocking. He picked up the bodies of the dead and carried them to an improvised mortuary.

He wrote a postcard to the Star telling them of his considerable shock at the work he was doing, especially finding women among the dead.

Two days later, Hemingway, Brumback and twenty three others who comprised ACR Section Four were on a train to Vicenza.

Then on to Schio, 24 Kilometres to the northwest of Milan in the foothills of the Dolomites. Hemingway named the headquarters the Schio Country Club.

A newspaper of sorts was published by the regiment, called Ciao and Ernest wrote a contribution somewhat sending up himself and his fellow ambulance drivers.

Hemingway found his assignment in Schio boring. He'd seen action, he'd had an intial taste of war of Milan, (with the munitions factory blowing up) but now he was in a place that was a long way from the front (where the fighting was) and he was doing mundane, boring work, mainly helping civilians. This was not what he wanted or had expected.

Feeling he was not properly involved in the war and wanting to see action, troops and fighting, Hemingway signed up for a different job - canteen duty.

The Red Cross (a charitable foundation), mounted canteens that fed and provided for the troops who were on the 'battlefield'.

Hemingway was placed in Fossalta, a low lying, heavily damaged village in the middle of the fighting. His job may have been mundane, giving out food to the army but he was right in the middle of the fighting, he was working in a battle ground.

On July 8th 1918 Hemingway was hit by Austrian artillery, six days before his nineteenth birthday.

He had been injured in his knee and foot and had to return to Milan for hospitalization and many operations on his wounded limbs..

It wasn't until two months later that he was able to walk with the aid of crutches.

But he had been promoted to First Lieutenant and awarded a silver medal of valor.

By October, Hemingway was back in his regiment of Section Four but then he had jaundice and had to return yet again to Milan for hospitalization.

By December 1918 he had left the service and by January 1919 he was back in America with 227 scars on his wounded leg.

Whilst in hospital in Milan, he met and fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky. Agnes and Hemingway spent some time together but she dismissed him as being too young for her. She later wrote to him after he had returned to the States telling him that she had found someone else. Ten years later, Hemingway recounted his experiences in "A Farewell To Arms," his 1929 novel about an affair between a wounded World War I soldier and his nurse.

Around midnight on July 8th, 1918 in a forward listening post on the west bank of the river near Fossalta, Ernest Hemingway was severely wounded. He was carrying a supply of cigarettes, postcards and chocolate for the Italian soldiers.

A projectile, the size of a five gallon tin and filled with steel rod fragments and miscellaneous metal junk, was sent by the Austrian Minenwerfer crews. Hemingway was chatting with Italian soldiers when it exploded in their midst. Several men were wounded. Hemingway was wounded but managed to carry another badly wounded man to the command post. As he was doing so he was hit by machine gun fire. It was two hours before a doctor came and administered morphine to him. He was taken to a field hospital near Treviso. He spent five days there, swathed in bandages. Then he was taken to Milan.

In Milan he was put in a large mansion at 10 Via Allessandro Manzoni along with three other wounded men. There were 18 Red Cross nurses to look after them. Hemingway had a machine gun slug in his right foot and another lodged behind his right kneecap. He was nicknamed 'Broken Doll'.

Hemingway was popular with all the nurses and he enjoyed their company and joking with them but he liked one nurse especially. Agnes Von Kurowsky. She was a tall dark haired girl, reared in Washington, D.C. After her father's death in 1910, she had worked as an assistant in the Washington Public Library and then gone on to nursing school at Bellevue. In January 1918 she applied for admission to the Red Cross Nursing Service and late in June sailed for Europe. Being in Milan was her first foreign assignment.

She was, by all accounts, a very good nurse. She had a kind temperament, was generous and was full of bubbly energy. All the men admired her and the joke amongst the men was who was to have a date with her first.

It appears Hemingway was the winner. He was the hero in the hospital. He was the first American to be injured in Italy and he had been injured in a very heroic way, saving the life of another man. Every nurse and wounded soldier admired Hemingway and Agnes Von Kurowsky said of him ' Men loved him. You know what I mean '.

Hemingway was nineteen years old, and perhaps, here in this romantic setting of a hospital in wartime Milan, he discovered for the first time, he was attracted to women and women were attracted to him. By the middle of August, Ernest was 'wildly in love' with Agnes. It was his first adult love affair and he hurled himself into his emotions. Agnes did not fully respond. She had a duty to do and refused to let the affair pass the kissing stage. Ernest wanted to marry her but she was committed to her nursing career.

Agnes called Ernest 'Kid' and herself 'Mrs Kid' and kept a picture of him in her pocket and wrote to him nightly, despite seeing him every day. But she possibly suspected this 'wartime' romance would not last.

After two months of looking after Hemingway in Milan, Agnes was posted to another hospital, Via di Camerata near Florence. They wrote to each other regularly, sometime three or four times a day. Ernest was very sad but resolved to return to the front. By October, Hemingway had returned to the fighting but had to hurry back to the hospital in Milan with a severe case of jaundice.

In November Agnes returned to Milan, she knew of course what had happened to him, because of their daily letters. She only stayed a week with Hemingway in the Milan hospital before she left to go to Treviso, to look after more sick American troops.

In December Hemingway went to the hospital in Treviso to surprise Agnes in the hospital. It was not a very successful meeting. She criticized his manner and persuaded Hemingway to return to his home. She also hinted that maybe in two years or so they would get married. She wanted to pursue her career as a nurse and she was worried about their age gap.She was 26 and he was only 19. They did not spend the Christmas together.

They remained in touch but their relationship ended when Agnes sent him a letter of rejection. Hemingway was very upset at what he saw as Agnes running away from him and even wrote a bitter letter to another of the nurses (Elsie Macdonald) complaining about Agnes.

However, later when Hemingway married Elizabeth Hadley, he wrote to Agnes and told her of his marriage and his living in Paris. She responded writing to him ' Anyhow I always knew it would turn out right in the end, and you would realize it was the best way, as I'm positive you must believe, now you have Hadley....'

Later Hemingway wrote Three Stories and Ten Poems. One story summarized his love affair with Agnes in Milan, concluding with an account of his homecoming and her letter of rejection. It was, it was said, his way of getting rid of the remnants of spite.

Eleven years later Hemingway was still coming to terms with his love affair with Agnes. He wrote ' A Farwell to Arms ', a story based on himself and Agnes. He was still trying to purge himself of his first real love.

His five month unconsummated love affair with Agnes was to live with him for the rest of his life.

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