Hemingway, the Red Cross, and the Great War by Steven Florczyk (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hemingway, the Red Cross, and the Great War by Steven Florczyk Alex Vernon Hemingway, the Red Cross, and the Great War. By Steven Florczyk . Kent, OH : Kent State UP , 2014 . 142 pp. Cloth $49.00 On a rainy Wednesday, 25 June 2014, participants in the sixteenth biennial international Hemingway conference visited the bend in the Piave River, at [End Page 106] the northeastern edge of Fossalta, where Ernest Hemingway received his severe wounding. According to our host, Gianni Moriani from the Università di Venezia Ca’ Foscari, Hemingway had begun his temporary assignment to run the local rolling canteen ninety-six years ago to the day of our visit. However, Red Cross records indicate his actual posting was not to Fossalta but to Fornaci, some seven kilometers back from the Piave. Such research precision is at the heart of Steven Florczyk’s Hemingway, the Red Cross, and the Great War. The book’s ambition is modest. It uses “previously unexamined materials” to “offer even more helpful details about Hemingway’s Red Cross service” and “clarify aspects of Hemingway’s involvement that have been unclear or not entirely accurate in previous scholarship” (xv – xvi). Florczyk draws on the mainstays—Baker’s Life Story, Reynolds’s Hemingway’s First War and The Young Hemingway, Villard and Nagel’s Hemingway in Love and War, Lewis’s A Farewell to Arms: The War of the Words—takes full advantage of Steve Paul’s work on the Kansas City Star’s reportage about the war as well as the first volume of the Letters project. It also conducts significant original research, including “the diary of the commanding officer, Captain Robert W. Bates; official reports documenting the ambulance and canteen services; section newspapers published by volunteers; as well as additional contemporaneous accounts” (xvi). The result is a compact yet thorough recounting of Hemingway’s wartime experience in five chapters, from the Red Cross ambulance service’s decision to support the Italian front and Hemingway’s decision to volunteer (“Esprit de Corps” and “Journey to War”), to his service and wounding (“Active Duty” and “Hero of the Piave”), and wrapping up with a survey of the war’s treatment in Hemingway’s writing (“Dopo la Guerra”). If you are looking for a final answer about whether Hemingway ignored his own injuries and carried a wounded Italian soldier to safety, you will be disappointed. Florczyk compares all the accounts he presumably could find—wisely disregarding the fiction—but can only finally state that Hemingway “apparently” performed this heroic feat (70). More intriguingly, Florczyk provides evidence that suggests another Italian soldier might have given his own life to save Hemingway’s, this from Captain Robert W. Bates’s “Ambulance Report No. 9” (Bates commanded the Red Cross ambulances in Italy): During such a trip, E.M. Hemingway of Section 4 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 [End Page 107] explosion, and wounding others. Due to the soldier who lost his life and who protected Hemingway somewhat from the explosion, and due also to the fact that the eclats [shell-casing fragments] had not yet obtained their full range, Hemingway was only wounded in the legs. (79) In Hemingway in Love and War, James Nagel quotes a nearly identical sentence to this first one, from Guy Lowell’s Red Cross Report of the Department of Military Affairs, though Nagel does not quote the second sentence (if indeed Lowell repeated it) and does not draw the same potential inference (216). We should not at all be surprised that military reports reproduce the same language—indeed alterations to the most immediate official account would be the more suspect scenario. Other biographers have quoted Ted Brumback’s description, which includes the soldier killed between Hemingway and the blast but does not carry the same implication (Florczyk 78). Hemingway, the Red Cross, and the Great War achieves a great deal in the way of context. In the opening pages, for example, Florczyk tracks the issues within the Red Cross that created the delay between Hemingway’s application and acceptance. He singles out Section...