On this date in 1918, a young man from the Chicago suburbs was wounded in Italy fighting in the Great War. Before volunteering, he'd been a reporter on the Kansas City Star. He would go on to become one of the great chroniclers of war. He didn't do this as a military historian, but instead as an author of fiction. He reigned supreme in a generation of writers who found the Victorian prose popular in his day not only pompous, but -- when contrasted with the unthinkable carnage of world war -- hypocritical.
His name was Ernest Hemingway, and when he died in July of 1961 by his own hand, no less an accomplished author than John F. Kennedy praised him.
Looking back on his World War I experience as America plunged into war again in 1942, Ernest Hemingway marveled at his own naiveté. "I was an awful dope when I went to the last war," he said. "I can remember just thinking that we were the home team and the Austrians were the visiting team."
But don't old men depend on just such attitudes when they send young men off to fight?
In 1917, when the United States entered the Great War, young Hemingway, working at the K.C. Star, decided to join the Army. His father, a Chicago physician, balked at the idea, which was a problem as Ernest was only 17. Further complicating the boy's new goal was poor sight in his left eye, which made it difficult to pass a physical exam.
The riddle was solved when the Kansas City Star editors hired a 22-year-old Cornell dropout named Theodore Brumback. While golfing at school, he'd struck a ball off the fairway that ricocheted off a tree and back into his face, putting out an eye. Restless afterward, Brumback went to France where he enlisted in the American Field Service, organized at the outbreak of the war to drive ambulances for the American Hospital of Paris. Four months later, he was in Kansas City where he was telling Ernest Hemingway that ambulance drivers didn't need two good eyes.
Joined by Ted Brumback, who itched for more action, Hemingway signed up. Along with a slew of other American volunteers, they shipped out from New York on May 21, 1918, seeing a favorable omen in the name of their ship: a French vessel named the Chicago.
From Milan, Hemingway sent a postcard to the Star newsroom describing "my first baptism of fire." A munitions factory had exploded and the scene, which Hemingway would return to in his fiction, was horrific. It wasn't only the mutilated bodies and body parts Hemingway had to carry back to the morgue that shocked him. Worse, most of the victims were women.
But he kept moving forward, toward the front. He drove ambulances in the Italian town of Schio, and then went even further forward to an Italian village called Fossalta on the banks of the River Piave. There, just after midnight on July 8, 1918, Hemingway rode his bicycle to the battlefield to deliver chocolate, cigarettes, and postcards to Italian soldiers in their trenches. He had an easy camaraderie with the Italian troops, who appreciated the provisions as well as Hemingway's attempts to speak their language.
The young American told them he'd come down from the mountains to be with them on the plains. By way of reply they laughed ruefully and said they'd rather be up on the high ground. Then, from across the river came the sound of an incoming Austrian mortar shell. It was roughly the size of a five-gallon can, filled with steel fragments, and it exploded among them. "I tried to breathe," Hemingway related later, "but my breath would not come." Beside him lay a dead soldier he'd been talking to a moment earlier. Another man's legs were blown off.
Concussed and injured, Hemingway himself didn't remember all the details, and he provided slightly differing accounts during his life, several of them in his fiction. The most credible might be the account in "A Farewell to Arms," when the Hemingway-inspired Lt. Frederic Henry says simply: "I didn't carry anybody. I couldn't move."
His brief, but intense, wartime experience informed his writing for the next four decades. The real-life Ernest Hemingway, not yet 19, was carried by stretcher to a dressing station, only to find it abandoned because it had come under artillery fire. His uniform was so drenched with Italian blood that the medics thought he'd been shot in the chest. He was given morphine and told to wait for two hours for further treatment. While doing so, he prayed, a scene familiar to any reader of the short story "Now I Lay Me."
As for the idyllic town of Abruzzi featured prominently in "Across the River and Into the Trees, a white-haired soldier Hemingway met at dawn in a converted field hospital came from there. Upon learning that the boy had a birthday in two weeks, the man said he'd turn 55 in August.
"You're too old, Dad, for this war," said the boy.
"Corpo di Bacco," came the reply. "I can die as well as any man."
Death, and the fear of dying -- and the fear of being grievously wounded or changed by war -- were themes Hemingway returned to many times.
"Hemingway's great war work deals with … what happens to the soul in war and how people deal with that afterward," author Tobias Wolff observed at a Hemingway centennial event. That 1999 seminar was held at the John F. Kennedy Library. "The way we write about war or even think about war," added Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, "was affected fundamentally by Hemingway."
Another Harvard man who knew a thing or two about war was saddened when he learned of Hemingway's death in 1961. Before he became president, JFK had written a letter to Hemingway, trying to ascertain the accuracy of the quote widely attributed to the author, namely that bravery is defined as "grace under pressure."
Kennedy intended to use the line in the opening of "Profiles in Courage," his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller about U.S. senators who risked their political careers for principle. The line turned out to be authentically Hemingway, though it appears in none of his novels or short stories. He first used it in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (Hemingway seems to have been lauding matadors) and with a contradictory twist in a conversation overheard by Dorothy Parker and immortalized in a 1929 New Yorker magazine profile. Hemingway didn't use the word "courage" or "bravery," but rather "guts." When asked to define it, he replied simply, "Grace under pressure."
Used this way, courage is an adaptable concept, as President Biden underscored Thursday while handing out medals. The recipients were an eclectic group of athletes, civil rights activists, educators, religious leaders, and public servants, most of them from Biden's side of the aisle, as we say in Washington.
Although the only actual war hero among the group was the late John McCain, courage was a recurring theme through the ceremony. One of the medal awardees was former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, grievously wounded by a mass shooter in 2011. And it was while honoring Gabby Giffords that Biden provided a more encompassing description of our country's national character than "grace under pressure."
"Gabby is one of the most courageous people I have ever known," the president said. "She's the embodiment of a single signature American trait: Never, ever give up."
And that's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.