This Week in Literary History: Ernest Hemingway is Wounded on the Italian Front

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On July 8, 1918, just two weeks shy of his 19th birthday, American Red Cross volunteer Ernest Hemingway was struck by an Austrian mortar shell while delivering chocolate to soldiers on the Italian front.

The shell landed about three feet from the teenage Hemingway, knocking him out and filling his legs with shrapnel. An Italian soldier standing between him and the blast was killed; another lost both legs in the explosion and later died from his wounds. According to a letter his friend Ted Brumback wrote to Hemingway’s parents after visiting him in the hospital, Hemingway, once he regained consciousness, managed to carry a third wounded soldier on his back to the first aid station. “He says he did not remember how he got there, nor that he carried the man,” Brumback wrote, “until the next day, when an Italian officer told him all about it and said that it had been voted to give him a valor medal for the act.”

Hemingway spent six months recovering in Milan, where he famously fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, the American Red Cross nurse who cared for him, before heading home to Oak Park, Illinois, in January 1919.

“When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you,” Hemingway later wrote in Men at War. “Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it.”

The incident quickly became part of Hemingway’s mythos, despite, and perhaps in part because of, the haziness of some of the details. (How many wounds did he suffer? Just when did he get those medals, and for what? Did he really drag another soldier to safety?) “Hemingway himself confused the facts of the matter as early as during the days of his recuperation in Milan, and upon returning home, he gilded the lily (of a story sufficiently dramatic for most veterans) with tall tales of fighting with the Italian infantry,” wrote Robert W. Lewis in 1982, pointing out that the details of his war experience are not the only accounts from Hemingway’s youth that have been shown to be not entirely accurate, “not from his desire to deceive so much as from sportiveness,” he says.

Or possibly from his literary tendencies, as his experiences in Italy would form the backbone to his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms, which would become his first best selling book and cement his reputation as a great American writer.