“Then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red…I tried to breathe, but my breath would not come. The ground was torn up and in front of my head there was a splintered beam of wood. In the jolt of my head I heard somebody crying…I tried to but could not move. I heard the machine guns and rifles firing across the river. (July 8, 1918)”
Shrapnel from a trench mortar blast had inflicted more than two hundred separate wounds in his legs. Despite his serious injuries, he carried a wounded Italian soldier to safety, but only after a round of heavy machine gun fire tore into his right knee. Hemingway was awarded the Silver Medal of Valor and the Croce di Guerra, and promoted to first lieutenant in the Italian army.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Men At War
1942 – Men at War – Volunteered with the war effort in Cuba by organizing a private spy network against Nazi sympathizers, The Crook Factory.
“Hemingway convinced the American ambassador to Cuba that his forty-foot fishing boat, the Pilar, could be converted into a sub destroyer and that she could easily sink one of the German submarines that were preying on Allied ships in the Straits of Florida…
…Two men were stationed in the bow with sub-machine guns and two in the stern with BARs and hand grenades. Papa steered on the bow and up there with him was ‘The Bomb,’ a huge explosive device, shaped like a coffin, with handles on each end. The idea was to maneuver the Pilar next to a sub-how exactly was not clear-whereupon a pair of over-the-hill jai alai players with more guts than brains would heave ‘The Bomb’ into the open hatch of the conning tower. And then ‘The Bomb’ would presumably blow the submarine to kingdom come…
…(Papa) recalled seeing a whale shark, the largest fish in the sea, sixty feet long, with black and white polka dots on its dorsal side. Since the giant fish was just basking on the surface, and appeared docile and harmless, they pulled up alongside it. The first mate, Gregorio Fuentes, poked it in the side with an oar to see if he could make it move. As my father remembered it, it was like poking the side of a building. ‘Christ,’ Gregorio said, ‘that thing is enormous.’ ‘Yes,’ Papa replied, ‘almost a third of the size of the sub we are looking for.’
There certainly were German submarines running throughout the Caribbean and even along the coast of North America at this time. Although Hemingway never closed on one, he did report useful intelligence on U-boat movements.”
“Hemingway convinced the American ambassador to Cuba that his forty-foot fishing boat, the Pilar, could be converted into a sub destroyer and that she could easily sink one of the German submarines that were preying on Allied ships in the Straits of Florida…
…Two men were stationed in the bow with sub-machine guns and two in the stern with BARs and hand grenades. Papa steered on the bow and up there with him was ‘The Bomb,’ a huge explosive device, shaped like a coffin, with handles on each end. The idea was to maneuver the Pilar next to a sub-how exactly was not clear-whereupon a pair of over-the-hill jai alai players with more guts than brains would heave ‘The Bomb’ into the open hatch of the conning tower. And then ‘The Bomb’ would presumably blow the submarine to kingdom come…
…(Papa) recalled seeing a whale shark, the largest fish in the sea, sixty feet long, with black and white polka dots on its dorsal side. Since the giant fish was just basking on the surface, and appeared docile and harmless, they pulled up alongside it. The first mate, Gregorio Fuentes, poked it in the side with an oar to see if he could make it move. As my father remembered it, it was like poking the side of a building. ‘Christ,’ Gregorio said, ‘that thing is enormous.’ ‘Yes,’ Papa replied, ‘almost a third of the size of the sub we are looking for.’
There certainly were German submarines running throughout the Caribbean and even along the coast of North America at this time. Although Hemingway never closed on one, he did report useful intelligence on U-boat movements.”
In Our Time
While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed Oh Jesus Christ get me out of here. Dear Jesus please get me out. Christ please please please Christ. If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do anything you say. I believe in you and I’ll tell everyone in the world that you are the only one that matters. Please please dear Jesus. The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody.
War in the Siegfried Line
War in the Siegfried Line - breaking through to Germany, SS bunkers. “The only thing that will probably be hard to get properly in the picture is the German SS troops, their faces black from the concussion, bleeding at the nose and mouth, kneeling in the road, grabbing their stomachs, hardly able to get out of the way of tanks, though probably the cinema will be able to make this even more realistic. But a situation like that is the fault of the engineers who, when they designed those concussion-proof doors, did not expect to have 105-mm Wump guns come up and fire point-blank at them from behind. That was not provided for when the specifications were laid down. And sometimes, observing such sad sights and such elaborate preparations gone wrong, I have a feeling that it really would have been better for Germany not to have started this war in the first place.”
The Retreat From Caporetto
The Retreat from Caporetto: “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.”
Agressive War Is The Great Crime
*In Cuba at the Finca Vigia when WWII ends with the dropping of the atomic bombs: “We have waged war in the most ferocious and ruthless way that it has ever been waged. We waged it against fierce and ruthless enemies that it was necessary to destroy. Now we have destroyed one of our enemies and forced the capitulation of the other. For the moment we are the strongest power in the world. It is very important that we do not become the most hated…
…We need to study and understand certain basic problems of our world as they were before Hiroshima to be able to continue, intelligently, to discover how some of them have changed and how they can be settled justly now that a new weapon has become a property of part of the world. We must study them more carefully than ever now and remember that no weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one…
…An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggression at the earliest moment, is the necessary counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and the dead.”-Treasury for the Free World.
…We need to study and understand certain basic problems of our world as they were before Hiroshima to be able to continue, intelligently, to discover how some of them have changed and how they can be settled justly now that a new weapon has become a property of part of the world. We must study them more carefully than ever now and remember that no weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one…
…An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggression at the earliest moment, is the necessary counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and the dead.”-Treasury for the Free World.
The Balkins: A Picture Of Peace, Not War
“It is hard to believe this rich pleasant farming country is the bleak-sounding Balkans. It is, though, and as you ride through it you can see how the love of the land can make men fight wars. It is a matter of land, of fields of corn and yellowing tobacco, of flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, of heaps of yellow pumpkins in the shocked corn, of beech groves and peat smoke from chimneys, a matter of mine and thine that is the cause of all just wars-and there can never be peace in the Balkans as long as one people holds the lands of another people-no matter what the political excuse may be.” - The Balkins: A Picture of Peace, Not War-October 16, 1922
War Is Coming
The Malady of Power: A Second Serious Letter-“…Since that evening your correspondent has studied various politicians, statesmen and patriots in the light of Bill Ryall’s theory and he believes that the fate of our country for the next hundred years or so depends on the extent of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ambition. If he is ambitious only to serve his country, as Cleveland was, we, and our children, and their children will be very fortunate. If he is ambitious personally, to leave a great name, or to eclipse the luster of the name he bears, which was made famous by another man, we will be out of luck because the sensational improvements that can be made legally in the country in time of peace are being rapidly exhausted.
War is coming in Europe as surely as winter follows fall. If we want to stay out now is the time to decide to stay out. Now, before the propaganda starts. Now is the time to make it impossible for any one man, or any hundred men, or any thousand men, to put us in a war in ten days - in a war they will not have to fight. In the next ten years there will be much fighting, there will be opportunities for the United States to again swing the balance of power in Europe; she will again have a chance to save civilization; she will have a chance to fight another war to end war. Whoever heads the nation will have a chance to be the greatest man in the world for a short time-and the nation can hold the sack once the excitement is over. For the next ten years we need a man without ambition, a man who hates war and knows that no good ever comes of it, and a man who has proved his beliefs by adhering to them. All candidates need to be measured against these requirements.”
War is coming in Europe as surely as winter follows fall. If we want to stay out now is the time to decide to stay out. Now, before the propaganda starts. Now is the time to make it impossible for any one man, or any hundred men, or any thousand men, to put us in a war in ten days - in a war they will not have to fight. In the next ten years there will be much fighting, there will be opportunities for the United States to again swing the balance of power in Europe; she will again have a chance to save civilization; she will have a chance to fight another war to end war. Whoever heads the nation will have a chance to be the greatest man in the world for a short time-and the nation can hold the sack once the excitement is over. For the next ten years we need a man without ambition, a man who hates war and knows that no good ever comes of it, and a man who has proved his beliefs by adhering to them. All candidates need to be measured against these requirements.”
Notes On The Next War
“…Germany under Hitler wants war, a war of revenge, wants it fervently, patriotically and almost religiously. France hopes that it will come before Germany is too strong. But the people of France do not want war. There is the great danger and the great difference. France is a country and Great Britain is several countries but Italy is a man, Mussolini, and Germany is a man, Hitler. A man has ambitions, a man rules until he gets into economic trouble; he tries to get out of this trouble by war. A country never wants war until a man through the power of propaganda convinces it. Propaganda is stronger now than it has ever been before. Its agencies have been mechanized, multiplied and controlled until in a state ruled by any one man truth can never be presented.
War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule. And we in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the premeditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason. Hit in the head you will die quickly and cleanly even sweetly and fittingly except for the white blinding flash that never stops, unless perhaps it is only the frontal bone or your optic nerve that is smashed, or your jaw carried away, or your nose and cheek bones gone so you can still think but you have no face to talk with. But if you are not hit in the head you will be hit in the chest, and choke in it, or in the lower belly, and feel it all slip and slide loosely as you open, to spill out when you try to get up, it’s not supposed to be so painful but they always scream with it, it’s the idea I suppose, or have the flash, the slamming clang of high explosive on a hard road and find your legs are gone above the knee, or maybe just below the knee, or maybe just a foot gone and watch the white bone sticking through your puttee, or watch them take a boot off with your foot a mush inside it, or feel an arm flop and learn how a bone feels grating, or you will burn, choke and vomit, or be blown to hell a dozen ways, without sweetness or fittingness; but none of this means anything. No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it’s not you that dies. But you will die, brother if you go to it long enough. The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it so that an honest man will distrust it as he would a racket and refuse to be enslaved into it…
…In a modern war there is no Victory. The allies won the war but the regiments that marched in triumph were not the men who fought the war. The men who fought the war were dead. More than seven million of them were dead and it is the murder of over seven million more that an ex-corporal in the German army and an ex-aviator and former morphine addict drunk with personal and military ambition and fogged in a blood-stained murk of misty patriotism look forward hysterically to today. Hitler wants war in Europe as soon as he can get it. He is an ex-corporal and he will not have to fight in this one; only to make the speeches. He himself has nothing to lose by making war and everything to gain. Mussolini is an ex-corporal, too, but he is also an ex-anarchist, a great opportunist, and a realist. He wants no war in Europe…He does not want to fight in Europe because he knows that anyone who fights may lose, unless of course one can arrange to fight Rumania, and the first dictator who provokes a war and loses it puts a stop to dictators, and their sons, for a long time. Because the development of his regime calls for a war he chooses Africa as the place to fight and the only surviving free African state as his opponent. The Abyssinians unfortunately are Christians so it cannot be a Holy war…
...But it may be that a regime and a whole system of government will fall because of this foolproof war in less than three years. If the Abyssinians choose to fight on in guerrilla warfare rather than make peace Italy may find that Ethiopia will be an unhealing wound in her side that will drain away her money, her youth and her food supplies and return men broken in health and disgusted with suffering and the government that sent them to suffer with promises of glory. It is the disillusioned soldiers who overthrow a regime…” - *1935-Esquire- Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter
War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule. And we in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the premeditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason. Hit in the head you will die quickly and cleanly even sweetly and fittingly except for the white blinding flash that never stops, unless perhaps it is only the frontal bone or your optic nerve that is smashed, or your jaw carried away, or your nose and cheek bones gone so you can still think but you have no face to talk with. But if you are not hit in the head you will be hit in the chest, and choke in it, or in the lower belly, and feel it all slip and slide loosely as you open, to spill out when you try to get up, it’s not supposed to be so painful but they always scream with it, it’s the idea I suppose, or have the flash, the slamming clang of high explosive on a hard road and find your legs are gone above the knee, or maybe just below the knee, or maybe just a foot gone and watch the white bone sticking through your puttee, or watch them take a boot off with your foot a mush inside it, or feel an arm flop and learn how a bone feels grating, or you will burn, choke and vomit, or be blown to hell a dozen ways, without sweetness or fittingness; but none of this means anything. No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it’s not you that dies. But you will die, brother if you go to it long enough. The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it so that an honest man will distrust it as he would a racket and refuse to be enslaved into it…
…In a modern war there is no Victory. The allies won the war but the regiments that marched in triumph were not the men who fought the war. The men who fought the war were dead. More than seven million of them were dead and it is the murder of over seven million more that an ex-corporal in the German army and an ex-aviator and former morphine addict drunk with personal and military ambition and fogged in a blood-stained murk of misty patriotism look forward hysterically to today. Hitler wants war in Europe as soon as he can get it. He is an ex-corporal and he will not have to fight in this one; only to make the speeches. He himself has nothing to lose by making war and everything to gain. Mussolini is an ex-corporal, too, but he is also an ex-anarchist, a great opportunist, and a realist. He wants no war in Europe…He does not want to fight in Europe because he knows that anyone who fights may lose, unless of course one can arrange to fight Rumania, and the first dictator who provokes a war and loses it puts a stop to dictators, and their sons, for a long time. Because the development of his regime calls for a war he chooses Africa as the place to fight and the only surviving free African state as his opponent. The Abyssinians unfortunately are Christians so it cannot be a Holy war…
...But it may be that a regime and a whole system of government will fall because of this foolproof war in less than three years. If the Abyssinians choose to fight on in guerrilla warfare rather than make peace Italy may find that Ethiopia will be an unhealing wound in her side that will drain away her money, her youth and her food supplies and return men broken in health and disgusted with suffering and the government that sent them to suffer with promises of glory. It is the disillusioned soldiers who overthrow a regime…” - *1935-Esquire- Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter
"The Spanish Earth"
The Spanish Earth (wrote and narrated documentary), “The slow, heavy-laden, undramatic movement forwards. The men in echelon in columns of six. In the ultimate loneliness of what is known as contact. Where each man knows there is only himself and five other men, and before him all the great unknown. This is the moment that all the rest of war prepares for, when six men go forward into death to walk across a stretch of land and by their presence on it prove-this earth is ours.”
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