“Gee I’m afraid I wont be good for anything after this war!”, Ernest Hemingway wrote to his parents in September 1918. He was recuperating at an Alpine hotel on Lake Maggiore, having been granted leave from the military hospital where he was undergoing “electrical treatments” on his severely wounded legs. “All I know now is war”, the nineteen-year-old continued. “Everything else seems like a dream.”
All aspects of the statement may be marked down as the heady utterance of a young man who was aware he had performed a courageous act, knew that his ordeal under fire was over, and was in the throes of a romantic affair into the bargain. In the view of Dr Clarence Hemingway and his wife Grace, who had five other children to care for, the suggestion that war would be the sum of their eldest son’s experience might have seemed a foolish overstatement, soon to be laughed off. He had been at the front a month and was a medical assistant, not a soldier.