09/15/2026
At 18, Hemingway volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy during World War I and was seriously wounded in 1918.
Those experiences later shaped works such as A Farewell to Arms and his lifelong skepticism toward romantic portrayals of warfare.
In his 1935 essay “Notes on the Next War,” written as tensions were again rising in Europe, Hemingway warned against presenting another major conflict as an honorable adventure. He argued that patriotic slogans concealed what modern industrial warfare actually meant for ordinary soldiers and civilians.
Painting: Soldat und Tod (1917) by Hans Larwin (1873–1938).
