Hemingway On War

ForewordI am sure Ernest Hemingway would be pleased with the selection his grandson Sean has made from his grandfather's writing on war. Any selection implies just that: some things have been left out, but more than enough has been left in to give the twenty-first-century reader the true gen on war as it was waged in the last hundred years.Hemingway was born in 1899 and had he lived as long as it is possible for a man to live, he could have borne witness to the whole of the deadliest and most war-torn century of which we have a historical record. Sadly, his health began to fail at mid-century and drastically worsened when he was forced to choose by the Cold War between his beloved Finca Vigía and his country. He died just short of completing the second third of the twentieth century.How much did his going to the wars affect his health and shorten his life? In my opinion, a great deal. As a fortunate American, he chose to go to war rather than, as an unlucky Spaniard or an even unluckier Pole, have it inevitably come to him.James Joyce, perhaps the greatest writer of the twentieth century, neither went to war nor wrote about it in any way but he did not have Hemingway's initially robust constitution and would not have lasted very long in war. Writers who write of war from personal experience have to have special qualities, and I am not sure any of them succeed without strong drink. I like to think that Karl von Clausewitz would never have made it through the Jena campaign without potato schnapps and we know Ulysses S. Grant needed both cigars and corn whiskey to get him through the Wilderness.About the earlier wars: the Italian front in 1918 and the Greco-Turkish War in the 1920s I know only from what my father wrote in such stories as "A Way You'll Never Be," but I do remember when I was ten years old in 1938 and in the fifth grade being beside my father at the top of the stairs on the second floor of our home in Key West when he opened and read a telegram informing him of the start of the last big offensive of the Spanish Republic which would end sixteen weeks later in disaster on the Ebro. Papa left us for Spain at once. That was the year my mother, my younger brother, and I went to war, three whole years before Pearl Harbor. My family was, as they say, prematurely antifascist.Martha Gellhorn, who was a protegee of Mrs. Roosevelt, arranged an invitation for Hemingway to the White House when it was by then very clear that Spain was about to fall to Franco and his German and Italian allies. I remember my father's conversation after that visit, all of us enjoying an excellent meal at the long eighteenth-century Spanish table downstairs in our Key West house in the dining room with the big painting by Joan Miro of his farm outside Barcelona. Papa was telling us that he had come away from his White House evening with a confirmation of his previous dislike of the President. Things had gotten off to a bad start, from my father's point of view, when the President somewhat gratuitously remarked that he had not read any work of fiction since he was an undergraduate at Harvard. Hemingway must have then recalled to mind what he had written not long before inGreen Hills of Africa,that all countries eventually eroded and that the only things that lasted were the people who had practiced the arts. The rest of the evening the President spent telling about, not listening to, what was going on in Spain. Furthermore, said my father, Mrs. Roosevelt, although undoubtedly a person with deep sympathies for humanity in general, was a poor housekeeper and he had never had to eat a worse meal than what was served him at the White House, especially the squab, which was tougher than rubber.Only a year or so later, when the great popular success ofFor Whom the Bell Tollsseemed to confirm the wisdom of his having ended his second marriage, Hemingway leftHemingway, Ernest is the author of 'Hemingway On War', published 2004 under ISBN 9780743243292 and ISBN 0743243293.