JAMES MCGRATH MORRIS - How Ambulance Drivers Hemingway and Dos Passos Rerouted the Course of American Literature
The entry of the United States into the Great
War a century ago today was the beginning of a new role for the nation
in world affairs. But it also closed the chapter on a remarkable volunteer
effort by young Americans that left a lasting literary legacy.
Between the outbreak
of the war in 1914 and the United States entry in 1917, thousands of young
Americans joined an ambulance brigade that provided first aid to Allied
soldiers on the front lines. Among their ranks were many who would become
preeminent writers. For two in particular - John Dos Passos and Ernest
Hemingway - the war would become one of their great themes.
When the Great War
broke out, American expatriates living in France obtained ambulances and ferried
the wounded from the front to the well-equipped American hospital in Paris.
This initial group came to be known as the American Field Service. Their
actions inspired Richard Norton, an American archeologist living in Paris at
the time. He set about launching an ambulance service with volunteers from the
United States. The socially well-connected Norton found ready support for his
plan. French millionaire H. Herman Harjes wrote large checks, and the venture
was named the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps. The Norton-Harjes
Ambulance Corps pursued drivers as if it were looking for candidates for
membership in an elite men’s club rather than for service in a war zone. “A
volunteer must be a man of good disposition possessed of self-control—in short,
a gentleman,” said one recruitment letter. From a practical point of view,
targeting the American elite for recruitment made sense: It also took money to
join—recruits were expected to pay for their passage and expenses. Ivy League
campuses, with their wealthy students, were choice picking grounds.
Up until the American
entry into the war, wounded Allied soldiers counted on Americans to get them to
medical aid. But once American soldiers arrived in Europe in 1917, the two main
volunteer ambulance corps were closed down. In early September, Norton
announced an end to his corps. “As gentlemen volunteers, you enlisted in this
service,” he said. “As gentlemen volunteers, I bid you farewell.” From now on
the American Expeditionary Forces would be in charge and the Red Cross assumed
ambulance duties.
Present in the
encampment when Norton delivered the news was 21-year-old John Dos Passos. He
had been among the drivers who had worked that summer on the front in Verdun, a
stretch of land less than four square miles in size where hundreds of thousand
French and German soldiers had died and a greater number were wounded fighting
over a few thousand yards of blood-soaked soil.
In each trip back from
the fighting, Dos Passos steered an ambulance loaded down with more wounded
soldiers than it was meant to carry. Sometimes those soldiers with the more
manageable injuries stood on the running boards or squeezed in on the front
seat between Dos Passos and his assistant. “At every lurch, the wounded groaned
horribly,” said Dos Passos.
The gruesomeness of
what Dos Passos saw left him wordless. “I’m dying to write—but all my methods
of doing things in the past merely disgust me now, all former methods are
damned inadequate,” he wrote in his diary. “Horror is so piled on horror that
there can be no more.” When his ambulance
corps was disbanded, he joined the Red Cross and was sent to Italy where he met
a 19-year-old ambulance driver named Ernest
Hemingway. Like Dos Passos Hemingway was certain that to miss the war was
to be absent from the defining moment of his generation. “Believe me,”
Hemingway wrote his sister before leaving for Europe, “I will go not because of
any love of gold braid glory etc. but because I couldn’t face anybody after the
war and not have been in it.”
A month after meeting
Dos Passos, Hemingway was wounded by a mortar. Convalescing, he fell in love
with his nurse, who would later inspire a fictional character, and with the
close of the war he returned to the United States a war hero. Six years later
the two writers were reunited in Paris and became fast friends and
collaborators. Their experience as
ambulance drivers deeply affected them and would alter American literature. In
the post-war years the books they wrote, such Hemingway’s A
Farewell to Arms and Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers as
well as his USA Trilogy, were innovative and important works, read
by a nation coming to terms with the Great War. Many of those who would fight
in the Second World War experienced the first cataclysmic war of the 20th century
through the pages of these books... read more:
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