Hemingway wanted to go to war and tried to enlist in the U.S. Army but was not accepted because he had poor eyesight.[12] Instead he volunteered to a Red Cross recruitment effort in December 1917 and signed on to be an ambulance driver with the American Red Cross Motor Corps in Italy.[13] In May 1918, he sailed from New York, and arrived in Paris as the city was under bombardment from German artillery.[14] That June he arrived at the Italian Front. On his first day in Milan, he was sent to the scene of a munitions factory explosion to join rescuers retrieving the shredded remains of female workers. He described the incident in his 1932 non-fiction book Death in the Afternoon: "I remember that after we searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments."[15] A few days later, he was stationed at Fossalta di Piave.[15]
On July 8, right after bringing chocolate and cigarettes from the canteen to the men at the front line, the group came under mortar fire. Hemingway was seriously wounded.[15] Despite his wounds, he assisted Italian soldiers to safety, for which he was decorated with the Italian War Merit Cross, the Croce al Merito di Guerra.[note 1][16] He was only 18 at the time. Hemingway later said of the incident: "When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you ... Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you."[17] He sustained severe shrapnel wounds to both legs, underwent an immediate operation at a distribution center, and spent five days at a field hospital before he was transferred for recuperation to the Red Cross hospital in Milan.[18] He spent six months at the hospital, where he met "Chink" Dorman-Smith. The two formed a strong friendship that lasted for decades.[19]
In Milan in 1918While recuperating Hemingway fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, a Red Cross nurse seven years his senior. When Hemingway returned to the United States in January 1919, he believed Agnes would join him within months and the two would marry. Instead, he received a letter from her in March with news that she was engaged to an Italian officer. Biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes Agnes's rejection devastated and scarred the young man; in future relationships Hemingway followed a pattern of abandoning a wife before she abandoned him.[20] His return home in 1919 was difficult time of readjustment. Before the age of 20, he had gained from the war a maturity that was at odds with living at home without a job and with the need for recuperation.[21] As Reynolds explains, "Hemingway could not really tell his parents what he thought when he saw his bloody knee." He was not able to tell them how scared he had been "in another country with surgeons who could not tell him in English if his leg was coming off or not."[22]
That September, he went on a fishing and camping trip with high school friends to the back-country of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.[17] The trip became the inspiration for his short story "Big Two-Hearted River", in which the semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams takes to the country to find solitude after coming home from war.[23] A family friend offered Hemingway a job in Toronto, and with nothing else to do, he accepted Late that year he began as a freelancer and staff writer for the Toronto Star Weekly. He returned to Michigan the next June[21] and then moved to Chicago in September 1920 to live with friends, while still filing stories for the Toronto Star.[24] In Chicago, he worked as an associate editor of the monthly journal Cooperative Commonwealth, where he met novelist Sherwood Anderson.[24]
He met Hadley Richardson through his roommate's sister. Later he claimed, "I knew she was the girl I was going to marry."[25] Red-haired, with a "nurturing instinct", Hadley was eight years older than Hemingway.[25] Despite the age difference, she seemed less mature than usual for a young woman her age, probably because of her overprotective mother.[26] Bernice Kert, author of The Hemingway Women, claims Hadley was "evocative" of Agnes, but that Agnes lacked Hadley's childishness. After exchanging letters for a few months, Hemingway and Hadley decided to marry and travel to Europe.[25] They wanted to visit Rome, but Sherwood Anderson convinced them to go to Paris instead, writing letters of introduction for the young couple.[27] They were married on September 3, 1921; two months later Hemingway signed on as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and the couple left for Paris. Of Hemingway's marriage to Hadley, Meyers claims: "With Hadley, Hemingway achieved everything he had hoped for with Agnes: the love of a beautiful woman, a comfortable income, a life in Europe."[28]
