Hemingway’s WWI Service
October sale features over 350 photos that document Ernest Hemingway’s service in the Red Cross ambulance corps
A photo album compiled by a New Jersey volunteer named Johnson who served in the Red Cross Ambulance Service during World War I is a highlight of the Fine Books auction at Swann Auction Galleries on October 24. The album is of particular note because Johnson just happened to serve in the same ambulance unit as a certain 20th-century literary luminary: Ernest Hemingway. Johnson, a keen amateur photographer, documented his overseas experience and compiled a photo album including rare, unpublished images of Hemingway and his fellow volunteers from the time they shipped to Europe through their service in Italy. A particular highlight is an image of the injured Papa in his Milan hospital bed.
We checked in with Devon Eastland, Senior Specialist, Early Books, with Swann to hear more about this incredibly unique photo album:
“At 18, Ernest Hemingway was writing for the Kansas City Star and itching for adventure. He and a friend volunteered to serve in the Red Cross ambulance corps and shipped out for the Italian theater. His experiences overseas and those of his many colleagues, military and otherwise, shaped him as a young man and as an artist. After sustaining major injuries from an Austrian mortar attack, his service was cut short, the war ended, and young Hemingway’s life went along a different set of tracks.”
“Another volunteer from New Jersey named Johnson ended up in the same volunteer ambulance group. They traveled the Atlantic on the same vessel; they were assigned to the same unit; our New Jersey volunteer even visited Hemingway in the hospital after his injuries. Oh, one other thing, Mr. Johnson also was a bit of a shutterbug. He took hundreds of photos documenting his time in the ambulance corps during the First World War, and when he returned home, he set his annotated images into an album.”
“This album has not seen the light of day since it was purchased from Johnson’s widow in the 1970s. It contains unpublished photos of Hemingway himself; moreover, it sets an objective context for Hemingway’s later masterwork, A Farewell to Arms.”
Eastland is referencing the love attachment that Hemingway formed with a Red Cross nurse seven years his senior named Agnes von Kurowsky while he was recovering in the Milan hospital. When Hemingway returned to the United States in January 1919, he thought Agnes would be joining him shortly thereafter and was heartbroken to receive a letter from her in March indicating she was engaged to an Italian officer. The rejection devastated Hemingway and, according to some of his biographers, set a pattern throughout Hemingway’s life where he would abandon his wives before they could abandon him. The experience also set the stage for one of Hemingway’s greatest works and a cornerstone of 20th-century literary fiction in A Farewell to Arms.
Johnson’s WWI Red Cross Ambulance Service photo album provides a unique and unparalleled eyewitness insight into the early war experience that would so shape the young Hemingway and, by extension, alter the course of 20th-century fiction. While of primary interest to Hemingway and 20th-century literature collectors, World War I historians and amateur photo enthusiasts will also find the album fascinating.
