Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy by Nicholas Reynolds

Author:Nicholas Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Hemingway’s last hurrah with the troops coincided with the Battle of the Bulge in the second half of December 1944. Hitler hurled German tanks and infantry—some thirty divisions in all—against a thinly defended part of the Allied line, a few miles to the north of where Lanham and his regiment were digging in. When the last great battle in the west started, Hemingway was in Paris with Mary. Once again, duty called; Barton, the division commander, told Hemingway over the phone that it was “a pretty hot show,” one not to be missed.18 Hemingway felt an obligation to go to the front and record the story.

By the time Hemingway arrived at the front, the German tide was beginning to ebb, and his appetite for battle was also winding down. Combat was exhilarating but it was also exhausting, especially in the winter of 1944–45, one of the coldest on record, when daily temperatures started out around 15 degrees Fahrenheit. Even the great writer-soldier could only push himself so far, and he accepted an invitation from Lanham to move in to his command post, then in a comfortable home near the town of Rodenbourg in the tiny country of Luxembourg. Hemingway shared a double bed with a fellow journalist (each man had his own bedroll) and he let the regimental doctor care for him. For some time he had been feverish, with a temperature that spiked at 104 degrees. Never quite warm enough even when wrapped in two sheepskin jackets, he was suffering from a chest cold and needed the quiet and the antibiotic sulfa drugs that the doctor gave him.19

By January 1945 the end of the war in Europe was predictable, a little like January 1939, when it had seemed just a matter of time before Franco’s troops marched into Madrid. Hemingway did not need to wait to see the credits rolling down the screen to know how the movie would end. Instead he needed to leave the theater, and withdraw in order to recharge and to write. He was all too aware that he had not penned—or been paid for—much apart from news dispatches since publishing For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940. The lack of new income made him feel “stony cold broke.”20

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