Chapter 10
At the Front
The Last Months of the Great War Against Fascism
In early September 1944, Hemingway and U.S. Army officer Charles T. Lanham stood on a hill overlooking the Belgian town of Houffalize, its gray and white stucco buildings clustered neatly around the town square on the far side of the River Ourthe. What Hemingway called “the rat race . . . through rolling, forested country” was coming to an end.1 The Allies had mostly driven the Germans out of France, then north and east through Belgium toward the Belgian–German frontier. The Americans could take pride in their achievements since D-Day in June, but the war was not yet over.
On this day Hemingway and Lanham could see the Germans retreating over the bridge that spanned the small river, barely wider than a millrace, that now separated the two sides. To make sure that the Americans kept their distance, German artillery fired on the roads leading into town. Hemingway and Lanham each bet that he could reach the town square before the other. While Lanham took the back roads through the woods, Hemingway set off down the main road, “his” forces in two jeeps—one with his band of French irregulars, another with Private Pelkey at the wheel. Booby traps and downed trees made for slow going, and by the time Hemingway arrived at the water’s edge, Lanham was already there—but neither could cross because the Germans had blown the bridge.
About ten days later, the two men were still testing each other. They were at dinner in an old farmhouse, eating a steak dinner in Hemingway’s honor, when a German shell came through one wall and went out the other without exploding. While most of the other diners scurried for shelter, Hemingway calmly continued to cut his meat. Lanham told his guest to move, or at least to put on his helmet, but he refused and they argued while more shells tore through the walls, again and again, miraculously without exploding. Not to be outdone, Lanham took off his helmet, and resumed eating. The other diners—Lanham’s officers—returned to the table after the shelling had tapered off. Some of them called Hemingway and Lanham brave, others hinted at bravado. Lanham settled the matter: it was a foolhardy test of fate.2
After the fall of Paris, Hemingway divided his time between the French capital and the front lines. In town he set up housekeeping at the Ritz with Mary Welsh, the American war correspondent whom he had courted in London in the spring even before his marriage to Gellhorn had completely disintegrated. Welsh used the word “horizontal” to describe how they rediscovered the pleasures they had first discovered in London.3 Hemingway said that they now “loved each other very much with no clothes at all, no lies, no secrets, no pretenses . . . and only one shirt apiece.”4 Along the way, they helped other guests drink their way through the hotel’s stock of Perrier-Jouët Brut, eventually forcing the sommeliers to fall back on lesser houses. When he was not with Mary, Hemingway attached himself to the Allied armies while they pushed the German army back to its homeland.
Mary Welsh, fellow war correspondent and future wife, dressed for war, ca. 1944. Ernest Hemingway Photo Collection, JFK Library.
Most of the time, he was with what had become his favorite unit, the 22d U.S. Infantry Regiment of General Barton’s 4th Infantry Division. Its commanding officer was Colonel Charles T. Lanham, the West Point graduate known to his friends simply as “Buck.” Hemingway was drawn to this warrior-writer as he had been to Gustavo Durán in the Spanish war. Lanham liked to fight and write about it; he had even published a few poems and short stories about soldiering. In wartime pictures he is a little shorter than Hemingway, and nowhere near as heavy: Mary Welsh described him as “sprightly, prickly, sharp-witted.”5 His eyeglasses gave him a thoughtful air. But that did not keep him from being effective in combat. “It was,” Hemingway remembered after the war, “always so much fun to be with a man who was literate, articulate, [and] completely brave. . . . [During a fight he was] absolutely intact, intelligent, humorous, and the best company in the world.”6
The adventures at Houffalize and over dinner at the farmhouse were bonding rituals. Hemingway and Lanham never settled who was faster or braver, but they did lay the foundation for a friendship that grew on the battlefield and lasted for the rest of their lives. When they could relax after a day of combat, they stayed up late drinking and talking. Seizing the opportunity to pick the brain of a living legend of American letters, Lanham wanted to discuss literature and talk about his own writing. Hemingway was far more interested in courage on the battlefield—what Lanham would later call “this grace-under-pressure crap.”7 Courage, Lanham told Hemingway, was not “what a sober person discusses in public.”8 Even so, the writer who wanted to fight and the fighter who wanted to write complemented each other, and formed a bond as strong as any Hemingway ever had with another man. In 1948, looking back at the war, Hemingway mused that he had never “been closer to anyone, as a friend, than to Buck . . . nor admired anyone more.”9
October brought an official investigation into his conduct at Rambouillet, an unwanted diversion from service with the 22d and from his love affair with Mary. Hemingway (and commanders with impeccable judgment like David Bruce) still felt that he had performed well on the road to Paris. Hemingway would later say, more than once, that he deserved a medal for finding the best route into the French capital, the one that the Germans were not defending in force. He noted how an OSS officer “got a DSC [Distinguished Service Cross] for the work I did about Rambouillet laying out everything so [the French general Phillipe] Leclerc . . . went in on a dime where it would have cost him at least $8.95.”10 Instead, he was now being called to account for conduct unbecoming a war correspondent. Probably levied by one or more of the other journalists whom he had literally pushed around at the Grand Veneur in August, the allegations were that he had stockpiled weapons, commanded troops, and joined the fight to liberate Paris. These allegations—all true—were violations of the U.S. Army regulations that war correspondents “will not exercise command, be placed in a position of authority over military personnel, nor will they be armed.”11 The penalties for “an intentional violation of these . . . regulations . . . may be . . . arrest to await deportation or trial by a court martial.” Most of this was common knowledge among American war correspondents, whether experienced or not, but the Army still required them all to sign an agreement that spelled out the details.
Within a matter of weeks the allegations against Hemingway had spread widely enough to demand official attention. They were, after all, about a celebrity, and the newspapermen levying the charges knew how to make themselves heard. Eventually the inspector general (IG) of the Third Army felt compelled to investigate and summoned Hemingway to his headquarters, then in the French city of Nancy. The IG took written and oral testimony. Hemingway himself answered a series of questions under oath. Neither telling outright lies nor the whole truth, he talked around the issues. As he would put it years later, “I denied and kidded [my way] out of all of it and swore away everything I felt any pride in.”12
This hurt. It was one thing not to get the recognition he thought he deserved; it was quite another to be the subject of an investigation that might lead to a court-martial in a war zone, ignominy for a man who cherished his reputation for courage under fire. Along the way, the investigation showcased Hemingway’s ambivalent feelings for authority and the law. His last biographer, Michael S. Reynolds, put the Army investigation into a broader context and came to the conclusion that the writer had for most of his life “a profound, almost irrational fear of the law, its enforcers, and the courtroom. . . . He might joke about his sworn testimony . . . but at the same time there was nothing humorous about it” until the IG decided to drop the investigation.13
In November Hemingway was back with the 22d. By this time the regiment was facing the enemy’s main line of resistance along the German–Belgian border, a set of fortifications that the Germans called the Westwall. The regiment’s sector was in the Hürtgen Forest, where the network of bunkers and pillboxes was integrated into a landscape of dense woods, steep valleys, and waterways. Though only a few miles southeast of the German border city of Aachen, the forest was hard to get to, let alone to move through; there were few roads or even tracks, and many of the ones that existed in 1944 were narrow and unimproved. On his way in, Hemingway noted the succession of thickly wooded hills, some with clearings from which a soldier could see his enemy below.14 In the late fall of 1944, cold and rain made it even harder for the 22d to move and fight.
During the heavy fighting from November 15 to December 4 that would cost the regiment over 2,700 casualties, Hemingway shadowed Lanham at his command post and on the battlefield, taking everything in and offering occasional bits of advice. One day they visited a frontline battalion commander in his solid bunker of earth and logs. The major had little energy, and Lanham commented to Hemingway that he was on the point of relieving him. Hemingway answered that Lanham did not need to relieve the man; he had the stink of death about him and would soon be dead. Within less than ten minutes, the report came through that the major had been killed when a piece of shrapnel passed through the walls of his bunker.15
Though not as active as he had been at Rambouillet, Hemingway did not hesitate to lend a hand in the many crises that occurred. When German infantry attacked the regimental command post on November 22, Hemingway grabbed a Thompson submachine gun and joined in the fray, helping to repel the attackers. During another counterattack a few days later around 4 a.m., German tanks and infantry swarmed around and through the regiment’s defenses. The battalion commander who sounded the alarm was shooting Germans with one hand and holding a field telephone with the other. For once Hemingway and Lanham were not side by side, but Lanham called for him while issuing stopgap orders. “I’ll be right there, wait for me,” was Hemingway’s instant response. To get to Lanham, he dashed through a firebreak where many others had died, staying with the colonel until the Americans had fought the Germans to a standstill and left them no choice but to surrender by the dozen. It was for Lanham another pivotal moment in their relationship, one that he would never forget. Years later he would write that of all the things that he had carried in his heart from those days, none was more alive than the memory of that night.16
In the eyes of Lanham and his soldiers, Hemingway’s performance in the Hürtgen Forest was exemplary. First, he was good company, sharing his whiskey and talking about subjects that mattered to him and were entertaining: how his son Jack had joined the OSS and parachuted into occupied France, how his undeserving wife Martha wanted a divorce, what the mating habits of African lions were. Hemingway even demonstrated how a lion got what he wanted from a lioness. And, though his job was to report on the fighting, he took the same risks as the men whose job was to fight. He went outside the wire with the attacking infantry, much farther forward than he had to go. Cool under pressure, willing to fight when he had to, he again displayed that sixth sense, what the Germans call the feeling in the tips of your fingers, that mark the best practitioners of the art of war.
On December 4, his last day in the forest, just as the members of the regiment who had survived the battle were being pulled back for a desperately needed rest, Hemingway’s sixth sense saved his life and that of his friends. A thick ground fog made it impossible to see more than a few feet ahead as he rode slowly down a muddy road with a fellow correspondent named William Walton. Suddenly they heard a ripping sound that only Hemingway recognized, and he shouted “Oh, God, jump!” to Walton and their driver, Pelkey, pushing Walton into the roadside ditch and shielding his body seconds before a German fighter fired a stream of bullets into their jeep. The plane came back for a second pass, again firing down the middle of the road and missing the men in the ditch by a few feet—a very thin margin for a strafing. Hemingway calmly unhooked a canteen from his belt and offered Walton a premixed martini. The taste was metallic, but Walton had never enjoyed a drink more. The three picked themselves up, brushed the dirt off their clothes, and walked on past the smoldering wreck of their ride.17
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
A deceptively happy-looking Hemingway in the spring of 1945, on his way home to Cuba. Copyright PAA, Ernest Hemingway Photo Collection, JFK Library.
Hemingway started looking for a way home, no easy task in early 1945. It took until early March for him to book a seat on a plane to take him back across the Atlantic. When he made it to Cuba, he focused again on what the war years had meant to him and how best to write about them in a novel.
At the Finca, Hemingway settled back into his routine of getting up before dawn and, alone except for a dog or a cat, either sitting at a desk or standing at a chest-high table, writing seriously for a few hours, usually in longhand, sometimes on a typewriter. He might be working on a book, or maybe writing letters, for him another way to practice his art. Later in the day, perhaps after lunch or after dinner, Hemingway might return to his desk to write long letters, often letting his guard down and expressing himself freely. On April 14, 1945, for example, he wrote seven letters in the morning, and was at it again in the late afternoon.21
Hemingway wrote love letters to his wives and mistresses, even to his first ex-wife, Hadley, and playful, affectionate letters to his sons. To publishers and lawyers, he dispatched sharp-tongued instructions, and more than once excoriated critics. It was hard for him to write short letters: one note to the journalist and critic Malcolm Cowley about his wartime exploits started with a promise to be short and tapered to a close more than once, but then there was just one more thing, and another. In the end the letter ran to four typewritten pages, with three more handwritten pages of postscripts.22 It was as if he did not want to let go. Taken together, Hemingway’s letters from this time reveal a man who wanted very badly to connect, and to stay connected, especially with those who were close to him.
Almost as soon as they were separated, Hemingway started writing to Lanham, telling him how much he missed him. On April 2, 1945, “absolutely homesick for the regiment,” he wrote Lanham that he had “the Black Ass,” his word for depression.23 He added that he had not been depressed during the fighting, when there was a war to win and he had Lanham’s companionship. Twelve days later, Hemingway told Lanham again that he was “lonesome for you and for [the] outfit.”24 In letters to others he praised Lanham the commander, the author, and above all the friend: “my pal and partner”25 and “my best friend,” feelings that Lanham reciprocated.26 Together they had experienced life and death: Hemingway told Max Perkins that he had learned more while he and Buck were together than he had learned “altogether up until then.”27 This was a supreme compliment from a man who put such store by living life fully, and learning from it.
Hemingway’s relationship with Lanham had nothing to do with spying. For the writer-soldier, war, especially ground combat, was the ultimate life experience. “It is wicked to say but that is the thing I love . . . best.”28 He felt most alive when risking his life, all of his senses fully engaged, putting his well-developed field and military skills to good use and not incidentally killing fascists. Hemingway relished being useful in this way. He also relished the comradeship that jelled in combat. Many of the friends whom he stayed in touch with for life were those he had been with on a battlefield, in Spain in the 1930s and France in 1944—men like the communist film maker Ivens, the patrician spy David Bruce, and the thoughtful soldier Lanham. The shared secret and risk of a meeting with the NKVD could make the pulse race; for many, spying was a substitute for battle. But for Hemingway it paled in comparison to actual combat, to being under fire, when a snap decision, moving to the left or the right, or a well-aimed shot, made reflexively, determined whether you lived or died.
No one in the NKVD had connected with Hemingway in the way that Ivens, Bruce, and Lanham did. The short Russian in the shabby clothes with the Boris-and-Natasha accent, the NKVD recruiter Jacob Golos was the kind of man Hemingway might have grown attached to: he was a true believer with heart and character, at a time when Hemingway was also a true believer (albeit in the allied cause of antifascism, not hard-line Marxism-Leninism). But Hemingway was only in touch with Golos for a short time, in peacetime New York in 1940 and 1941, and the NKVD operatives who reached out to Hemingway after Golos were unknowns, “workers” who had to conjure up introductions, met with the author once or twice without making much headway, and hoped for better results at the next meeting. When the Soviets dispatched another NKVD “worker” to meet with Hemingway in Cuba not long after he returned from Europe in 1945, the results were again inconclusive. But the Soviet record suggests that, until he received an “urgent summons out of the country,” this “worker” nourished hopes of building a relationship with “Argo.”29
Even if the Soviet operative and Hemingway had been granted the time to establish rapport, Hemingway’s agenda was even more different now from the time when he had signed on with the NKVD in the winter of 1940–41, when his home country was sitting on the sidelines as the world burned. In 1945 there was no longer a compelling need to find the best way to fight fascism. World War II was over. Japan and Germany were literally in ruins. The armies of the East and the West faced each other warily on the plains of central Europe along a dividing line that ran through Germany and Austria.