World War I Love Stories

by Gill Paul

  At the age of nineteen, Hemingway was good-looking, with an extrovert character, but he could be rude and uncooperative with his nurses—apart from Agnes.

  “It does beat all how popular I have become in the last six mos,” wrote Agnes in her diary. “Must be because I’m turning frivolous.” Among the hearts she stole while working in Milan as a Red Cross nurse was that of an impressionable young ambulance driver named Ernest Hemingway.

  Agnes and Ernest (center) with two other nurses at Milan’s San Siro racetrack in 1918. “He is adorable & we are congenial in every way,” Agnes wrote in her diary.

  P olish-German-Russian by descent, Paul Moritz Julius von Kurowsky arrived in the US from Königsberg, Germany, in 1890 and settled in Washington, DC, where he taught languages at the Berlitz school. It was in Washington that he met and married Agnes’s mother, Agnes Theodosia Holabird. The family moved around a lot during Agnes’s childhood, staying in Alaska and Vancouver, but Washington became home by the time she was a teenager. Agnes attended the Fairmount Seminary for young ladies, and after her father’s early death, when she was just eighteen years old, she took a job in the catalogue department of the Carnegie Library. “That was too slow and uneventful,” she later told friends. “My taste ran to something more exciting.” She trained as a nurse at Bellevue Hospital in New York and applied for an overseas Red Cross assignment as soon as she graduated. She was perhaps inspired to do her duty by her family’s strong military history—both her grandfathers had served as generals in their country’s forces—or perhaps she was just looking for some fun. On June 15, 1918, she sailed for Europe on the SS La Lorraine. She was twenty-six years old.

  “She had a sparkle the others didn’t possess. Fresh and pert and lovely in her long-skirted white uniform … she radiated zest and energy.”

  Agnes was very attractive, with chestnut hair and blue-grey eyes, and her cheerful persona was popular with men. She had already dated several beaus before she left America, and she left a man known in her diary as “Dr. S” under the impression that they had a commitment, but she still enjoyed flirting with Belgian officers during the Atlantic crossing and according to her diary one Lt. Collins gave her “souvenirs” every day and her friends warned her not to break his heart. On arrival in Milan she was reunited with a group of nurses she had known at Bellevue, and soon met her next beau—Captain Enrico Serena of the Italian army—at a Red Cross event near Lake Maggiore. She began work at the Italian hospital in Milan, then the new Red Cross hospital in Milan opened on July 17, 1918. Agnes reported for work just as a eighteen-year-old boy named Ernest Hemingway was being brought in on a stretcher.

  According to Henry Villard, a Red Cross driver who was there at the same time, all the patients fell for Agnes: “She had a sparkle the others didn’t possess. Fresh and pert and lovely in her long-skirted white uniform . . . she radiated zest and energy.” Under Red Cross rules, unchaperoned contact between the sexes was strictly forbidden, but Agnes had never been the type of girl to let a rule stand in the way of a good time.

  The schoolboy Hemingway at age sixteen, a year before America entered the war. His family was disappointed when he decided not to go to college but to seek work as a reporter instead.

  A Young Man’s First Love

  Ernest Hemingway grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, the son of a physician father and musician mother who owned comfortable homes both in town and on Walloon Lake, Michigan, where as a young boy Ernest learned to hunt and fish. He did well at school, particularly in English, and decided to make a career as a journalist. His first job was as a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star, but he had only been there for six months when there was a Red Cross recruitment drive in town for which he signed up in April 1917. “My country needed me, and I went and did whatever I was told,” he later explained to his hometown newspaper.

  AMERICAN PUBLIC OPINION OF THE WAR

  In 1914, almost all Americans felt they should stay out of the war in Europe. Irish Americans were hostile to the idea of helping the British after the 1916 Easter Uprising (Ireland’s rebellion against British rule) had been brutally crushed by British forces. German Americans were understandably keen for the US to stay neutral. Midwestern farmers cared only about the price their crops could get in market and were concerned this could be affected in wartime. Women and clergymen throughout the US argued for a negotiated peace, and peace movements were formed, such as Andrew Carnegie’s Endowment for International Peace, established to advance cooperation between nations. But the sinking of the Lusitania by a torpedo from a German U-boat in May 1915 with the loss of 1,195 passengers, including 128 Americans, began to sway public opinion. The Germans agreed to halt their unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic, but when they resumed it in January 1917 and eight US ships were sunk in February and March, Woodrow Wilson felt he had no choice but to involve US forces. He’d been elected in November 1916 on the slogan, “He kept us out of war,” but on April 4, 1917 the US declared war on Germany.

  Woodrow Wilson tried hard to keep America out of the war.

  RMS Lusitania was sunk 11.5 miles off Kinsale Head on the south coast of Ireland

  He left the US in May 1918 and sailed to Paris—at the time being bombarded by German troops—and in June 1918 was dispatched to the Italian Front, just as Austro-Hungarian troops launched an attack on the Italian army near Lake Maggiore. However, things were relatively quiet in the area where Hemingway was assigned to work as an ambulance driver. He soon got bored with the routine and volunteered for the rolling canteen service that dispensed drinks, cigarettes, and chocolate to soldiers along the front line. He was transferred to the canteen at Fossalta, a village by the Piave River, and soon realized how dangerous the area was when another rolling canteen driver was killed by an Austrian shell. Sure enough, Hemingway had been there just six days when on July 8 a trench mortar exploded right next to him. A man standing beside him was killed and several others wounded. Hemingway’s legs were “pretty smashed up,” but he managed to carry another of the wounded to safety, though not without being hit in the foot and knee by machine-gun bullets—“like a sharp smack on the leg with an icy snowball,” he wrote to his parents.

  “My country needed me, and I went and did whatever I was told.”

  Hemingway in a Red Cross ambulance in Italy in June 1918. He only served there for a few weeks.

  He spent five days in a field hospital and was then taken by train to Milan and admitted to the American Red Cross hospital. They found 237 wounds in his legs, with pieces of shrapnel buried inside the flesh and bullets lodged in his knee and foot. Although most wounds were superficial, the knee and foot required surgery and Hemingway worried that he might have to lose a leg. Fortunately, the operation was a success and he was given one of the bullets as a souvenir, but he was also told he needed several weeks of recuperation during which he could not get out of bed.

  Hemingway was in the room next to Henry Villard and the doors were left open, so the two soon became firm friends, but his main focus of interest was the lovely Agnes von Kurowsky, who often worked night shifts and liked to party with her patients. On Hemingway’s birthday, July 21, they played the Victrola (an early record player), ate ice cream, and drank a large bottle of cognac on the balcony. On August 13, she brought in a mandolin so the patients could have musical evenings, and they often played poker. By August 25, Hemingway was so seriously smitten that she wrote about it in her diary: “Ernest Hemingway has a case on me . . . he is a dear boy & so cute about it.” On August 31, the first day he was able to get out of bed, she let him take her out for dinner and buy a bottle of her favorite Asti Spumante. And although they tried to keep it secret, Henry Villard noticed them holding hands “in a manner that did not suggest she was taking his pulse.” On September 11, Agnes gave her “home ring” to Hemingway—whom she called “the Kid”—in what she later called “a gesture to solidify the friendship.” Captain Serena was out of the picture now and Hemingway laughingly told her of
f for “being mean to the Capitano,” little expecting that such a fate might one day be his.

  ROLLING CANTEENS

  During the war, the Red Cross had many roles: transporting the wounded, looking after servicemen in hospitals and convalescent homes, ferrying humanitarian supplies into war zones, and helping families to get word of wounded or missing relatives. One of their most popular initiatives was the rolling canteen that took supplies to soldiers on the front line. At first these were trailers that could be hauled along behind the lines, but this proved difficult in areas such as the north of Italy where roads were impassable, so some of them developed into static huts situated at crossroads that the troops frequently passed. They would be decorated with patriotic posters and might even have a phonograph and a collection of records—and they served treats: jam, croissants, chocolate, and hot and cold drinks. It was a huge morale booster for battle-weary troops to have a rolling canteen arrive in their vicinity.

  American Red Cross volunteers tended to be well-educated men from wealthy backgrounds.

  There’s no doubt that Agnes and Hemingway became very close over the next month. Quite how close has always been a matter of conjecture, with him implying they had a sexual relationship. He told friends, “It takes a trained nurse to make love to a man with one leg in a splint.” But although her yellow hairpin was found under his pillow one day, it seems unlikely she did more than embrace the man for whom she evidently felt increasing tenderness. The open-door policy alone would have made it difficult for the young couple to get any privacy. Still, on October 15, Agnes was suddenly transferred to work in a hospital in Florence and wrote to Hemingway just after her arrival, “I kept wishing I had you alongside of me, so I could put my head on that nice place—you know—the hollow place for my face—& go to sleep with your arm around me.”

  According to Hemingway, “The 237 wounds I got from the trench mortar didn’t hurt a bit . . . [but] my kneecap was acting queer.”

  Hemingway returned briefly to the Front in late October, but succumbed to hepatitis and was back in a hospital bed when the war ended on November 11. He waited anxiously every day to see if a letter would arrive from Agnes, and pined when he didn’t hear. Absence intensified their romance and by December they were talking about getting married. Hemingway met her in Treviso on December 9, and four days later she wrote to her mother that she was “planning to marry a man younger than I—& it wasn’t a Doctor.” Hemingway certainly believed they were engaged to be married and although he didn’t tell his parents, he had written to his mother on August 29 to say he was in love; on his return to the US just before Christmas, with an honorable discharge from the Army, he also told friends of his forthcoming marriage.

  “Everyone fell for Agnes, but Hemingway fell hardest,” wrote Red Cross driver Henry Villard.

  The Brush-off

  It’s obvious from Agnes’s letters to Hemingway that she cared deeply about him, but the issue of age comes up time and again: “When you add on a few years & some dignity & calm, you’ll be very much worth while,” she writes to him, and persists in calling him “Kid.” At the same time, she mentions that a friend has called her “a flirt” and writes on December 31, “Capt. Moore was teasing me today about my fondness for Italian officers,” which can’t have gone down well with her betrothed. His letters to her have not survived, but presumably he was anxious for them to be reunited and to name the day. He had no idea that her feelings for him were cooling until he received her letter of March 7, in which she dropped a bombshell: “I know that I am still very fond of you, but, it is more as a mother than as a sweetheart.” In case he should still have hope of changing her mind, she added, almost casually, “I expect to be married soon.” Back in January, she had begun to date an Italian nobleman called Domenico Caracciolo, and it had quickly become serious.

  “…I am still very fond of you, but, it is more as a mother than as a sweetheart.”

  Hemingway was utterly devastated. He took to bed at his parents’ home and told a friend, “I’m just smashed by it . . . I forgot all about religion and everything else because I had [her] to worship.” The medals he received for his bravery in the Piave River campaign did nothing to heal his pain. He never saw Agnes again and if he wrote in response to her heartbreaking letter, she did not reply. In 1922, after he had married another woman, Hadley Richardson, he wrote to let her know. “It is so nice to feel I have an old friend back,” she replied, in a long, newsy letter. But she wasn’t at all pleased when Hemingway began to publish short stories with characters that bore striking similarities to her. His first major success, a 1929 novel called A Farewell to Arms, was about an American Red Cross ambulance driver who has an affair with the nurse, Catherine Barkley, who takes care of him in a hospital in Milan. In the novel, she gets pregnant with his child and dies in childbirth. When asked by one of Hemingway’s biographers about the similarities between herself and Barkley, Agnes was cross about the insinuation that she’d had a physical relationship with Hemingway: “I wasn’t that kind of girl,” she insisted.

  The wedding of Hemingway and Hadley Richardson on September 3, 1921. Their marriage would last just five years before she realized he was involved with another woman.

  Agnes’s relationship with the Italian aristocrat didn’t work out because his parents were opposed to it. She continued to work for the Red Cross after the war, in Romania, New York, and then Haiti. While in Haiti, in November 1928, she married a man called Howard Preston Gardiner, a civilian member of the US occupation forces. The marriage failed and she traveled to Reno for a divorce, then in 1934 she married William Stanfield, a widower with three children who lived in New York. They moved to Key West and she visited Cuba several times in the 1940s and 1950s while Hemingway was resident there, but decided not to look him up because she’d heard he was drinking heavily.

  Was it as a kind of revenge on Agnes that Hemingway made the nurse in A Farewell to Arms die in childbirth?

  Hemingway married four times altogether and became one of the 20th century’s most admired novelists, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. Agnes had predicted back in 1919: “I somehow feel that some day I’ll have reason to be proud of you.” But throughout his life he struggled with severe depression, and in 1961 he committed suicide by putting a shotgun in his mouth and pulling the trigger.

  Some biographers speculate that Hemingway’s rejection by Agnes affected him for the rest of his life, making him leave women before they had a chance to leave him. She certainly broke his heart at a very impressionable age and that seems to have left its mark, making him cynical before his time. “You make love to a girl and then you go away,” he told a friend. “She needs someone to make love to her. If the right person turns up, you’re out of luck.”

  “It was just a flirtation,” Agnes insisted at the end of her life, when Hemingway was long gone. She’d liked him, but at nineteen he was too immature for a girl who was seven years his senior.

  Fred & Evelyn

  ALBRIGHT

  Married: June 12, 1914

  A picture Fred took on his honeymoon of men queuing to enlist, at Old Scotland Yard in London.

  A certificate awarded when Fred qualified as a sergeant, and Fred’s cap badge (top).

  Frederick Stanley Albright

  CANADIAN

  Born: March 23, 1883

  Rank & regiment: Private, 21st Reserve Battalion Canadian Expeditionary Force

  Elnora Evelyn Kelly

  CANADIAN

  Born: November 14, 1890

  Fred Albright: When Evelyn accused him of being reserved, he replied, “I have always felt that I’d prefer to have my real inmost self unknown to the world and to everybody except one woman.”

  Fred and Evelyn enjoyed a wonderful honeymoon traveling round Britain, but she woke up crying in their London hotel on the night of August 1, 1914, with a feeling that something terrible was about to happen.

  F red and Evelyn’s family were friends and may
have been distantly related, so they grew up knowing each other. In 1903, when Evelyn was just thirteen years old, Fred spent Christmas Day with her family and he gave her “a big apple and some silly verses.” He often helped her with her school lessons and when in 1910 he moved from their hometown of Cayuga, Ontario, to Alberta to finish his law degree, they began to write to each other from time to time. She was studying English and History at Victoria College in Ontario when they began the correspondence, in which they discussed politics, literature, religion, women’s suffrage, temperance—of which they were both proponents—and all the big issues of the day. The letters were intelligent, often funny, and beautifully written, and gradually they became warmer and more frequent.

  When Fred returned to Ontario for a holiday in August 1913, he at last told Evelyn that he had been in love with her since they were youngsters and asked for her hand in marriage. She admitted she had always loved him too and they became engaged, agreeing to wed the following summer. Fred returned to Calgary, where he was now practicing as a lawyer while also lecturing in law at the University of Alberta, and his next letter to Evelyn was a self-conscious love letter. He admitted that his “habit of reserve is not easily broken” but said that he longed to see her and kiss her again. She wrote back teasing that he had to be her “fellow” for a while: “All the girls here have their beaus handy. But you, I have had you two or three weeks, and then I’m going to marry you.”