"Soldier's Home" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway, first collected in In Our Time (1925).
The story opens when the protagonist, Harold Krebs, has just come back from World War I.
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 — July 2, 1961) was an American writer and journalist. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, and one of the veterans of World War I later known as "the Lost Generation." He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
Hemingway's distinctive writing style is characterized by economy and understatement, and had a significant influence on the development of twentieth-century fiction writing. His protagonists are typically stoical men who exhibit an ideal described as "grace under pressure." Many of his works are now considered classics of American literature.
During the First World War, against his father's wishes,he tried to join the United States Army to see action in World War I. He failed the medical examination due to poor vision, and instead joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps. On his route to the Italian front, he stopped in Paris, which was under constant bombardment from German artillery. Instead of staying in the relative safety of the Hotel Florida, Hemingway tried to get as close to combat as possible.
Soon after arriving on the Italian Front Hemingway witnessed the brutalities of war. On his first day on duty an ammunition factory near Milan blew up. Hemingway had to pick up the human—primarily female—remains. Hemingway wrote about this experience in his short story "A Natural History of the Dead". This first encounter with death left him shaken.
On July 8, 1918, Hemingway was wounded while delivering supplies to soldiers, which ended his career as an ambulance driver. He was later awarded the Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) from the Italian government for dragging a wounded Italian soldier to safety in spite of his own injuries. He was credited as the first American wounded in Italy during WWI by newspapers at the time but there is debate surrounding the veracity of this claim.
This left an indelible mark on his psyche and provided inspiration for, and was fictionalized in, one of his early novels,
A Farewell to Arms and other stories.
Hemingway in WWI
The set test from Hemingway is "Soldier´s Home". You can download it
here
