"WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?": ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S "SOLDIER'S HOME" AND AMERICAN VETERANS OF WORLD WAR I (2).

During the summer of 1918, the Division played a key role, at the notorious battle of Belleau Wood, in checking the final German offensive that almost reached Paris. Here many Second-Division units, including both Marine regiments, lost more than fifty percent of their men. Service in almost every major campaign fought by the A.E.F. followed--including, as Hemingway accurately notes, "Soissons, Champagne, St. Mihiel, and ... the Argonne" (69). Any soldier who passed through this string of bloodbaths without being physically wounded, shell-shocked, or infected with disease could justifiably refer to himself as "a fugitive from the law of averages" to quote World War II cartoonist Bill Mauldin. Out of the twenty-nine American combat divisions that saw action on the Western Front (each containing, at full strength, approximately 27,000 men), the Second suffered the highest number of casualties--approximately 18,000 wounded and 5,000 killed--and received the highest number of replacements-more than 35,000 men (Stallings 375-77). In short, Krebs's war experience, unlike that of the vast majority of men who entered the U.S. Army in 1917 or 1918 (half of whom never left the United States), would have been one of unimaginable ferocity--a foretaste of what Marines endured, two and a half decades later, during the savage island campaigns in the Pacific.

Before considering further the implications of Krebs's grimly distinguished service record as it relates to the story's treatment of veterans's issues, I should point out that not every reader has accepted Krebs's military credentials. In a fascinating reading, entitled "`Soldier's Home' Revisited: A Hemingway Mea Culpa," J.F. Kobler contends that Krebs's claim to the status of combat veteran is fraudulent and constitutes an oblique confession of the lies and exaggerations spread by the youthful Hemingway following his near-fatal wounding on the Italian front. Essentially, Kobler bases this interpretation on three key pieces of textual evidence: first, that when Hemingway writes of Krebs having been "at," rather than "in," "Belleau Wood, Soissons, the Champagne, [and] St. Mihiel," he subtly indicates that Krebs may have served on these battlefields without actually participating in the fighting; second, that Krebs's lowly rank--that of Corporal--would have been inconsistent for a soldier who survived so many campaigns; and, third, that the "imaginative seed" for Krebs, if we accept his harrowing war record as a sham, is none other than the unheroic "kitchen corporal" featured in the Chapter 1 vignette of In Our Time.

Like all valuable criticism, "'Soldier's Home' Revisited" sends the reader back to the text reminded of its essential ambiguity, no longer so trusting of the critical truisms that Hemingway scholars have long taken for granted. Nevertheless, Kobler's specific arguments are not difficult to counter. Take the first point, which concerns Hemingway's use of "at," as opposed to "in." One need only glance at the title of the finest American combat memoir of the Second World War--E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa--to see that Hemingway,s choice of preposition is not necessarily as incriminating as one might think. As for Krebs's rank, the rate of attrition within the Second Division indeed necessitated the swift promotion of men whose chief qualification (beyond at least some indication of leadership potential) was survival; however, as rosters for the A.E.F's most bloodied divisions demonstrate, not every experienced soldier sought promotion or received it.(4) Moreover, Krebs's rank, while humble, is still two notches above buck Private: before becoming eligible for promotion to Corporal, a soldier during this period (whether serving in the Army or the Marines) would first have to attain the rank of Private First Class, a grade that most doughboys never reached. And, finally, any discussion of the shadowy "kitchen corporal" as an "imaginative seed" for Krebs must first, it seems to me, wrestle with the question of the corporal's nationality. Because the drunken lieutenant featured in the same vignette as the corporal uses the phrase "mon vieux"--an expression that was not, as far as I know, incorporated into American soldiers' slang--the scene may be describing a French battery on its way to the Champagne, a region, incidently, that saw numerous (and pointlessly bloody) French campaigns prior to the A.E.F.'s arrival.(5) One notes as well that two of the other vignettes set during the Great War feature English soldiers at the 1914 Battle of Mons, and so a brief glimpse of French military action would be consistent with the focus of In Our Time on the ubiquitous, international nature of early 20th century violence (whether manifested in the Great War, the Greco-Turkish conflict, the boxing arena, or the bull ring).

If, then, we can trust in the veracity of Krebs's service record, we are left with the question of just how his status as a former combat Marine adds to the story's commentary on the situation of American World War I veterans in general. As we have seen, the humiliations that attend Krebs's homecoming, his discovery that he is forgotten by his community (a community that had earlier welcomed far less experienced veterans with parades and "hysteria" [69]) and still regarded as an adolescent by his insensitive parents, result in part from a kind of willful amnesia that permeated American culture in the 1920s--with disastrous economic and psychological results for many veterans.

Yet Krebs is also fated to suffer endless indignities because of the perplexing nature of the conflict that he has survived. In addition to constituting an adroit attack upon the national passion for "normalcy," "Soldier's Home" also addresses the interpretive challenges presented by a war that only one American soldier in four witnessed directly, a war whose bewildering mixture of intensity and anticlimax ultimately defied the coherence of myth--and thus left its most brutalized veterans, men like Krebs, without a clear-cut cultural niche.

This theme may well explain Hemingway's seemingly arbitrary selection of Oklahoma for his setting. The state's soldiers experienced widely varying destinies. In all, Oklahoma provided approximately 80,000 troops during World War I (Ayres 23), at least half of whom (assuming that the national average holds true in this case) probably never left the United States. For the rest, a very rough outline of their military assignments is possible. Although the U.S. Army became notorious during World War I for disregarding the regional origins of its soldiers and scattering them, helter-skelter, among newly created, highly impersonal organizations--a necessary policy given the objective of creating a mass modern army virtually overnight (Showalter 32-33)--many of its divisions retained, at least until they were flooded with replacements, strong ties to specific states. The majority of Oklahomans who saw combat probably did so as members of either the 36th Division (primarily comprised, at least at the time of its departure for France, of National Guardsmen from Oklahoma and Texas) or the 90th Division (created out of conscripts from the same two states).

Significantly, neither of these two units arrived in France early enough to participate in the Second Battle of the Marne, of which the ferocious fighting at Belleau Wood was a part, nor did their number of casualties, while devastating enough, come close to that of Krebs's Second Division. The 36th Division, which got off lightly by the standards of World War I carnage, suffered only 2,000 casualties, while the 90th, much harder hit during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, lost more than 7,500 of its men (Stallings 375-76). Moreover, the number of replacements received by the two divisions--about 8,000 combined (Stallings 377)--is indicative of less exhausting, and much briefer tours of duty. The 90th, it is true, served in the Army of Occupation, one of several draftee divisions that, contrary to the narrator's claim in "Soldier's Home," actually remained overseas longer than some units that contained volunteers; however, it returned home four months ahead of the Second Division. Thus, the two military organizations that absorbed the bulk of Oklahoma's combat soldiers experienced a rather different war from Krebs's, one far less intense, in terms of sustained periods of violence, than the succession of horrific engagements--punctuated by the arrival of endless, faceless replacements--witnessed by the A.E.F.'s most seasoned troops.

As for the remainder of the state's combatants, those who were not part of the 36th or 90th Divisions, a perusal of World War I county histories from Oklahoma, and neighboring states, suggests that most wound up as replacements in divisions with records similar to those of the Oklahoma-Texas units or as members of specialized railway, engineering, aviation, or (as was invariably the case with the state's African-American soldiers) labor detachments. Only a handful of men from each county served in so-called Regular Army divisions (such as the Second) comprised, at least initially, of career servicemen and volunteers. World War I Marines from Oklahoma represented the ultimate rarity. As local honor rolls indicate, in rural areas typically four or five men per county enlisted in the Marine Corps (a striking irony given the predominance of Marines in postwar fiction, drama, and film).(6)

This admittedly sketchy and imprecise statistical breakdown suggests that Krebs's sense of alienation, partly a literary conceit endemic to the lost-generation mythos, also mirrors an all-too-real historical phenomenon--namely, the fact that veterans with comparatively brief (though often agonizing) experience of battle, or with no combat experience at all, far out-numbered the A.E.F.'s most tested soldiers. Thus, it is almost certain that the local veterans with whom Mrs. Krebs compares her disappointing son, those who are "settling down" and "on their way to being really a credit to the community" (75), have passed through a less grueling ordeal than Krebs, a factor that explains their apparently smoother reentry into peacetime America.

Combine the relative inexperience of Krebs's fellow veterans with the pre-occupied pursuit of material advancement engaged upon by his neighbors and family--note, again, how Mrs. Krebs defines "getting somewhere" in exclusively financial terms--and you have the basic qualities of the "soldier's home" with its ironically appropriate sick-room associations, that awaits Hemingway's protagonist in 1919. Yet Krebs's predicament perhaps involves more than these specific hindrances. While willful ignorance explains much of his treatment, no clear-cut master narrative seems to exist through which his ordeal can make sense to others--or receive the respect it deserves.

Indeed, the myriad ironies in "Soldier's Home" all underscore the essential ambiguity of America's First World War, an event whose bewildering mixture of opposites (savage warfare for some soldiers, an anticlimactic interruption of civilian routine for the vast majority of others) and general sense of inconclusiveness (just how crucial to the Allied victory was American intervention anyway?) defied assimilation into a stable national myth. The town cheers the wrong returning soldiers. Mrs. Krebs voices her suspicions regarding Eugene's sexual "temptations" by fallaciously equating World War I with a conflict fought sixty years before (and, in all likelihood, edited for her by her father). No one sees Krebs, despite his length of service, as an authority. Eugene himself has "lost everything" (70)--perhaps even his grasp of what he has actually undergone--by modifying his war stories to comply with competing fictions. In short, "Soldier's Home" stands as dramatic literary support for the argument, recently made by historian Mark Meigs, that "World War I has been a matter of unresolved interpretation for American participants from the first moments of their involvement to the return of the last soldiers and bodies of soldiers in the 1920s and even to the present day" (1).

Ultimately, however, it is Hemingway's anger over the marginalized status of American combat veterans--an anger fully warranted, I believe, by such events as the Veterans' Bureau scandal--that stands out most in "Soldier's Home." Whatever the cultural confusion surrounding American participation in the Great War (arguably a theme within the story itself), the fact that Krebs, who survives some of the worst killing fields of the Western Front and who sacrifices more than two years of his life to the Great Crusade, is not perceived as "a credit to the community," even by his own parents, constitutes a withering critique of a society that has, in effect, left its returning soldiers homeless. Such a grotesquely ironic situation as Krebs's might seem implausible were it not, as we have seen, for Hemingway's insight into American culture in the 1920s--specifically the nation's reaction against its own war fever (and resulting indifference toward the welfare of its veterans)--and his astute understanding of how the mixed experiences of American soldiers in World War I further complicated their reception and readjustment.

Yet, unfortunately enough, Hemingway's story also transcends its contemporary social and cultural context. Indeed, as we stand at the millennium, and look back upon the treatment of American veterans over the past century--an often disturbing record with such low points as the dispersal of the Bonus Army, the denial of benefits to WWII servicewomen, the Agent Orange affair, and, most recently, the debate over the existence of Gulf War Syndrome--it becomes increasingly clear that "Soldier's Home," with its topical focus on the problematic nature of the doughboy's return, is also a tale of great cautionary relevance in our time.

NOTES

This essay is an expanded version of a paper delivered at the 1999 Hemingway and War Centennial Conference, held at the US Air Force Academy. I wish to thank Stephen Plotkin, who read an early version of this article during the symposium, for his encouragement and enthusiasm. Thanks go as well to James Meredith, who ran a fine conference, and to my friends and colleagues, Robert Rook and Bradley Will, both of whom helped me to fine-tune the manuscript.

(1.) Carlos Baker's assessment of the primary background for "Soldier's Home" is typical. The story, Baker remarks, "showed the town of Oak Park as it had looked to [Hemingway] after his return from the wars in January, 1919" (132).

(2.) In the interest of improving the postwar prospects of its overseas soldiers, the U.S. Army did establish the A.E.F. University at Beaune. However, the University existed for only a few months in 1919 and its educational benefits were negligible. As Mark Meigs points out, "However ambitious to return improved citizen soldiers to the United States, the program never had the resources of the GI Bill that held out the possibility of years of higher education to over ten million soldiers (but not female personnel) in the 1940s" (197).

(3.) I am not, of course, the first critic to be struck by the negative space (in more senses than one) represented by Krebs's invisible parent. Robert Paul Lamb adroitly remarks, "In Krebs's dysfunctional American family, the father is absent, represented synecdochically by the car that stands outside his second floor office, which itself represents the autonomy Krebs desires but can have only if he becomes an accomplice to his own infantilization" (31).

(4) A quick perusal of American Decorations, the official list of soldiers who received the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, or the Distinguished Service Medal from 1862 to 1926 demonstrates that longevity of service in a casualty-ridden unit hardly insured a soldier's promotion--even when coupled with extraordinary heroism. Consider, for example, the case of John O. Budd, a medic in the Third Division, a long-serving unit whose casualty rates approached those of the Second. Awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for singlehandedly rescuing twelve wounded men from an enemy artillery barrage on 15 July 1918, Budd went on to serve, like Corporal Krebs, in the Army of Occupation in Germany (190). He returned home in the summer of 1919--still a buck Private.

(5.) Daniel Robinson convincingly argues that Hemingway may have had in mind a specific and especially notorious instance of French military wastage--the 1915 Champagne Offensive, a frontal assault that resulted in 145,000 French casualties (2).

(6.) William T. Lampe's Tulsa County in the World War, published in 1919, illustrates the centrality of the 36th and 90th Divisions in the Oklahoma war experience; not surprisingly, local companies that were incorporated into these two units receive the bulk of the section devoted to Tulsa County's combatants. My observations about the destinies of soldiers with specific technical skills, the demeaning assignments that awaited most African-American troops, and the relative rarity (in the rural Midwest) of veterans who served in the Marine Corps or in the A.E.F.'s premier fighting divisions derive from a sampling of WWI county histories from central Kansas, including the World War Roll of Honor for Marion County, Reno's Response: Reno County in the World War, and Russell County in the War.

WORKS CITED

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STEVEN TROUT Fort Hays State University