I was watching the PBS - Michael Palin show on Hemingway. Some time in Italy during WWI, Hemingway was injured on the battlefield. He returned in the 1940’s and burried something at the spot he was injured. What did he bury? I missed what Michael Palin said. Thanks.
How was that Michael Palin show? I forgot to record it.
I don’t know the answer, but I can provide these details on Hemingway’s wound in ItalyThe Hemingway Resource Center ).
Hemingway first went to Paris upon reaching Europe, then traveled to Milan in early June after receiving his orders. The day he arrived, a munitions factory exploded and he had to carry mutilated bodies and body parts to a makeshift morgue; it was an immediate and powerful initiation into the horrors of war. Two days later he was sent to an ambulance unit in the town of Schio, where he worked driving ambulances. On July 8, 1918, only a few weeks after arriving, Hemingway was seriously wounded by fragments from an Austrian mortar shell which had landed just a few feet away. At the time, Hemingway was distributing chocolate and cigarettes to Italian soldiers in the trenches near the front lines. The explosion knocked Hemingway unconscious, killed an Italian soldier and blew the legs off another. What happened next has been debated for some time. In a letter to Hemingway’s father, Ted Brumback, one of Ernest’s fellow ambulance drivers, wrote that despite over 200 pieces of shrapnel being lodged in Hemingway’s legs he still managed to carry another wounded soldier back to the first aid station; along the way he was hit in the legs by several machine gun bullets. Whether he carried the wounded soldier or not, doesn’t diminish Hemingway’s sacrifice. He was awarded the Italian Silver Medal for Valor with the official Italian citation reading: “Gravely wounded by numerous pieces of shrapnel from an enemy shell, with an admirable spirit of brotherhood, before taking care of himself, he rendered generous assistance to the Italian soldiers more seriously wounded by the same explosion and did not allow himself to be carried elsewhere until after they had been evacuated.” Hemingway described his injuries to a friend of his: “There was one of those big noises you sometimes hear at the front. I died then. I felt my soul or something coming right out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner. It flew all around and then came back and went in again and I wasn’t dead any more.”
Hemingway’s wounding along the Piave River in Italy and his subsequent recovery at a hospital in Milan, including the relationship with his nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, all inspired his great novel arewell To Arms
I thought it was good. Part II should air soon. I was blown away by the camera shots of Mt. Killamanjaro.
Just saw it on television. Hemingway buried a thousand-lire note to make the spot. Michael Palin buried his school copy of “A Farewell to Arms.”