STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK

PUBLIC DOMAIN PHOTOS PROVIDED BY JOANNE KLEIN

Tuesday’s observance of 9-11 marked the beginning of the War in Afghanistan, which is five months short of tying the Vietnam War as America’s longest conflict.

But many are also marking the hundredth anniversary of World War I—the Great War that was supposed to be “the war to end all wars.”

That war was a war of “chaos and gore,” says Hemingway scholar Stacey Guill, the author of “Hemingway and the Spanish Earth.” But an impressionable 17-year-old Ernest Hemingway couldn’t wait to be part of it.

“I can’t let a show like this go on without getting in on it,” he wrote in a letter to his sister Marcelline in 1917.

The hundredth anniversary of the war was one of the reasons organizers chose “A Farewell to Arms,” which some call the greatest novel to come out of World War I, as the theme of the 2018 Hemingway Festival, which was hosted by Ketchum’s Community Library this week.

That novel helped propelled Hemingway, who lived in Sun Valley off and on between 1939 and his death in 1961, into the upper echelons of America’s great fiction writers.

The United States became involved in the war while Hemingway was a senior at Oak Park High School in Illinois. And young Hemingway, a voracious reader, was bombarded with articles and advertisements about how honorable it was to serve.

He asked friends and family to send him newspapers and magazine while working on a farm in upper state Michigan during his summer vacation. And they touted servicemen in such articles as “Role (sic) of Honor.” Even razor ads were directed to men in uniform: “If you look good, you will move up in the ranks.”

What’s more, there was a vigorous campaign against those who didn’t serve. Newspapers wrote of dragnets to nab so-called slackers. “The Slacker” feature film showed at the Oak Park movie theater. And a popular song of the day exhorted, “Don’t be a slacker. Uncle Sam wants a backer.”

Hemingway’s parents did not want their son to join the war effort and so they saw him off to the Kansas City Star where he serve as a cub reporter from October 1917 to April 1918 at the recommendation of his uncle who was a friend of the newspaper’s editor.

But Hemingway ‘s main goal during this time remained to go overseas. And in April 1918 the newspaper told how the honorary second lieutenant was headed to the front where he helped recover the shredded remains of munitions workers following a factory explosion in Milan his first day on the job.

Six weeks after he left New York, Hemingway’s own leg was riddled with shrapnel in a mortar attack after he’d delivered chocolate and cigarettes to troops.

The incident wizened the youngster: “When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you,” he later wrote. “Then when you are badly wounded you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you.”

“They talked about proving yourself in battle. But the reality is that men were just blown to bits,” added Guill.

Red Cross recruitment posters had stated: “Men wanted over 31 years of age for American Red Cross…drivers, mechanics, chauffeurs…” with the assumption that older men would be stronger and more mature than younger boys.

But women volunteered, as well. Some helped as stretcher bearers. Others drove ambulances, required to know how to fix engines and change tires.

The women who served wrote of men’s once-blue uniforms being drenched in blood, their shoes full of mud, said Joanne Klein, who teaches classes on modern European history and World War I at Boise State University.

Often, they would help German aid workers carry their wounded off the field. And the Germans, in turn, would help them.

With resources stretched, medics used scissors to cut off fingers, Klein said. They attended to those they thought would live and made those they thought were going to die as comfortable as possible.

Those who were not badly wounded might lie on stretchers for days, even weeks, before being transported to makeshift hospitals set up in churches, university halls, even trains.

Hemingway was hit at a clearing station where the wounded and dying were taken. He was fortunate in that he was transported on an Italian hospital train, as they were the nicest of the trains in those days, Klein said.

The trains would be full of casualties from various countries—nurses would try to put together those who spoke the same language.

Doctors and nurses often became addicted to morphine due to the stress and shock over dealing with so many casualties.—10,000 Italians were killed and 30,000 wounded at the battle of Caporetto alone.

Laudanum—a tincture of opium--was used frequently. In fact, mothers in those days used it to quiet their babies.

While World War I was the first to involve machine guns, most casualties were due to artillery shrapnel.

The bodies of the dead were used to shore up trenches. The survivors were often taught to knit—an activity to keep them busy—as they dealt with shell shock. And, just as today, many soldiers struggled to readjust to civilian life, missing the camaraderie of fellow soldiers in the trenches, as horrible as it was.

And in the end, Ernest Hemingway had this to say: “World War I was the most colossal murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth.”

KETCHUM’S ROLE IN WORLD WAR I:

Many of those working in the silver or galena mines in the Wood River Valley were exempted from duty in World War I because of the demand for lead, says local historian John Lundin.

That said, Ketchum send 18 boys to the front. That reportedly gave Ketchum the largest participation per capita in the war.