"Soldier's Home" revisited: a Hemingway mea culpa - Ernest Hemingway

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1993 by J.F. Kobler

By the second sentence of the fourth paragraph, the story clearly has taken up residence in indirect discourse from and through Krebs's awareness: "Later he felt the need to talk but no one wanted to hear about it" (145). This arrival at a new and permanent point of view means that the crucial first sentence of the fourth paragraph marks the point of departure for the objective narrator: "At first Krebs, who had been at Belleau Wood, Soissons, the Champagne, St. Mihiel and in the Argonne[,] did not want to talk about the war at all." Can we determine that at some precise point in this sentence the narrator's objective voice ceases and Krebs's defensive one begins? I believe that the change occurs precisely with the second "at" of the sentence. The narrator puts Krebs "at" those five military engagements and Krebs simultaneously admits in his own mind that he was only "at" those battles. For "Soldier's Home" this "at" may be just as important to a reading of Krebs's military experiences as is the same carefully chosen word to an interpretation of motives in the more-often-examined passage about how "Mrs. Macomber, in the car, had shot at the buffalo" [my emphasis].

Both the narrator of "Soldier's Home" (and therefore Hemingway) and Krebs know that this Marine was merely "at" those five engagements, that he was not "in" them, but only near them, perhaps in much the same way that Frederic Henry and Ernest Hemingway himself were only "at" the battles in Italy in which each was "accidentally" wounded. Neither was a "real" soldier engaged in combat at the time; nor was Krebs, who apparently has not even "benefitted" from the suffering of an accidental wound.

A close reading of "Soldier's Home" after the fourth paragraph reveals no description of Krebs's being in combat. One of the major sentences often cited by critics as evidence of Krebs's role in the war is a masterful piece of ambiguity that suggests much more than it actually says. Had a current political term been available to Hemingway in 1924, he might have admitted to exercising "spin control" on Krebs's behalf.(4) Here is the sentence that has been quoted numerous times to support a reading of Krebs as a fighting Marine:

All of the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside himself when he thought of them; the times so long back when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost themselves. (145-46)

Is this the way a young man would remember specific acts of military prowess or bravery?

If this story is completely lacking in details about Krebs's military performance, why have so many readers over so many years believed that Krebs really was a fighting Marine? Hemingway has employed at least two "tricks" to make readers feel more positively about Krebs than they should. One way that Hemingway accomplishes the seduction of his readers is to make Krebs's mother such a focus of hypocrisy and religiosity that Krebs cannot help but look good in contrast.