When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it.
In the spring of 1918, Oak Park’s most famous native son, Ernest Hemingway, left for the Italian front in a war the United States had only entered months before. He enlisted with the Red Cross, serving first in an ambulance unit and then as a canteen worker.
In June of that year, while distributing chocolate bars and cigarettes to soldiers at Fossalta di Piave, an Austrian mortar exploded and shrapnel struck Hemingway; 227 pieces cut into his body. While carrying a wounded comrade to safety, Hemingway was hit by machine-gun fire. He was not yet 19 years old.
Talk about grist for an author’s mill!
To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the beginning of that war, throughout the month of November, the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park will offer free admission to the Hemingway Museum and Birthplace for military, active duty or retired (with ID), to honor their service.
In addition, the Hemingway Museum and the National Veterans Art Museum are putting together a youth art exhibition. They are looking for collages from artists age 5-18 on the theme of “Peace Triumphant,” to be exhibited at the two museums during the month of December.
Peace Triumphant, of course, is the name of the WWI memorial at the top of the hill in Scoville Park.
The monument is composed of three larger-than-life-sized figures in bronze representing the World War I forces on air, land and sea. Behind the soldier, pilot and sailor is a stone figure, representing Columbia in the act of sheathing her sword (indicating the end of war). A bronze wall plaque on the north side is engraved with the names of 56 soldiers from the Oak Park and River Forest area who lost their lives during World War I. Four plaques encircle the first tier of the pedestal base and are engraved with the 2,446 names of the enlisted men from the two communities.
Just complete the entry form (available on ehfop.org) and bring or mail the form and the collage to the Hemingway Museum, 200 N. Oak Park Avenue, Oak Park, IL 60302.
On Veterans Day itself, the museum will premiere “A Farewell to Arms: In Fifteen Seconds,” a Hemingway video commentary on Instagram.com/ehfop.
And on Nov. 20 at 7 p.m., the Hemingway Birthplace, 339 N. Oak Park Ave., just up (and across) the street from the museum, will host a reading and signing by Steven Florczyk, author of Hemingway, the Red Cross and the Great War. That, too, is free and open to the public.