In Love and War (1996) is a romantic drama based on the World War

							Background Information
In Love and War (1996) is a romantic drama based on the World War I
experiences of Ernest Hemingway and his first love, Agnes von Kurowsky.
When young Hemingway graduated from high school, in 1917, he wanted to
see the action of World War I, the “war to end all wars.” Rejected from
enlisting in the U. S. Army because of a bad left eye, he volunteered for and
was accepted by the U. S. Red Cross Ambulance Corps on the Italian front.
Although Lt. Hemingway’s duties were that of a “morale booster” (he was to
hand out chocolate and cigarettes, serve coffee, and boost the spirits of the
American troops), he was able to see the war secondhand. On 8 July 1918,
Hemingway was wounded delivering supplies to soldiers, which ended his
career as an ambulance driver. He was hit by an Austrian trench mortar shell
that left fragments in his legs, and was also hit by a burst of machine-gun fire.
He was later awarded the Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento)
from the Italian government for dragging a wounded Italian soldier to safety in
spite of his own injuries. After he returned home to Oak Park, Illinois, after
the war, he entertained his friends, family, and neighbors with stories of his
“bravery” and impressed them with his medals.
Hemingway worked in the American Red Cross hospital in Milan, Italy. Here
he met Agnes von Kurowsky of Washington, D.C., one of eighteen nurses
attending groups of four patients each, who was more than six years older
than he. Hemingway fell in love with her, but their relationship did not survive
his return to the United States; instead of following Hemingway to America, as
originally planned, Agnes became romantically involved with an Italian officer.
This rejection permanently devastated Ernest, but it provided inspiration for,
and was fictionalized in, one of his early novels, A Farewell to Arms. Years
later, after Agnes’ death, her diary was published by Hemingway scholars
James Nagel and Henry Villard, who published the diary and sold the rights to
Hollywood. The end result was this film, In Love and War. Hemingway
scholars evaluate it to be 85-90% accurate as a representation of what
happened between Hemingway and von Kurowsky.


Supplementary source: “In Love and War.” 26 February 2008.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Love_and_War_%281996_film%29