After the not guilty verdict Hemingway left the hotel, boarded a waiting Jeep and headed back to Paris and  Mary Welsh.

Ernest Hemingway had beaten the “rap” as he called it. But despite his relief at the outcome Hemingway still felt bitter at having to suffer the indignities, as he saw them, of undergoing a “trial” where he was forced to lie about his actions when he should have admitted them openly even if that meant being sent back home where he could expect a “lousy hero’s” welcome, but could nevertheless comfortably sit back and wait for a suitable medal to be struck by the Key West Chamber of Commerce, or the Havana Pigeon Shooters Club. Instead, he’d stood up in front of Park and denied all the things that had made him proud to be an American.

Hemingway’s chief emotion in October, apart from his bitterness, one of shame at having the Ritz Hotel in Paris as an address when all those guys he loved most dearly were dug in all along the quickly freezing front line on the Belgian/German border. That’s where he wanted to be – where the fighting was.

And there was plenty of fighting back at the Ritz too between Mary and Hemingway. It was probably all due to the various tensions that had built up with Hemingway’s impending interrogation – and the fiasco of the interrogation itself – which all came to a head one night when Hemingway turned up at the Ritz with some drunken cronies, depositing them upon an unsuspecting Mary. The evening turned into a thoroughly unpleasant, vomit ridden incident that ended – as unconvincing as it may sound – in a fist fight between Hemingway and Mary, with Mary coming out on top, in more ways than one.

It was to be the start of a new strain within their relationship which, fortunately, always remained in control. Perhaps only Mary Welsh, from a very stable, and forgiving background, could manage.

Hemingway had to get back to the action. He felt he had something – he wasn’t sure what – to prove.

His chance came in early November, 1944, when a new offensive by the 4th Infantry Division got underway to clear a wide pathway through some fifty square miles of thickly wooded hill country. The whole thing seemed ridiculous to Hemingway. The ground was a sodden mess, with vehicles sinking into the mud up to their axles, with the Germans heavily dug in – their mortars and heavy machine guns placed every fifty yards or so – and with every village turned into a fortress. The area was known as the Hurtgenwald. The battle of the Hurtgen Forest was about to begin.

Late on the afternoon of November 15th 1944, Lt Colonel Tom Kenan looked out from his battalion command post, located in a deep hole in a clearing on the west edge of the Hurtgen Forest, and saw a “…tall man in olive drab trousers, combat boots, a knitted helmet liner, and a steel helmet. His bulk was further accentuated by a white leather jacket, lined with sheepskin. By contrast, the spectacles astride his nose seemed pitifully small and inadequate.” He was carrying a Thompson sub-machine gun.

This was Lt Col Kenan’s first sight of Ernest Hemingway still carrying arms. Within minutes Hemingway was re-united with his staunchest ally, Colonel “Buck” Lanham.

The attack on the German lines commenced the following day at 1245 hours, but the German artillery responded shell for shell, with the whole thing quickly becoming something of a stand-off, with casualties mounting by the hour. Artillery fire from both sides smashed the tops out of the tall fir trees, sending heavy branches and deadly shell fragments scattering in all directions. It soon became a senseless and costly campaign, with the US generals quickly taking on a First World War mentality that sent more and more US infantry into the forest of death (as it soon became known) to fight an unseen, well dug in enemy. Had the US generals sent their forces around the forest things might have been very different indeed.

And Hemingway stuck right in there with the troops. He at last was making an association with the real fighting men, something he’d been unable – or unwilling – to do in those days and months after he landed in Normandy back in the summer. It was almost as if he was seeking forgiveness.

During his stay in Hurtgen Forest Hemingway was visited one night by a US Army psychiatrist – probably ordered to keep an eye on Hemingway – who gently began to question Hemingway about his feelings, and emotions.

Hemingway told the psychiatrist that he was often troubled by dreams about Walt Whitman, and the goings on at Pfaffâ’s Bar, but that he was also worried about his thirty odd cats, and the increasing amount of kittens being born every week, back at the Finca in Cuba, and that he really didn’t know what to do about the situation. The psychiatrist told Hemingway to stop worrying, that it was natural to be concerned about his animals.

” Yes, I know that, Doc. But how the hell do I stop dreaming that I’m a Tom, and the one making all the kittens? Hemingway pauses and looks at the psychiatrist.

” That you’re what, Mr Hemingway?”

” That I’m a Tom cat, and the one…”

” Oh, I see.”

The psychiatrist is now very uncomfortable.

” I’m the black Tom that’s…”

” I really must be going, Mr Hemingway, I have a lot of patients to see.”

” I bet you do.”

The two men shook hands, and as the psychiatrist walked away Hemingway called after him.

” If you ever want a kitten.”

There was no reply as Ernest Hemingway burst into deep glorious laughter that echoed around the forest.

The Hurtgen Forest campaign lasted for three months (Hemingway was there for eighteen days) and in some of the worst winter weather ever known in that part of the world. To get a visual idea of the fighting and the
conditions the GIs had to endure, watch John Irvin’s film, When Trumpets Fade, which is as shattering a cinematic experience as watching Saving Private Ryan, and then think hard what it must have been like for the men involved, on both sides.

But for Ernest Hemingway his involvement in World War II was coming to an end, and it could have been a bloody end too had someone, somewhere, not been looking out for him.

By early December, 1944, Colonel “Buck” Lanham’s 22nd Infantry Regiment had been decimated. Between the middle of November and the 3rd of December the regiment had sustained 2,678 casualties, including 12 officers and 126 men killed in action, 184 missing, 1,859 wounded, and 500 non-battle casualties. Add these figures to those killed and wounded since July, when Hemingway joined the regiment, and there were very few left – apart from Lanham himself – that Hemingway knew. It was the same story across the whole of the US Army. The American Army that landed on D-Day was not the same one that marched into Berlin in 1945.

On the morning of 4th December Hemingway suggested to his friend, William Walton, they should drive over to the 22nd HQ and say goodbye to their remaining old friends, and say a farewell to the guys in the field hospitals. Walton agreed, and the two of them jumped into a Jeep. It was a bone-chillingly cold morning, with a heavy freezing fog that hugged the ground.

Walton drove the Jeep slowly along the rutted, mud-frozen, road, with the two of them passing a flask of brandy back and forth to keep the chill out. After about four miles or so Hemingway heard a low buzzing sound in the distance, a sound that grew closer and closer. He couldn’t place the sound at first, then recognised it from the time he lay in that frog-infested ditch in Spain. It was the sound of a German aircraft. Not the low hum of a 109, but the high pitched, bee-like buzz of a Focker trainer the Germans had used in Spain to teach new pilots the art of strafing.

” Hear that, Bill?”

” Yeh. What is it?”

” The last of the Luftwaffe come looking for me is what.”

” How the…”

” Jump! Jump, Bill!”

Both men jumped, and as they did so the German aircraft, painted in grey and green camouflage, emerged eerily out of the freezing fog no more than twenty feet off the ground and emptied its 9mm ammo into the careering Jeep, opening the petrol tank like a can of sardines. The explosion propelled the two men cleanly into a ditch filled with water, and three decomposing German corpses.

” Shit!” Shouted Hemingway as he shook a fist at the departing aircraft.

Bill Walton was impressed at Hemingway’s calm.

” You okay, Ernie?”

” Shit! The Bastard got the brandy.”

Walton could see the familiar flask in the middle of the rutted road, a bullet hole clean through its centre.

” Shit indeed, and I sure could use a drink right now.”

Hemingway began to laugh as he dragged himself out of the ditch, his white sheepskin soaking, and smeared in filth.

” Don’t say old Hemeroid don’t come prepared, Bill, because he do.”

With that Hemingway handed Walton, who had now dragged himself out of the ditch, his water bottle.

” Water?”

” Drink, my man, drink to the poor bastards in that ditch who ain’t gonna drink nothing but ditch water. Drink!”

And Bill Walton did drink, a long drink of one of the best dry martinis he’d ever tasted.

” Ernie, you never fail to amaze me, never.”

” At your service. Now hand it over for I am, as they say, as dry as a dogs tail in a following wind. A toast to the Hun: long may they die!”

They eventually found the 22nd’s HQ, said their farewells, and headed back to Paris, and the Ritz, which now had a sign outside that read:

“Everything Available To Those Who Can Pay.”

For Hemingway the war was now almost over, and with a severe cold took to his bed in the Ritz where he sipped champagne, ate wonderful goose pate, and held court to all and sundry.

The sundry included Simon de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre, who sat on the end of his bed and ate his pate, and drank his champagne (they had no such luxuries) and tried to involve Hemingway in long convoluted discussions about literature, and its place, its rightful place, in the philosophical scheme of things. Hemingway was rather bored by it all, but in the end stated:

” Jean, I’ll tell you this: William Faulkner is a goddam better writer than me, so put that in your existential pipe and smoke it.”

In the weeks that followed Hemingway visited old friends in the 4th Division, watched Von Rundstedt’s final offensive, and in January 1945 met up again with his old RAF friend, Peter Wykeham Barnes, who was on leave in Paris, with whom, after taking in a quantity of grog adjourned to the George V for dinner. ” We went down to the lower to eat, and everything was ringing like bells when Ernest espied William Saroyan sitting two tables away.”

” Well, for God’s sake what’s that lousy Armenian son-of-a-bitch doing here?”

The more Wykham Barnes tried to quieten Hemingway the worse he became, calling the young American novelist, who later came to fame as the author of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, all the names under the sun. Saroyan could only take so much, and when Hemingway called Saroyan’s mother something unspeakable the young novelist went across to Hemingway and smacked him in the mouth, which resulted in Hemingway retaliating, which resulted in Saroyan’s dinner guests setting about Hemingway and Wykham Barnes, which then involved the rest of the restaurant taking sides in an all out brawl from which Wykham Barnes escaped on his hands and knees just as the gendarmes arrived in force.

By March 1945, Hemingway and Mary were on their way back to the US.