Ernest Hemingway and The Battle of Hurtgen Forest: October – December, 1944

” 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.