In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recalled the ambulances he drove on the Austro-Italian battlefront in the summer of 1918:
I remembered how they used to burn out their brakes going down the mountain roads with a full load of wounded and braking in low and finally using the reverse, and how the last ones were driven over the mountainside empty, so they could be replaced by big Fiats with a good H-shift and metal-to-metal brakes.
Their 1999 versions are still made by Fiat, but they are sophisticated affairs with lots of gears and PS20,000-worth of equipment in the back alone. Which may account for the nervousness with which the Italian Red Cross has acceded to my request to drive one. I’m sent out to the main depot, given a uniform, and directed to an ambulance. Piero, the regular driver, has a mournful face and a dark beard line. He hasn’t had an accident in twenty-five years’ driving, and looks at me dubiously, as if the record might be in jeopardy today.
‘These Fiats must be pretty tough?’ I ask him. I think he takes this the wrong way, for behind the nod of agreement is a hint of anxiety at my motive for asking. The Fiats are fine, he says, but they’d rather have Mercedes. However, they’re government funded so they have to buy Italian. We drive around the streets until Piero finds one wide enough, straight enough and empty enough for him to entrust me with the wheel. Empty streets are not easy to find in Milan but we find comparative peace and quiet on the approach roads to San Siro Stadium.
If Central Station was Mussolini’s temple for the 1930s then San Siro is Italian football’s temple for the 1990s. It’s a functional building of enormous size - it seats a hundred thousand spectators - but in its grace and elegance is an outstanding example of the Italian talent for turning engineering into an art form. Piero answers questions about it somewhat tersely whilst giving me instructions on where to go next.
‘Left here, please! OK, OK, yes, right is good.’
I want to set his mind at rest by telling him that I’ve driven vehicles under many testing circumstances. Whilst making the Monty Python series I had to drive an E-Type Jaguar through the Scottish countryside whilst dressed as the front half of a pantomime horse. If you can change gear with a hoof you can do anything. But I don’t know quite how to phrase this in Italian.
After a while he lets me sound the alarm and press the button that sets off the flashing blue light, which could be very addictive given the swathe of space it immediately opens up in the traffic ahead. And gradually he eases up and we talk about things like his four-year-old son and how he has moved out of Milan because he hates it there and because he wants to be somewhere his boy ‘can wake up and see trees’. When we finally say goodbye, he tips me off as to where I can gain a little more Red Cross experience.
This turns out to be a first-aid class at the Maggiore Hospital in the centre of the city, the very same place to which Hemingway was sent for physiotherapy after his injuries at the Austrian front. (The Red Cross hospital in Via Manzoni where he was treated for his wounds and where he fell in love with nurse Agnes von Kurowsky also still exists, but the building is now, surprise, surprise, a bank.)
Tonight’s class is devoted to the cause and prevention of cardiac arrest. This is a tricky one for someone whose Italian is confined to ordering pasta, but I nod comprehendingly as we’re told how to check pulse, size of pupils, colour of lips and nose. Italian is such a lovely language that even parts of the body sound exciting - like very fast cars or interesting ways to cook veal. When it comes to the particularly mellifluous respirazione bocca a bocca I’m aware that the lecturer and everyone in the class is turned towards me, smiling in anticipation. Apparently I’ve nodded once too often and volunteered myself for a demonstration of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
In these hygienically correct days the victim is not one of the blondes attending the course but a unisex polystyrene torso with a pink head, yellow rubber hair and no arms. Even the dummy lips are protected by a square of white gauze which remains stuck to the end of my nose as I straighten up. (Much laughter.)
Worse is to come. I am asked to join two others in showing how to lift an inert body. The instructor appeals to the class for anyone weighing around sixty kilos to be the body. Due to a misunderstanding, a man who is sixty years old but a lot more than sixty kilos is laid on the floor in front of us. I get the middle section. It gives a whole new meaning to bottom of the class.
Still, it’s nice to know that after two years of this I could become a fully qualified Red Cross Ambulance Driver.
Hemingway took two days.
We leave Milan today to try and locate the place where Hemingway was wounded. It’s complicated because though he portrays his own real injury as the fictional injury sustained by Lieutenant Henry in A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway locates the event in a part of the battlefront that he’d never seen - the Isonzo River, now the border between Italy and Slovenia.
This is mountainous, dramatic country, where a milky-green river scours steep, wooded gorges. There was heavy fighting here, but Hemingway never saw any of it. He himself was hit and wounded on the banks of the Piave River in the low, flat farmlands only twenty-five miles from Venice.
The journey out there from Milan is straight and uncomplicated and pretty boring, both road and railway slicing across the rich plains of Lombardy with the snow-capped Alps away to the north a constant, if not always visible, presence.
Romantic cities like Verona, Padua, Vicenza and Venice are nothing more than names on overhead gantries as the autostrada curves to avoid them. Open country is quickly snuffed out by development. The wide plain is in danger of becoming one long industrial estate.
East of Venice the landscape patterns change. Dead straight roads, canals, power cables and the fresh-ploughed furrows of the fields bisect, criss-cross and converge on each other like lines on a Mondrian painting.
We put up at a hotel in Noventa di Piave, a tiny town with the second tallest bell tower in the Veneto outside St Mark’s Square, a pizzeria called ‘Smack!’ and a smoky cafe where the old men gather to play cards. Eat good plain food washed down with jugs of prosecco, the local sparkling white wine, in a busy local restaurant.
Later, before bed, read a few more pages of A Farewell to Arms with a keener pleasure than usual, knowing that I am now only one and a half miles from the tiny town of Fossalta, the place where the story was born.
On the afternoon of 7 July 1918, exactly one month after arriving in Italy, Hemingway set off on a bicycle from the farmhouse where he was billeted and rode a mile or so through the village of Fossalta to the Italian front-line trenches where he distributed morale-boosting supplies of chocolates and cigars.
Rumours were rife that an offensive was about to begin and Hemingway, impatient to see some action, returned to the lines that night. He talked the soldiers into letting him move up to a forward listening post beside the river. Half an hour past midnight, just after the offensive had begun, an Austrian mortar shell hit the post. In A Farewell to Arms, written ten years later, Hemingway describes the moment of impact:
There was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind.
One of the men with him had his legs blown off and died from loss of blood. Though some biographers dispute exactly what happened next, it seems that Hemingway dragged the second wounded man back to the trenches, and was hit in the legs by machine-gun fire as he did so. He was taken to the town hall and then to a dressing station at the local school, before being moved by Fiat ambulance (so uncomfortably he vomited) to a field hospital in Treviso and finally back to Milan.