This comes from an article titled: Susan Beegel: What I like about Hemingway:
"His deepest commitment was to telling the truth about war. Today we are so
healthily obsessed with the social problems of gender, race and
environment, we have unhealthily forgotten the social problem that can
impartially slaughter by the millions men, women and children of every
race, religion, color and creed, while laying waste to the earth and
poisoning the sea for all species and their generations to come.
We are so obsessed with respecting our differences we have forgotten how to
respect our common humanity.
Not Hemingway. Badly wounded as a Red Cross volunteer in World War I, he
experienced firsthand the Greco-Turkish War, the Spanish Civil War, the
Sino-Japanese War and World War II, often coming under fire. Before his
death in 1961, he would taste the terrors of hot war and cold in a nuclear
age, and lose his much-loved Cuban home to revolution.
In his novels The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell
Tolls, as well as in his superb short fiction and dispatches from many
fronts, Hemingway bears witness to the horror of war and its psychic
aftermath with graphic realism.
He reminds us that wounded soldiers scream for the mercy of death, that a
munitions factory explosion blows women workers into unrecognizable
fragments, that invading armies practice rape and murder, that refugee
mothers will not surrender their dead babies, that enemy soldiers are good
men with families, that the capacity for atrocity knows no ideology, that
killing another human being can destroy a man's serenity for life, that
jets and automatic weapons make it easy. . . ."
[Homestead] Ernest Hemingway on war,
Gene GeRue, 10/02/2005