“I'll make it to Europe some way in spite of this optic. I can't let a show like this go on without getting into it.” According to Literary Ambulance Drivers Hemingway wrote these words to sister in reference to the eye problem that kept him from enlisting in the general military during World War I.
He was determined to see the action through and sought out another way to get to the front and found it as an ambulance driver. He was one of many future writers who worked in the ambulance corps of The Great War, a new role introduced by the advent of automobile ambulances, and open to the educated and upper class.
Once there Hemingway was badly injured, as noted by the National Endowment for the Arts' Reader's Guide, and nursed by a woman named Agnes von Kurowsky, who was seven years older than him. He fell in love with her and asked her to marry him five months later, but she refused. These experiences served as a basis for the relationship between his main characters in A Farewell to Arms, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an ambulance driver for the Italians, and the nurse who cares for him after he is injured, Catherine Barkley.
