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Working Nurse l WorkingNurse.com 21 February 22-March 29, 2021 5 I n Love and War is a 1996 film based on the real-life romance between a young Ernest Hemingway and Agnes Von Kurowsky, the nurse who treated him after he was wounded during the First World War. The film was produced and directed by actor-director Richard Attenborough, known for grand stories (he directed A Bridge Too Far and Gandhi), and filmed on location in the beautiful Italian mountain town of Vittorio Veneto. The story begins in July 1918, in the final months of World War I. At the time, Italy feared an overwhelming invasion from Austria and requested aid from the United States. Since U.S. troops had already been committed to France, President Wilson promised to send Red Cross workers to Italy to "boost morale and care for the wounded." In Search of Adventure One of those workers is an 18-year-old from Chicago: Ernest Hemingway, played by Chris O'Donnell. After being severely wounded in action, he is sent to a convent-turned-hospital, where he meets Agnes Von Kurowsky, a nurse from New York seven years his senior, played by a very lovely Sandra Bullock. Hemingway has decided not to attend college and instead joined a Kansas City newspaper in hopes of making his name as a frontline war correspondent. He's determined to prove himself the uber-male, the man who cannot be ignored among the other injured men. But he's also very young, and as a writer, we're always wondering how much of what he does and says is just invention. Von Kurowsky has left a career as a librarian to become a nurse, and then volunteered for war service. She finds herself in a strange country, in a hazardous role that puts her nursing skills to the test and faces her with an emotional strain most of us can only imagine. MOVIE REVIEW In Love and War A sumptuously-filmed melodrama by Christine Contillo, RN, BSN, PHN hospital and Von Kurowsky's tone became more and more affectionate, soon leading to protesta- tions of love and even talk of marriage. Von Kurowsky later insisted it was all quite chaste. Hemingway had suggested otherwise, but she declared, "I wasn't that kind of girl." For her, the affair seems to have been just another passing fancy, since she was still juggling several other men, including her erstwhile fiancé, a Bellevue physician. Nonetheless, her ardent letters (which Hemingway kept) make it easy to understand why a naïve 19-year-old would see it as a grand passion. In any case, their relationship was brief. In October, Von Kurowsky was transferred to Florence and then Treviso. Hemingway returned to active service, only to almost immediately end up back in the hospital with hepatitis. After the Armistice ended the war that November, they saw each other only a few more times before he sailed for home. Hemingway still imagined that Von Kurowsky would marry him, but her attention had already shifted to a new romance with Italian aristocrat Domenico Caracciolo. She broke things off with Hemingway in March 1919, telling him, "I am now & always will be too old … I can't get away from the fact that you're just a boy — a Kid." Novel Inspiration Von Kurowsky didn't marry Caracciolo, whose fam- ily mistrusted her, but she found she wasn't ready to return to America either. She soon rejoined the Red Cross, serving for two years as a visiting nurse in Romania. She was posted to Haiti in 1926, spend- ing five years as director of nursing for the Haitian Public Health Service, a challenging and diplomati- cally sensitive role. In 1928, she married an auditor from the American delegation in Haiti, but she divorced him in 1931. She remarried in 1934 and eventually set- tled in Key West, Fla. Although Hemingway was then living in Havana, Cuba, with his fourth wife, continued on page 22 continued on page 22