User:KWatson/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents” should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an un stabilized line where the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later, we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938 Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of

the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective (Watson 71-2). This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice self-ironic moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938. The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying. In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do you won’t have to write it” (Watson 58).

Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after

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 The opening boastfulness of “American Veterans Tell of Escaping Insurgents” should be taken somewhat ironically. The dispatch begins by announcing that for “two days we have been doing the most dangerous thing you can do in this war. That is keep close behind an un stabilized line where the enemy are attacking with mechanized forces.” Then, a few pages later, we learn about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivors of the spring 1938 Nationalist offensive that took Bob Merriman and eventually reached the Mediterranean Sea. Reading about these survivors creeping through enemy camps, stepping on a sleeping German soldier’s hand, sprinting “across an open field toward the Ebro bank and being sniped at by artillery controlled by an observation plane overhead” and then “the desperate swimming of
 the Ebro” naked, we are asked to place the correspondent’s plight in due perspective (Watson 71-2). This story certainly escapes the charge of a monotonous battle and bombing scene; its switch from apparently boastful to awe-struck witness feels almost deliberately self-conscious. Other choice self-ironic moments come in the dispatches of that pre-Teruel quiet fall of 1938. The one titled “Hemingway, Covering War, Tells of Brush with Death” has little to report from Madrid other than the new aftershave brand he is trying. In “Loyalists’ Drive Seen Progressing as Planned,” he writes that “Shells are all much the same and if they don’t hit you there is no story and if they do you won’t have to write it” (Watson 58).
+Hemingway’s dispatches are sometimes monotonous because his war was usually monotonous—as wars are most of the time. It should also be kept in mind that scholars reviewing Hemingway’s NANA dispatches one after
+Page break 436-437