Publishing Disclaimer: In all of its publications and products, Military Review presents professional information. However, the views expressed therein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Army University, the Department of the Army, or any other agency of the U.S. government.

---

 

Pen and Sword

The Symbiosis between Ernest Hemingway and Maj. Gen. Buck Lanham

 

Eileen Martin

Greer Rising

 

Download the PDF

 

Ernest Hemingway’s time at war in Europe during World War II gave him direct experience with combat and close interaction with many U.S. military leaders on the ground. In 1944 France, Hemingway met then Col. Charles T. “Buck” Lanham, West Point class of 1924, commander of the Army’s 22nd Infantry Regiment, and the two became best pals. The men were intellectual equals connected over shared interests in history, literature, and military tactics. Hemingway the journalist became a de facto member of the regiment, beloved by the commander and the troops. The writer and the soldier forged a friendship that lasted for the remaining years of Hemingway’s life. They exchanged hundreds of intimate letters, and Hemingway channeled Lanham’s biography in shaping infantry Col. Richard Cantwell, the cynical protagonist in his 1950 novel Across the River and Into the Trees. The symbiosis between the writer who longed to be a warrior and the professional soldier who was a published poet rounded out each man’s character and enhanced Hemingway’s art.

Although armed with full infantry credentials, most of Lanham’s assignments leading up to command were staff positions focused on training and doctrine, and this, along with his published poetry, gave him an egghead reputation, with peers seeing him more suited for a desk job than a field position leading troops. However, in July 1944, he took command of the 22nd Infantry and from the get-go was known for spewing fighting words for the enemy and profanity-laced exhortations to his men to hold their ground or face court-martial.¹

Hemingway’s earliest contribution to the World War II effort was to oversee his ragtag “Crook Factory” flotilla searching for German submarines in Caribbean waters off Cuba. Biographer Mary Dearborn writes that Hemingway’s wife Martha Gellhorn, a nomadic journalist then covering the war in London and Italy, was annoyed Hemingway was focused not on writing but on drinking and urged him to participate in the war effort. Gellhorn sought to have the Office of Strategic Services bring Hemingway on board, but while the outfit found Hemingway possessed the requisite skills, they thought he was too much of a lone wolf for their mission. Dearborn notes that Hemingway contacted his friend Archibald MacLeish, then the Librarian of Congress, to see if a position as a writer attached to the U.S. military could be arranged so that he would have published something worthwhile when the war was over; nothing ever came of this. In May 1944, Hemingway traveled to London to cover the war for Colliers, again assisted by Gellhorn, who persuaded none other than former Royal Air Force officer Roald Dahl to arrange air transport.² After D-Day, Hemingway made his way to France, seeking to get closer to the action. Hemingway’s lash-up with Lanham’s unit would place him on the front lines, provide the camaraderie on which he thrived, and allow him to understudy a commander during key battles of the war. All to be closely observed and served up in his future writing.

What drew Hemingway and Lanham together, and what sustained their brotherhood? On the surface, they were an unlikely pair: a bear of a man and celebrated author meets a diminutive, gray-haired Army regimental commander up to his eyeballs in fighting the Germans. Accounts of Hemingway and Lanham’s time together in the war have focused on their respect and admiration for each other’s bravery and military acumen. They also bonded as scholars of military doctrine and literary classics. Hemingway described Lanham’s appeal: he had fun being with a man who was literate, articulate, brave, and of superior intelligence.³ Hemingway gained a commander’s-eye view of how war is fought, and Lanham gained a confidante outside of his chain of command. Both acquired loyal, discreet brothers in arms and established the unique trust of those who have undergone combat together. The men shared a wicked sense of humor, pointed sharply at those who would feign heroism. Hemingway’s admiration for Lanham’s work in Infantry in Battle was one of their ties, and Lanham’s specialized expertise added verisimilitude to Hemingway’s writing.

Hemingway loved Infantry in Battle, with which Lanham had a long association. In an April 1945 letter from Cuba, Hemingway reports he has reread Lanham’s Infantry in Battle and found it extraordinarily good.⁴ Hemingway told Lanham that he thought a stupendous update could be produced with what they had learned from their recent war experience. In his vernacular, Hemingway pronounced that Infantry in Battle has less “BS” than almost any military book he had ever read. He spun out a scenario with himself and Lanham when they are “old and worthless” and carried out to the swimming pool by their “aged retainers” to rewrite the rest of the unworthy military manuals into proper English.⁵

Hemingway knew which military texts were worthy. In 1942, two years before meeting Lanham, Hemingway had edited the anthology Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time. Hemingway’s introduction to the 1,069-page tome shows a deep and broad familiarity with classic war themes by strategists from Julius Caesar to Carl von Clausewitz, and the curated volume includes works by Hemingway’s historical and contemporary favorites. Hemingway found it impossible not to include the entirety of the 1895 Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, likening it to a great poem.⁶ There are three pieces by Leo Tolstoy and three stories by Hemingway himself, and perspectives ranging from the trenches to lofty leadership to outsiders looking in. This was a writer itching for a meeting of the minds with an expert practitioner like Lanham, and in the years to come, the general would send Hemingway a continuous supply of books and reading recommendations to quench his thirst for military knowledge.

Some of Hemingway’s letters to Lanham were warmup exercises for his other writing and were conversational as he visited on paper with his friend, at times including stream-of-consciousness references to battles near and far. For instance, one paragraph of one letter from Hemingway to Lanham in October 1952 references Pickett’s Charge, Round Top, Dan Dickles, Stonewall Jackson and Chancellorsville, Badajoz, Torres Vedra, San Juan Hill, Aguinaldo, Manila Bay, Bellopheron, Hellespont, Trafalgar, Dervishes and Tiffen, Moskowa, Hoguemont, Houffalize, Terkel, Uncle Toby, Darlan, Old Summersby, Versailles, and Reims.⁷ A copy of Men at War within arm’s reach may be necessary for following Hemingway’s mindset during these encyclopedic digressions. Still, perhaps the well-read Lanham was able to track his friend’s musings.

Lanham’s association with Infantry in Battle dates to the beginning of his career. From 1932 to 1934, Lanham was an instructor in military history and editor of school publications for the Army’s Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. In 1934, the then lieutenant edited and revised the Army’s guide to infantry tactics, strategy, and leadership. The first edition of Infantry in Battle was produced under then Col. George C. Marshall, mastermind of the postwar Marshall Plan for Europe’s recovery, and focused on World War I-era tactics. The second edition in 1939 was extensively revised by then Capt. Lanham with changes to tactical doctrine. In both, Marshall was intent on checking the concepts learned in peacetime training against the experience of battle.⁸

Marshall’s introduction to Infantry in Battle compares theory and practice in ways that resonate more than eighty years later. He states that officers who have received the best peacetime training available are surprised and confused by the difference between map problems and the real world. He laments the faulty assumptions “that organizations are well trained and at full strength, that subordinates are competent, that supply arrangements function, that communications work, that orders are carried out.”⁹ In war, these ideal conditions do not exist, and the infantryman must “carry on in spite of seemingly insurmountable difficulties and regardless of the fact that the tools with which he has to work may be imperfect and worn.”¹⁰

One reason Hemingway may have been a fan was Lanham’s clear presentation and practical translation for the warfighter. In 1934, Marshall praised the young Lanham as someone with “genuine ability of a high order,” saying he “understands the business of putting technical military matter into a form acceptable to the citizen soldier.”¹¹ A veteran of World War I and the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway certainly was a citizen soldier, and his crisp writing is emulated today.

Also emulated, or replicated, was Lanham’s real life. To shape the character of regimental commander Cantwell in Across the River and Into the Trees, Hemingway borrowed extensively from Lanham’s biography and field service and channeled the hellscape the men endured together in World War II. In July 1945, Hemingway told his publisher, Maxwell Perkins, that he had learned more while he and Lanham were together than he had learned up to that time, so he planned to try very hard to get some decent writing from the experience.¹²

The novel is a work of fiction but contains dozens of compass readings pointing to the life and service of Gen. Lanham. Many of the allusions in the novel refer to Lanham’s experiences, some of which Hemingway participated in or witnessed, and others are derived from details shared in Lanham’s letters to Hemingway. Stars and medals are recurring symbols in the novel and echo conversations between Lanham and Hemingway. Cantwell is humiliated over losing his general’s star and reverting to colonel. This was a concern of Lanham’s as well because after World War II, the U.S. Army had an excess of generals and developed a system for bucking some of them back to their previous rank. Lanham termed it open season on general officers and feared he would be given “the old heave-ho.”¹³ Lanham hung onto his star and collected one more in the end, but his letters to Hemingway and others expressed this concern and mentioned colleagues who were reclassified. Military decorations are also on Cantwell’s mind, and he counts the Distinguished Service Cross and his two Silver Stars among valuable possessions he could leave his Italian countess girlfriend Renata when he dies.¹⁴ Hemingway and Lanham discussed medals in their letters as well, with Lanham reporting to Hemingway on the U.S. and French citations he received, and the two discussing whether Hemingway should accept a Bronze Star, a fraught topic given Hemingway’s contributions to the war while serving as an unarmed journalist.¹⁵ Hemingway sought Lanham’s help when his Army officer son Jack Hemingway’s Bronze Star and Purple Heart were stolen, and Lanham worked to obtain replacements.¹⁶ These real-life discussions about rank and ribbons thread through the novel with obvious symbolism about self-worth, recognition, and fairness. Besides love and loss, the novel’s leitmotifs also include honor and dishonor, other people’s orders (some issued without situational awareness), and whether the no-fight generals lead from the front, all topics that featured in wisecracking exchanges between Lanham and Hemingway.

While Hemingway did not reveal details of his writing in progress with Lanham or virtually anyone else (other than reporting his daily word count), letters between the two men between the end of the war and the novel’s publication covered military friends and personalities including comrades from the 22nd, discussed a prominent general who had lost his star, and chewed the fat on sundry postwar political topics, including whether another war might be brewing. Lanham supplied Hemingway with chatty reports from his duty stations and tailored reading material on military strategy and tactics to bolster Hemingway’s studies as he worked on the novel.¹⁷ Hemingway acknowledged Cantwell was based partly on Lanham and partly on himself and another soldier friend.¹⁸ A deep dive into Lanham’s personal letters and military 201 (personnel) file reveals Lanham’s extensive influence on Hemingway’s study of the military and war, and spotlights Cantwell as Lanham’s doppelgänger more than generally acknowledged. Some similarities include the following:

• Col. Cantwell is an infantry officer who had been awarded and lost a general’s star, a bitter obsession that reverberates throughout the novel. He has led a beautiful regiment that suffered heavy casualties in significant battles; he has lots of negative opinions about generals and politicians; he tirelessly narrates his war stories to the point of wondering if he is a bore; he is in love with a young woman; he appreciates fine cuisine, plied with copious amounts of alcohol morning till night; he is a linguist and a Europeanist who appreciates art and culture; and bird hunting frames the scenes in the novel.
• Gen. Lanham is an infantry officer who received a speedy wartime promotion but frets that he will be reclassified back to the rank of colonel. He led his beloved 22nd Infantry Regiment in key battles described in the novel and was anguished over the losses; he shares searingly detailed military accounts with Hemingway; he has sharp-eyed views about the many military seniors he knows; he married a woman eighteen years his junior; he enjoys fine food, his poison being smoking rather than drinking; he speaks excellent French and has served in Europe; and he has gone bird hunting with Hemingway at Gardiner’s Island in New York.

In addition to personal characteristics and experiences that Lanham shares with Cantwell, the novel is replete with dozens of places and names from Lanham’s actual military service. From Hürtgen Forest to a parade of military commanders, in the retrospective or flashback-style novel, Cantwell regales Renata with familiar scenes and personas from Lanham’s life. One page alone mentions three of Lanham’s bosses: Gens. Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and Joe Collins.¹⁹

Hemingway’s work became a bestseller, although it was far less successful than his 1940 For Whom the Bell Tolls and is poorly understood even today, partly due to its arcane references and obscure allusions that most would not decipher. Mark Cirino’s comprehensive glossary of Across the River and Into the Trees interprets these references line by line, without the benefit of some of Lanham’s private letters.²⁰ Lanham believed the novel could not be comprehended without understanding the battles in Hürtgen Forest. He told Hemingway’s official biographer Carlos Baker that Hürtgen was the genesis of Across the River and Into the Trees. “A great deal of the book, perhaps the bulk of it, can be interpreted in terms of the Battle of Hürtgen Forest and the people whom Hemingway knew so well who were in it.”²¹

While a full treatment of the Hürtgen Forest campaign is outside the scope of this article, in late 1944, military leaders framed the Hürtgen battles as a critical breakthrough. This achievement shattered Adolf Hitler’s myth of impregnability on his western flank. Lanham’s unit helped crack the Siegfried Line, a significant foray into German territory that advanced Allied objectives and threatened German resolve. In subsequent years, the high cost of human lives lost per square inch of gained territory has been critiqued, and theorists have debated all aspects of the Hürtgen Forest battles. Lanham was devastated over the losses to his brilliant regiment, which historians agree suffered casualties of more than 80 percent, magnified when reinforcement numbers are calculated.²² Thus the significance of the sinister Hürtgen in Hemingway’s fictionalized account overlaying a love story onto a dying colonel’s sorrowful recollections of death and loss. Cantwell is dismayed over destroying his beautiful regiment by following orders from the no-fight generals and overwhelmed by feelings of futility and sadness at his men’s sacrifices in the merciless Hürtgen “Death Factory.”²³

Unlike Cantwell, neither resentment nor bitterness are prominent themes in Lanham’s writings to family friends. He loved the Army, was proud of fulfilling his duty and oath, and was unafraid of giving the ultimate sacrifice as part of the job if necessary. Did he criticize his colleagues, commanders, and leadership? Indeed he did, often and eloquently; as a perfectionist he did not suffer fools and had exacting standards. Lanham’s literary bent and reputation for use of precise language was familiar to his colleagues, even as they mocked him as a stickler. For the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first iteration of the Infantry Journal issued in July 1904, an Army Magazine columnist remembered the journal’s history and illustrious contributors and shared anecdotes of pranks played on assistant editor Lanham. The piece outlines two tricks poking fun at Lanham, one on dictating fawning letters of rejection, and one involving William Shakespeare:²⁴

• Lanham’s boss, Lt. Col. Forrest Harding (who later also became a major general), would needle Lanham by dictating a letter of rejection to a superior officer “in such abject and obsequious terms that Lanham, unable to stand it any longer, would bolt in disgust from the office to the restaurant below for a cup of coffee. While he was gone, Forrest would dictate the real letter.”²⁵
• In an elaborate literary caper, a colleague called Lanham at home at night, pointing out he had grossly misquoted a passage from Shakespeare’s Macbeth that was supposed to say, “Fie, my Lord fie! A soldier and afeared?” Lanham reportedly stormed into the office the next day and demanded that the whole incompetent staff be fired. The stunt had been to change only Lanham’s home-delivered copy to read, “Foo my Lord foo! A soldier and afeared?” Lanham, the Shakespeare aficionado, would later meet Hemingway, no slouch in the Shakespeare department, two literary minds recognizing kindred spirits.²⁶

If Hemingway amplified his already considerable knowledge about war while with Lanham and borrowed Lanham’s regimental commander persona for his fiction, what were the actual lessons from Infantry in Battle that he found so captivating? A review of the 1939 volume presents relevant, time-tested truths, many expressed in pithy, common-sense phrases. Lanham’s voice can be heard throughout Infantry in Battle, as in this sentence from the first chapter on rules, explaining that combat circumstances and conditions have multiple variables that mutate and combine to produce new tactical patterns: “The leader who frantically strives to remember what someone else did in some slightly similar situation has already set his feet on a well-traveled road to ruin.”²⁷

Chapter 2 puts obscurity front and center: “In war obscurity and confusion are normal.” The leader “must be prepared to take prompt and decisive action, in spite of the scarcity or total absence of reliable information. He must learn that in war the abnormal is normal and that uncertainty is certain.”²⁸

Chapter 3 champions simplicity: “Simple and direct plans and methods make for foolproof performance.”²⁹ In combat, all types of confusion and unforeseen contingencies prevail, overlaying fatigue, hunger, bad weather, and other negatives impacting the troops, thus the need for simple commands.

Each chapter begins with a concise lesson, such as these examples:

• “Superior forces must be concentrated at decisive points, and economy of force elsewhere may have to be extreme.”³⁰
• “The intelligent leader knows that terrain is his staunchest ally, and that it virtually determines his formation and scheme of maneuver.”³¹
• “In war a large safety factor should be included in all time and space calculations.”³²
• “Surprise is a master key to victory.” Lest the reader finds his adages trite or shopworn, Lanham adds that “tactical surprise is usually the reward of the daring, the imaginative and the ingenious. It will rarely be gained by recourse to the obvious.”³³

Each of the teachings is followed by several battlefield examples illustrated by detailed maneuver maps, and many include discussion of takeaways and reinforcement of conclusions to be drawn.

Chapter 24, “Action and Morale,” gives this advice: to combat the intense mental strain of battle, the leader must reassure his men and allay their tension and give them a sense of security and time for exercise and activity.³⁴ Hemingway’s presence lifted Lanham’s 22nd Infantry’s morale to no end. For many years following the war, Lanham sent signed greetings from the entire regiment to Hemingway, and the writer would send gifts such as smoked turkeys and whiskey to their reunion celebrations.³⁵ Hemingway found a home with the 22nd Regiment and would have given anything to have stayed with them, writing Lanham in April 1945 that he was lonely and depressed, missing the regiment and wishing he were a soldier rather than a gutless writer.³⁶ Hemingway, the civilian, often referred to the esprit de corps he felt with “his” unit. Still waving its flag in 1952, Hemingway scolded his publisher and friend Charlie Scribner for delays in sending him book proofs, suggesting he whip his foot soldiers into shape so that the press ran more like the efficient 22nd Infantry.³⁷

Chapter 26, “Miracles,” states that “resolute action by a few determined men is often decisive.”³⁸ This treatment discusses human nature and flesh-and-bone tendencies magnified in combat. Some human beings are natural leaders and can be relied on through thick and thin; others become conveniently lost in battle. “A large proportion will go with the majority, wherever the majority happens to be going, whether it be to the front or to the rear. Men in battle respond readily to any external stimulus—strong leadership or demoralizing influences.”³⁹ This chapter’s theme reflects Lanham and Hemingway’s views on the lesser men who do not pull their weight and disrupt their units, only to emerge on the other side as heroes in their own minds with exciting tales of near misses and valor in action: “Every army contains men who will straggle at the first chance and at the first alarm flee to the rear, sowing disorder, and sometimes panic, in their wake. They tell harrowing tales of being the only survivors of actions in which they were not present, of lacking ammunition when they have not squeezed a trigger, and of having had no food for days.”⁴⁰

Hemingway and Lanham shared a particular disdain for this type of hypocrisy. Their BS meters were calibrated to the same settings, sniffing out as phonies the journalists who reported eyewitness accounts of battles from hotel barrooms far from the front and pretenders who never saw shots fired spinning tall tales in bars on the other side of town. Hemingway employs Cantwell’s contemptuous voice to disparage these men, words failing him to categorize this type of sin.⁴¹ In the dour novel with no redemptive arc, the antihero Cantwell admits he is an “unjust bitter criticizer who speaks badly of everyone,” a sad, misanthropic characterization few would use to describe either Lanham or Hemingway.⁴²

The writer and the poet-warrior admired each other so much that they wished they could walk in the other’s boots. When Lanham was named commander of the 1st Infantry Division, Hemingway wrote the general in December 1952 that he would love to command a division more than anything in the world, going as far as to state (more colorfully) that he could not care less about being a writer.⁴³ Lanham, the decorated World War II hero, had many gifts, and at the same time, was in awe of Hemingway’s talents, including his courage, perception, and “boundless joy in the rough and tumble of life,” and wished he could be more like him.⁴⁴ The crucible of war transformed Hemingway and Lanham, uniting and blending their mirror images, their unique collaboration of pen and sword enriching the literary world and the profession of arms. Military professionals and civilian leaders could do worse than adding Infantry in Battle, Men at War, and Across the River and Into the Trees to their reading lists.

---

Notes

1. Robert Sterling Rush, Hell in Hürtgen Forest: The Ordeal and Triumph of an American Infantry Regiment (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 92.
2. Mary V. Dearborn, Ernest Hemingway: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2017), 438–44.
3. Ernest Hemingway to Helen Kirkpatrick, 12 November 1948, in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner’s, 1981), 651.
4. Hemingway to Buck Lanham, 20 April 1945, Ernest Hemingway Personal Papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston (hereinafter cited as Hemingway Papers, JFK Library).
5. Hemingway to Lanham, 14 April 1945, in Baker, Selected Letters, 586.
6. Ernest Hemingway, ed., Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time (New York: Crown Publishers, 1942), xvii.
7. Hemingway to Lanham, 28 October 1952, Ernest Hemingway Letters to Charles T. Lanham, C0067, Manuscripts Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library (hereinafter cited as Lanham Collection, Princeton University Library).
8. Charles T. Lanham, ed., Infantry in Battle, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Infantry Journal, 1939), vii.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. George C. Marshall to Maj. Gen. Stuart Heintzelman, 31 October 1934, in The Papers of George Catlett Marshall: “The Soldierly Spirit,” December 1880–June 1939, ed. Larry I. Bland and Sharon Ritenour Stevens, vol. 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 441.
12. Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, 23 July 1945, in Baker, Selected Letters, 594.
13. Charles Lanham to Rising Family, 27 July 1945, private collection.
14. Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and Into the Trees (New York: Scribner’s, 1950), 255.
15. Hemingway to Charles Scribner, 18 December 1946, in Baker, Selected Letters, 623.
16. Hemingway to Lanham, 7 December 1945, Lanham Collection, Princeton University Library.
17. See, for example, Lanham to Hemingway, 17 March 1945, 4 May 1945, 30 June 1949, 30 July 1949, Hemingway Papers, JFK Library.
18. Hemingway to Lanham, 11 October 1949, Hemingway Papers, JFK Library.
19. Hemingway, Across the River and Into the Trees, 125.
20. Mark Cirino, Reading Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees: Glossary and Commentary (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2016).
21. Charles Trueman Lanham, “Hemingway-Lanham Chronology 1944–45,” manuscript, Bernice Kert Personal Papers, JFK Library.
22. See, for example, Terry Mort, Hemingway at War: Ernest Hemingway’s Adventures as a World War II Correspondent (New York: Pegasus, 2016); and Charles Whiting, The Battle of Hürtgen Forest (Conshohocken, PA: Combined Publishing, 2000).
23. Hemingway, Across the River and Into the Trees, 243.
24. L. J. B., “Front and Center,” Army Magazine, July 1979, 7–9.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Lanham, Infantry in Battle, 1.
28. Ibid., 16.
29. Ibid., 35.
30. Ibid., 55.
31. Ibid., 69.
32. Ibid., 79.
33. Ibid., 107, 121.
34. Ibid., 355.
35. Lanham to Hemingway, 27 July 1949, Hemingway Papers, JFK Library.
36. Hemingway to Lanham, 20 April 1945, in Baker, Selected Letters, 588–89.
37. Hemingway to Scribner, 9–10 July 1950, in Baker, Selected Letters, 705.
38. Lanham, Infantry in Battle, 390.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Hemingway, Across the River and Into the Trees, 137.
42. Ibid., 229.
43. Hemingway to Lanham, 15 December 1952, Lanham Collection, Princeton University Library.
44. Lanham to Hemingway, 5 January 1945, Hemingway Papers, JFK Library.

 

 

 

The Army University Press provides writers with a suite of publishing venues to advance ideas and insights military professionals need to lead and succeed. Consider Military Review, the Journal of Military Learning, the NCO Journal, or the Combat Studies Institute to present cutting-edge thought and discussion on topics important to the Army and national defense.

Learn how to publish with Army University Press at https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Publish-With-Us/.

 

Back to Top

September-October 2023