Like Diem, Hemingway has been affected with a swirling energy from a young age. It’s 1917. Instilled with a fighting spirit, the barely 18-year-old writer wants to go to battle at the front in Europe. Declared unfit because of his bad eyesight, he ultimately ends up being a medic in a Red Cross ambulance in Italy.
Together with American painter Waldo Peirce, who is already renowned by then, he pulls lifeless, blood-covered bodies out of the European battlefield’s mud. Atrocious images are forever etched in his mind’s eye.