Journalism as Literature

A New Kind of War

News Dispatch by Ernest Hemingway

notable quote against supporters of the left-wing elected

“Never think that war,
government of Spain (the Loyalists or
no matter how necessary,
Republicans). This war was widely seen
nor how justified, is not
as a struggle against fascism, or dictatorial
a crime.”
government. Many world writers,
fyi including Hemingway, were sympathetic
Did you know that to the Loyalist side. These writers were
Ernest Hemingway . . . greatly disheartened by Franco’s eventual
• began a romance in victory in 1939.
Spain with fellow
war reporter Martha Celebrity Journalist Hemingway
Gellhorn, who became covered the war for the North American
his third wife? Newspaper Alliance (NANA),
• hunted Nazi submarines receiving the highest fee ever paid a war
off the coast of Cuba in correspondent. His NANA dispatches
his private fishing boat? Ernest Hemingway have been called “a new style of reporting
1899–1961 that told the public about every facet of
the war, especially . . . its effects on the
Ernest Hemingway never considered his common man, woman, and child.” One
For more on Ernest journalism as important as his fiction,
Hemingway, visit the of these dispatches, “A New Kind of War,”
Literature Center at but his journalism was admired anyway, is considered classic.
ClassZone.com. particularly his war correspondence. Before
he published his first stories and novels Writer or Fighter? After World War II
in the 1920s, he reported on European broke out, Hemingway once again became
affairs for the Toronto Star. He covered the a war reporter, this time for Collier’s
Greco-Turkish War of 1922, describing 20 magazine. He memorably described the
miles of Greek refugees trudging through D-day landing at Normandy, the
the rain. He also interviewed the fascist liberation of Paris, and the Allied
Hemingway, center, among
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, calling movement into Germany in 1944. His
other correspondents covering
him the “biggest bluff in Europe.” command of a French guerrilla band and
the Spanish Civil War
his storage of weapons in his hotel room
Taking Sides in Spain By the 1930s, led him to be investigated for violating
Hemingway had become a famous literary the Geneva Convention, which forbids
figure. He returned to war reporting in journalists to take up arms. He was cleared
1937 after civil war broke out in Spain, of misconduct and later awarded a Bronze
the country that he loved. Hemingway is Star for his service as a war correspondent.
perhaps most identified with this conflict,
in which the right-wing army of General See also the biography on page 968, which
Francisco Franco (the Nationalists) fought covers Hemingway’s entire career.

1048
literary analysis: subjectivity in reporting Explore the Key Idea
News reporters are trained to be objective, presenting facts
without the intrusion of their own personal feelings or
opinions. You will notice, however, that Hemingway does
What can we learn
not strive for this ideal in his reporting on the Spanish Civil
War. His writing is quite subjective, expressing his personal
from war
?
KEY IDEA The Spanish Civil War did
reactions to what he sees. He wants his readers to be in
Madrid with him, experiencing exactly what he does. Toward not have immediate consequences
this end he uses both the second-person point of view (“as you for most Americans, yet American
lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line”) and the first- newspapers thought it was important
person point of view (“I did not believe a word of it”). enough to cover. Consider our own
As you read, notice ways in which Hemingway reveals his times. Why do newspapers and
feelings and opinions. Consider what his subjectivity offers broadcast networks send reporters to
that an objective news report could not. cover fighting in foreign countries?
What do these reports usually show
Review: Dialogue or tell an audience about war?
DISCUSS Think about war coverage
reading skill: analyze descriptive details you have read, seen on television,
Hemingway makes powerful use of descriptive details. Many or heard on the radio. Working in a
of these are sensory details, which appeal to the senses of small group, list types of information
sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. Notice the visual details you would expect to be included
in the following passage. What can you conclude from them? in such reporting—the number
On the corner, twenty yards away, is a heap of rubble, smashed of people killed in an attack, for
cement and thrown up dirt, a single dead man, his torn clothes example. After completing your list,
dusty, and a great hole in the sidewalk from which the gas from discuss insights about war that you
a broken main is rising. . . . have gained from journalists.

Other descriptive details are not sensory, but they still convey
important ideas. What might it mean, for example, that the
large rooms at the front of Hemingway’s hotel only cost a
dollar a day? As you read, jot down descriptive details about
• Madrid and the hotel
• Raven, the wounded soldier Hemingway meets
• Raven’s commander, Jock Cunningham
React to these details and make inferences from them.

1049
 A New
Kind of War
Ernest Hemingway

background Hemingway and other journalists covering the Spanish Civil War
stayed at the Hotel Florida in Madrid, the Spanish capital, which was under siege by
General Franco’s Nationalist forces. Franco was aided by the fascist governments of
Italy and Nazi Germany, which sent troops and weapons. The Loyalist forces of the
Spanish government were aided by the Soviet Union and volunteer International
Brigades from across Europe and the United States. The soldiers that Hemingway
profiles in this article were part of the International Brigades.

NANA Dispatch · APRIL 14, 1937 ANALYZE VISUALS

MADRID—The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the Examine the composition,
firing in the front line seventeen blocks away. There is a rifle fire all night long. or arrangement, of shapes
in the photograph on
The rifles go tacrong, capong, craang, tacrong, and then a machine gun opens up. page 1050. What does
It has a bigger calibre and is much louder, rong, cararong, rong, rong. Then there the angle of the photo
is the incoming boom of a trench mortar shell and a burst of machine gun fire. contribute to its impact?
You lie and listen to it and it is a great thing to be in bed with your feet stretched Explain.
out gradually warming the cold foot of the bed and not out there in University
City or Carabanchel.1 A man is singing hard-voiced in the street below and three
drunks are arguing when you fall asleep. a a SUBJECTIVITY IN
10 In the morning, before your call comes from the desk, the roaring burst of a REPORTING
What are Hemingway’s
high explosive shell wakes you and you go to the window and look out to see a
thoughts and sensations
man, his head down, his coat collar up, sprinting desperately across the paved in the first paragraph?

1. University City or Carabanchel (kärP-E-bän-chelQ): scenes of bloody battles in or on the outskirts of Madrid.

1050 unit 5: the harlem renaissance and modernism

 square. There is the acrid smell of high explosive you hoped you’d never smell
again, and, in a bathrobe and bedroom slippers, you hurry down the marble stairs
and almost into a middle-aged woman, wounded in the abdomen, who is being
helped into the hotel entrance by two men in blue workmen’s smocks. She has her
two hands crossed below her big, old-style Spanish bosom and from between her b DESCRIPTIVE DETAILS
fingers the blood is spurting in a thin stream. On the corner, twenty yards away, is Identify sensory details
in lines 10–21, and the
a heap of rubble, smashed cement and thrown up dirt, a single dead man, his torn senses they appeal to.
20 clothes dusty, and a great hole in the sidewalk from which the gas from a broken What mood do they
main is rising, looking like a heat mirage in the cold morning air. b create?
“How many dead?” you ask a policeman.
“Only one,” he says. “It went through the sidewalk and burst below. If it would
have burst on the solid stone of the road there might have been fifty.”
A policeman covers the top of the trunk, from which the head is missing;
they send for someone to repair the gas main and you go in to breakfast. A c GRAMMAR AND STYLE
charwoman,2 her eyes red, is scrubbing the blood off the marble floor of the Reread lines 28–30.
Notice how the use of the
corridor. The dead man wasn’t you nor anyone you know and everyone is very second-person pronoun
hungry in the morning after a cold night and a long day the day before up at the you places the reader in
30 Guadalajara3 front. c Hemingway’s shoes.
“Did you see him?” asked someone else at breakfast.
“Sure,” you say.
“That’s where we pass a dozen times a day. Right on that corner.” Someone
makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke.
And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me. d d SUBJECTIVITY IN
The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara front weren’t you, although Italian REPORTING
Interpret what
dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like our
Hemingway means
dead.4 No. You went to the front early in the morning in a miserable little car with by “the feeling that
a more miserable little chauffeur who suffered visibly the closer he came to the characterizes war.”
40 fighting. But at night, sometimes late, without lights, with the big trucks roaring
past, you came on back to sleep in a bed with sheets in a good hotel, paying a
dollar a day for the best rooms on the front. The smaller rooms in the back, on the
side away from the shelling, were considerably more expensive. After the shell that
lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on
that side, twice the size of the one you had had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me
they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore. e e SUBJECTIVITY IN
Then, in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy, REPORTING
Reread lines 36–46. What
located out behind the Morata front along the road to Valencia,5 they said, “Raven
is Hemingway’s attitude
wants to see you.” toward the Italian dead?
50 “Do I know him?” his chauffeur? his hotel
“I don’t think so,” they said, “but he wants to see you.” room?

2. charwoman: a woman employed to clean houses or offices.

3. Guadalajara: a city in Spain to the northeast of Madrid, strategically important because of its nearness
to the capital. Battle had raged there through most of March 1937, with the Loyalists finally winning.
4. Italian dead . . . our dead: Italian forces fought on the side of the Nationalists; however, Hemingway had
spent a long time in an Italian hospital as a young man during World War I.
5. Morata . . . Valencia: Morata de Tejuña, a small town southeast of Madrid, was heavily damaged at this
time. Valencia is on the eastern coast of Spain, about 240 miles southeast of Madrid.

1052 unit 5: the harlem renaissance and modernism

 “Where is he?”
“Upstairs.”
In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very
gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out, looking away from the gurgling bottle
and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular
intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not
move.
“Where’s Raven?” I asked.
60 “I’m here,” said Raven.
The voice came from a high mound covered by a shoddy gray blanket. There
were two arms crossed on the top of the mound and at one end there was
something that had been a face, but now was a yellow scabby area with a wide
bandage cross where the eyes had been.
“Who is it?” asked Raven. He didn’t have lips, but he talked pretty well without
them and with a pleasant voice. f f DESCRIPTIVE DETAILS
“Hemingway,” I said. “I came up to see how you were doing.” What emotional reaction
do you have to the
“My face was pretty bad,” he said. “It got sort of burned from the grenade, but
description of Raven?
it’s peeled a couple of times and it’s doing better.”
70 “It looks swell,” I said. “It’s doing fine.”
I wasn’t looking at it when I spoke.
“How are things in America?” he asked. “What do they think of us over there?”
“Sentiment’s changed a lot,” I said. “They’re beginning to realize the
government is going to win this war.”

Members of the International Brigades near Madrid in late 1936

a new kind of war 1053

 “Do you think so?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I’m awfully glad,” he said. “You know, I wouldn’t mind any of this if I could
just watch what was going on. I don’t mind the pain, you know. It never seemed
important really. But I was always awfully interested in things and I really wouldn’t
80 mind the pain at all if I could just sort of follow things intelligently. I could even
be some use. You know, I didn’t mind the war at all. I did all right in the war. I got
hit once before and I was back and rejoined the battalion in two weeks. I couldn’t
stand to be away. Then I got this.” g g DIALOGUE
He had put his hand in mine. It was not a worker’s hand. There were no What do Raven’s
words reveal about his
callouses and the nails on the long, spatulate6 fingers were smooth and rounded.
character?
“How did you get it?” I, asked.
“Well, there were some troops that were routed and we went over to sort of
reform them and we did and then we had quite a fight with the fascists and
we beat them. It was quite a bad fight, you know, but we beat them and then
90 someone threw this grenade at me.”
Holding his hand and hearing him tell it, I did not believe a word of it. What
was left of him did not sound like the wreckage of a soldier somehow. I did not
know how he had been wounded, but the story did not sound right. It was the
sort of way everyone would like to have been wounded. But I wanted him to
think I believed it.
“Where did you come from?” I asked.
“From Pittsburgh. I went to the University there.”
“What did you do before you joined up here?”
“I was a social worker,” he said. Then I knew it couldn’t be true and I wondered
100 how he had really been so frightfully wounded and I didn’t care. In the war that I
had known, men often lied about the manner of their wounding. Not at first; but
later. I’d lied a little myself in my time. Especially late in the evening. But I was
glad he thought I believed it, and we talked about books, he wanted to be a writer,
and I told him about what happened north of Guadalajara and promised to bring
some things from Madrid next time we got out that way. I hoped maybe I could
get a radio. h h SUBJECTIVITY IN
“They tell me Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis7 are coming over, too,” he said. REPORTING
Why doesn’t Hemingway
“Yes,” I said. “And when they come I’ll bring them up to see you.”
believe Raven? Do you
“Gee, that will be great,” he said. “You don’t know what that will mean to me.” believe Raven? Explain
110 “I’ll bring them,” I said. why or why not.
“Will they be here pretty soon?”
“Just as soon as they come I’ll bring them.”
“Good boy, Ernest,” he said. “You don’t mind if I call you Ernest, do you?”
The voice came very clear and gentle from that face that looked like some hill
that had been fought over in muddy weather and then baked in the sun.
“Hell, no,” I said. “Please. Listen, old-timer, you’re going to be fine. You’ll be a
lot of good, you know. You can talk on the radio.”

6. spatulate (spBchPE-lGt): having a broad, rounded end.

7. Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis: well-known American writers.

1054 unit 5: the harlem renaissance and modernism

 “Maybe,” he said. “You’ll be back?”
“Sure,” I said. “Absolutely.”
120 “Goodbye, Ernest,” he said.
“Goodbye,” I told him.
Downstairs they told me he’d lost both eyes as well as his face and was also
badly wounded all through the legs and in the feet.
“He’s lost some toes, too,” the doctor said, “but he doesn’t know that.”
“I wonder if he’ll ever know it.”
“Oh, sure he will,” the doctor said. “He’s going to get well.”
And it still isn’t you that gets hit but it is your countryman now. Your
countryman from Pennsylvania, where once we fought at Gettysburg.
Then, walking along the road, with his left arm in an airplane splint, walking
130 with the gamecock walk of the professional British soldier that neither ten years
of militant party work nor the projecting metal wings of the splint could destroy,
I met Raven’s commanding officer, Jock Cunningham, who had three fresh
rifle wounds through his upper left arm (I looked at them, one was septic8) and
another rifle bullet under his shoulder blade that had entered his left chest, passed
through, and lodged there. He told me, in military terms, the history of the
attempt to rally retiring troops on his battalion’s right flank, of his bombing raid
down a trench which was held at one end by the fascists and at the other end by
the government troops, of the taking of this trench and, with six men and a Lewis
gun,9 cutting off a group of some eighty fascists from their own lines, and of the
140 final desperate defense of their impossible position his six men put up until the
government troops came up and, attacking, straightened out the line again. He
told it clearly, completely convincingly, and with a strong Glasgow10 accent. He
had deep, piercing eyes sheltered like an eagle’s, and, hearing him talk, you could
tell the sort of soldier he was. For what he had done he would have had a V.C.11 in
the last war. In this war there are no decorations. Wounds are the only decorations
and they do not award wound stripes. i i SUBJECTIVITY IN
“Raven was in the same show,” he said. “I didn’t know he’d been hit. Ay, he’s REPORTING
a good mon. He got his after I got mine. The fascists we’d cut off were very good What is Hemingway’s
attitude toward Jock
troops. They never fired a useless shot when we were in that bad spot. They waited Cunningham? How can
150 in the dark there until they had us located and then opened with volley fire. That’s you tell?
how I got four in the same place.”
We talked for a while and he told me many things. They were all important,
but nothing was as important as what Jay Raven, the social worker from
Pittsburgh with no military training, had told me was true. This is a strange new
kind of war where you learn just as much as you are able to believe. 

8. septic: infected with bacteria.

9. Lewis gun: a lightweight machine gun.
10. Glasgow: a city in Scotland.
11. V.C.: the Victoria Cross, an award for valor “in the face of the enemy,” given by Great Britain.

a new kind of war 1055

 After Reading

Comprehension
1. Recall What happens in front of Hemingway’s hotel before breakfast?
2. Recall Who is Raven, and what are his injuries?
3. Clarify What is the truth about how Raven was wounded?

Literary Analysis
4. Analyze Descriptive Details Look back at the descriptive details you noted
and circle the ones you found most vivid or affecting. What do you infer from
any of these details that Hemingway doesn’t tell you outright?
5. Analyze Subjectivity in Reporting Hemingway’s article differs greatly from
an objective news report. What is he able to convey about the war through
each of the following?
• his recurrent thought “It wasn’t me” (lines 35 and 46)
• his reaction to the sight of Raven and to the story Raven tells (lines 61–106)
• his description of Jock Cunningham (lines 129–146)
• his belief about the most important thing he was told (lines 152–155)
6. Examine Dialogue A written news report often contains quotations from
sources, but rarely does it contain dialogue between two people. Why might
Hemingway have chosen to include dialogue in his dispatch?
7. Interpret Title What makes this conflict “a new kind of war”? Note what
seems to surprise Hemingway about it.
8. Synthesize Themes The Spanish Civil War ended more than 65 years ago.
What value is there in reading Hemingway’s article today? What insights
about war does it provide?
9. Compare Texts What similarities in style and theme do you see in “A New
Kind of War” and “In Another Country,” the Hemingway short story on
page 970?

Literary Criticism
10. Critical Interpretations When the New York University journalism
department compiled its list of the 100 best works of 20th-century American
journalism, Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War reporting was ranked 33rd. Do
you agree that it should be esteemed so highly? Support your answer.

1056 unit 5: the harlem renaissance and modernism