Another good one from Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time collection, also prefaced by an isolated paragraph with a war scene. At least it was a war scene—they don’t always feel on point. This story is not about Nick Adams but about Harold Krebs, a veteran of the Great War recently discharged and sent home. I don’t know the timeline of PTSD stories, but this certainly counts as one and may be an early one—it feels more like a Vietnam-era story in many ways. Krebs—not otherwise seen in Hemingway’s fiction as far as I know—was held over and not sent home until 1919, missing all the parades and such. Now he doesn’t want to do anything. The story feels so modern on this point that TV itself (not generally available in 1925) feels missing in action. There’s also some vibe from the movie The Best Years of Our Lives, with family and friends at home trying to help but not knowing how—arguably not even able because they weren’t there. All that is in Krebs without Hemingway having to spell it out. The title is a little double-jointed, playing off an ambiguous apostrophe, signifying a home that belongs to the soldier and also that the soldier has arrived there. The story is burdened and foredoomed with the certain sense it is true about homecomings from war, the confusing sense of being lost that the returning have. They have changed—they have aged. They don’t understand and rage dogs anyone trying to engage them. There are no real eruptions here. When Krebs’s mother presses him on his next step it is tense but ultimately uneventful. He decides to move to Kansas City, less a decision and more just a response to his mother’s pressure. In turn that’s more about the silent, absent father’s pressure. Krebs’s one point about leaving for Kansas City is he hopes he can skip a scene with his father that way. A good no-nonsense story about aimlessness and desperation and the stupid futility of war.
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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