Hemingway : insights on military leadership.

Abstract

The literature of Ernest Hemingway is rich with military lessons derived from his lifetime of proximity to war and his understanding of soldiers and leaders at all levels as presented through his characters. Hemingway wrote two significant military works that treat deeply the psyche and behavior of soldiers in war: For Whom the Bell Tolls presented a guerilla band led by an American professor named Robert Jordan, and exposed the different types of junior and senior leaser, as well as an ideal soldier in Anselmo, the old, untrained partisan. Across the River and Into the Trees was equally rich in military insights, at a much higher level of command, through the bitter musings of Colonel Cantwell. Hemingway's fiction represented and reproduced the detailed awareness he had of soldiers and leaders, good and bad. He was born with the natural instinct to lead, and through his proximity to men performing humanity's most vaunted of tests, he produced a body of fiction that can serve collectively as a manual for understanding soldiers, terrain, and military leadership. Hemingway recognized the combat soldier as the man onto whom the most pressure was placed, and he wrote through his characters and opinion of how the ideal combat soldier should behave, with grace under pressure.