While still a teenager, Ernest Hemingway volunteered to go to the front lines of World War One as an ambulance driver. Within a few days after his arrival in Italy, he was badly wounded and found himself confined to a hospital, where he fell head over heels in love with the nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, an older woman. It is not a spoiler to reveal that ultimately Agnes broke up with Ernest. Agnes kept a diary. Ernest wrote letters. This book reprints the diary and the letters, adding commentary and analysis by people who knew them.

It’s the raw material for a great love story — as Hemingway himself reworked it into A Farewell to Arms. This book, however, is not a gripping read unless you're already interested in Hemingway. It's great for the first-hand accounts in the words of Agnes and Ernie. The editors' analyses and explanations are dry in comparison, though necessary and helpful.

I love going to original sources. Many critics have belittled Hemingway — or glorified him — while serving their own agendas. Here you can judge for yourself, reading the words of the lovers themselves.

Personally, I found myself sympathizing with both lovers. What follows is not a book review so much as my own personal take on the facts presented:

Hemingway was wounded, painfully so, and Agnes appeared and she was lovely. She was fond of him. You could say she loved him under wartime conditions, but he was just a boy and she was a woman. She was pretty, and she enjoyed the attention of men.

When they were separated, Agnes responded to the immediate while Hemingway, a brooder, held the romance in his mind. She needed closeness and contact. Away from his presence she remembered his prickliness and boyish foolishness, while he remembered her loveliness and friendship. He created enhancements, embellishments to his time in Italy with her. She tended to the opposite.

It was a romance of a particular place and circumstance that would have been hard to sustain, and she realized it. Agnes also was clearly a hardworking, dedicated, idealistic nurse and by all accounts a cheerful and caring person. It's sad that the romance fizzled, but no one's to blame. It isn't fair to say that she broke his heart. Two hundred pieces of shrapnel and a couple of bullets embedded in his legs, along with the crushing of boyish ideals against the brutality of war, all combined to break his heart. Plus, of course, the fickleness of love. ( )