a number of avenues to avoid having to stand and fight--Michigan, World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, writing, safaris, Key West, and his marriages and divorces--yet this was somehow different from the masculine and always ready to fight image that he projected in his works and in his attitudes. He also had a concern with age, and as a younger man he would add a couple of years to his age when referring to himself (Hardy and Cull 41).
Frederick is another character representing Hemingway in some degree. Hemingway volunteered to work for the Red Cross in World War I and was accepted. He was wounded and spent time in an Italian hospital, and it was at that time that he met a nurse named Agnes Kurowsky and fell in love with her. The correspondences between Ernest and Agnes on the one hand and Frederick and Catherine on the other are not exact, but it would seem that Ernest used his own experience sa a source for the story he would tell some ten years later in A Farewell to Arms. Agnes did not die, for one thing, but instead took up with another man while Ernest was back in the United States working to get money together to bring Agnes to this country. The man Agnes took up with was a duke, and she wrote Ernest a letter about the affair:
Agnes, now quite certain of her future with the duke, had written that she had fallen in love with an Italian major, that theirs had been only a boy-and-girl affair, and that she was sorry and knew he probably would not understand but might someday forgive her and be grateful to her (Griffin 113
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