Though Hemingway does not mention World War I directly, he includes an allusion to the war in the very first paragraph of the story when describing the hotel grounds:
Their room was on the second floor facing the sea. It also faced the public garden and the war monument […] Italians came from a long way off to look up at the war monument. It was made of bronze and glistened in the rain.
The war monument that Hemingway describes here is a reference to the war memorials erected across Europe in the years after World War I—memorials honoring the soldiers who lost their lives. This was true in large cities as well as in small towns, such as in this Italian town where the story takes place.
This allusion, however subtle, is intentional on Hemingway’s part. In juxtaposing the isolated and inward-facing American couple with the many Italians who “came from a long way off to look up at the war monument,” Hemingway is highlighting how Europeans experienced the horrors of the war much more acutely than Americans did. In fact, during the first two-and-a-half years of the war, the United States refused to send support. Here, George and his wife are stand-ins for privileged Americans who saw Europe as a tourist destination while ignoring the devastating effects the war had on the European continent.
