A Very Short Story

A Very Short Story compresses an entire wartime love affair into roughly a thousand words. An unnamed American soldier is wounded in World War I and falls in love with Luz, his Italian nurse, while recovering in a hospital in Padua. They plan to marry after the war, agreeing he will return to America first to find a job. But while he is in Chicago, Luz writes to say their love was only a "boy and girl affair" — she has fallen for an Italian major. The major never marries her. The soldier contracts gonorrhea from a salesgirl in a taxicab. The story's brutal final paragraph demolishes the romantic promises of the opening in a single devastating turn, making it one of the most efficient pieces of fiction Hemingway ever wrote.

The story explores the fragility of wartime romance — the intense love between the soldier and Luz is real but cannot survive the transition to peacetime reality. Disillusionment and betrayal drive the narrative: both characters betray the relationship, Luz through the Italian major and the soldier through casual encounters in Chicago. The impossibility of returning to innocence is embedded in the final paragraph's jarring tonal shift from romance to cynicism. And the story raises the theme of communication failure — the soldier never receives Luz's wartime letters until after the armistice, and they quarrel at the Milan station because she won't come home at once, foreshadowing the disconnection that will end them.

Yes, substantially. Hemingway was wounded by mortar fire on the Italian front in July 1918 and fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, an American Red Cross nurse seven years his senior, while recovering at a hospital in Milan. They planned to marry, but after Hemingway returned to America, Agnes wrote him a letter breaking off the engagement — she had become involved with an Italian officer. The original version of the story, published in the 1924 in our time, used Agnes's real name; Hemingway changed it to "Luz" for the 1925 In Our Time collection. The final paragraph's brutal postscript — the gonorrhea from a salesgirl — is Hemingway's fictional addition, designed to punish both the character and any lingering romanticism about the affair.

The story is a concentrated demonstration of Hemingway's techniques. Compression is the dominant device — an entire love affair, from first meeting to bitter end, is told in roughly a thousand words, with years of experience reduced to single sentences. The iceberg theory is at maximum intensity: the emotional devastation of the breakup is conveyed entirely through factual statements, with no description of feelings. Tonal shift is used devastatingly in the final paragraph, which pivots from romance to cynicism in a single sentence. Irony runs throughout: the couple prays in the Duomo and tries to make their love permanent, but every institution — church, mail, distance — fails them. And the story's title is itself ironic: calling it "a very short story" acknowledges its brevity while understating the vast emotional territory it covers.

Luz is the nurse who cares for the wounded American soldier at the hospital in Padua. She is portrayed initially as devoted and passionate — staying on night duty for three months to be near him, preparing him for surgery, and writing love letters filled with declarations of how impossible it is to get along without him. But after the soldier returns to America, Luz falls in love with an Italian major while working at a hospital in Pordenone. She writes to end the relationship, dismissing their love as "only a boy and girl affair" while insisting she still loves him and believes in him "absolutely." The major never marries her. Luz is based on Agnes von Kurowsky, an American Red Cross nurse who broke off her engagement to the young Hemingway in 1919.

The final paragraph is one of the most ruthless endings in American literature. In three sentences, Hemingway demolishes every romantic expectation: "The major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time" — Luz's betrayal of the soldier gains her nothing. "Luz never got an answer to the letter" — the soldier has cut her off completely. And then the final sentence reveals that the soldier contracted gonorrhea from a salesgirl in a department store while riding in a taxicab. This brutal conclusion rejects sentimentality entirely — it replaces the sacred wartime romance with sordid peacetime reality, suggesting that the love story was always heading toward degradation. The tonal whiplash is deliberate: Hemingway punishes the reader's investment in the romance as thoroughly as he punishes both characters.

An earlier version appeared in Hemingway's 1924 chapbook in our time (lowercase), published by Three Mountains Press in Paris, using Agnes von Kurowsky's real name. The revised version, with the character renamed "Luz," was published in the 1925 collection In Our Time by Boni & Liveright. The story is placed among the interchapters and vignettes that make up the collection's experimental structure. It is one of Hemingway's most frequently taught stories in college and AP English courses, often used to illustrate the iceberg theory and the power of compression.

They quarrel because Luz refuses to come to America with the soldier immediately. Their agreement is that he will go home first, find a job, and then she will come to New York to meet him. But at the moment of departure, this plan feels inadequate — the soldier wants her to come with him now, sensing perhaps that distance will destroy what they have. The quarrel at the station is significant because it is the last time they are physically together, and they part on bad terms: "they kissed good-bye, but were not finished with the quarrel." He feels "sick about saying good-bye like that." This unresolved tension foreshadows the relationship's collapse — they cannot even manage a clean goodbye, let alone a long-distance engagement.

Before the soldier returns to the front, he and Luz go into the Duomo (the cathedral in Padua or Milan) to pray together. They want to get married but cannot because there isn't time for the banns and neither has a birth certificate. They "felt as though they were married, but they wanted everyone to know about it, and to make it so they could not lose it." This scene is poignant because their attempt to formalize and protect their love through religion and ceremony fails — the institutions they turn to cannot help them. The phrase "make it so they could not lose it" is the story's most heartbreaking line, because the reader already knows from the title's ironic understatement that they will indeed lose it.

The title "A Very Short Story" works on multiple levels. Most obviously, it describes the story's physical brevity — at roughly a thousand words, it is among the shortest stories in In Our Time. But it also refers to the brevity of the love affair itself: a relationship that felt permanent and sacred is compressed into a few paragraphs and then destroyed. There is also a self-mocking quality — by calling it "a very short story," Hemingway dares the reader to dismiss it, then delivers an emotional gut-punch that belies its modest scale. The title signals that this will not be a grand romance but something small, fast, and disposable — which is exactly how Luz's letter reframes the love affair: "only a boy and girl affair."