in our time, chapter 4: "We were in a garden at Mons"

Welcome to the fourth of our eighteen shows celebrating the centenary of the Paris edition of Hemingway’s book of vignettes, in our time.

At 75 words, this short scene describes the Battle of Mons. To Ezra Pound, Hemingway would refer to this conflict (from August 1914 at the very beginning of the First World War) as "clear and noble." In this episode, we discuss the historical aspects of the battle, Hemingway's friendship with the British soldier Eric Edward “Chink” Dorman-Smith, and the mixture of nobility, naivety, and absurdity that form the atmosphere of this vignette. We also examine how these first four vignettes are beginning to cohere into a larger project.

Join us as we explore in our time before it became In Our Time!