Soldier's Home

"Soldier's Home" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. It was included in the 1925 Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers and published by Boni & Liveright in Hemingway's 1925 New York collection short stories, In Our Time.

It was adapted to a PBS television movie in 1977.

The story is about Harold Krebs, a young soldier returning home to Oklahoma after seeing action in five of the bloodiest World War I battles: Battle of Belleau Wood, Soissons, Champagne, Battle of Saint-Mihiel and the Argonne. Krebs lives with his parents who treat him as they did before he left for war, unable to understand his post-war trauma and depression.

In the 1920s, Hemingway was inspired by Ezra Pound's writings and applied the poet's principles of imagism to his own early work. Hemingway's short stories from the 1920s adhere to Pound's tight definition of imagism; biographer Carlos Baker writes that in his short stories Hemingway tried to learn how to "get the most from the least, [to] prune language, [to] multiply intensities, [to] tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth". Hemingway adapted this style into a technique he called his iceberg theory: as Baker describes it, the hard facts float above water while the supporting structure, including the symbolism, operates out of sight.

Kreb's reactions to his war experience, his depression, are not explicitly mentioned in the story. Instead the readers learn of the number of battles he fought in. His fundamentalist parents fail to understand why he came back from the war miserable, as his mother repeatedly asks him to kneel with her in prayer, certain of its healing power. The town's citizens are similarly unable to understand the changes in Krebs, and after a series of parades for those who returned earlier are now generally disinterested in the plight of returning servicemen. In the end, Krebs leaves for Kansas City to find a job.

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