In Another Country by Ernest Hemingway
Quick answer: In Another Country by Ernest Hemingway: summary with the ending, the wounded major in Milan, his wife's death, the photographs of healed hands, and the famous first sentence.
Every autumn afternoon in Milan a group of wounded men walk through the cold to a hospital and sit at new therapeutic apparatus meant to bend their knees and open their fingers, while the doctor shows them photographs of hands once as withered as theirs and now, the pictures claim, whole. In Another Country ran in Scribner's Magazine in April 1927 and was collected in Men Without Women.
It is taught for its opening sentence and for a lesson about loss delivered by an Italian major who has decided that a man must not marry.
The story in brief, ending included
The American narrator, wounded in the knee, attends with three decorated young Milanese officers who cool toward him once they see his medals came partly for being American. A fourth boy wears a black silk handkerchief over a face with no nose. The narrator is closest to the major, once the finest fencer in Italy, whose hand has shrunk to a baby's size; the major disbelieves in the devices, attends daily, and corrects the narrator's Italian grammar with severity.
One day he asks whether the narrator means to marry and, told yes, says angrily that a man must not marry, that he cannot afford to lose, that he should find things he cannot lose. He apologises, telephones, and returns to say his wife has died of pneumonia after a few days' illness; she was young, and he had waited to marry until he was safely invalided. He weeps, straightens, and leaves. When he returns three days later, framed photographs of fully restored hands hang before the apparatus. The major only looks out of the window.
The characters
Four wounded men.
Themes: what cannot be repaired
The classroom readings are loss, isolation and the emptiness of medals: the narrator is in another country twice, in Italy and among men whose bravery he does not share. The photographs are the story's image of false consolation.
The sharper observation concerns the grammar lessons. The major insists on correct Italian because it is the one thing in the hospital that effort can make right; even in grief he asks forgiveness for speaking so. Dignity in this story is a grammar, and it holds when nothing else does.
The craft: an opening that sets the whole temperature
The first sentence, "In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more," fixes season, distance, plurality and loss in fourteen plain words. The turn is the outburst about marriage; the pay-off is the telephone call, placed after the anger so the reader misjudges the major before learning why.
The technique to steal is the delayed motive. Let a character behave badly for a page, then supply the fact that makes the misjudgement unbearable. The final image, a man at a window while photographs promise recovery, closes without a verdict.
For class and essays
Model answers, vocabulary, one misreading.
What writers can take from this
- For exams, quote the first sentence and show how each clause sets season, distance and loss.
- Pair the medals subplot with the boy without a nose to argue about courage and reward.
- Cite the grammar lessons as discipline and the photographs as false comfort.
- Writers: withhold the reason for an outburst until after it, so the reader misjudges and repents.
- Close on an image rather than a summary.
Try it yourself
Set a story in a place of slow recovery where a group of the damaged meet daily. Have one older character give the narrator harsh advice, then reveal within a page the fresh loss behind it. End on an image of official optimism that the character silently declines.
Questions
What is the theme of In Another Country?
Loss that no treatment can repair, and the isolation of the wounded from each other and from home. The major's grief exposes how little the medals, the therapy and the photographs can address.
Why does the major look out of the window at the end?
The doctor has hung photographs of hands healed by the treatment, but the major's real loss is his wife. Looking away from the pictures is his refusal of a consolation that misses the point.
Who is the narrator of In Another Country?
An unnamed young American officer wounded in the knee, often read as Nick Adams though never named. He is the witness; the story belongs to the major.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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