What you need to know before teaching or reading In Another Country
The story opens with a first-person narrator in a hospital in Milan during World War I. He's recovering from a knee injury and undergoing physical therapy. Nick Adams is the narrator. The others are Italian officers who've also been wounded. One of them, Count Rinaldi, introduces him to an officer named Cortazzi whose hand has been amputated. The central event is the narrator receiving rehabilitation treatments in a machine, alongside these men, and the odd social dynamics that develop around it. The title is straightforward enough. "In Another Country" refers to the narrator being a foreigner in Italy, but it also points to the emotional distance between the wounded officers and the civilians back home, and the strange liminal space of the hospital itself.
Where to find the full text for the In Another Country Short Story
The story appears in Hemingway's 1925 collection In Our Time. It's public domain in most jurisdictions now, so you can find it free on Project Gutenberg, Archive.org, or various open educational resource sites. Don't bother buying an anthology just for this one. The collections tend to pad the text with unnecessary essays unless you're doing serious academic work. When I was preparing lesson materials for a high school class, I ran into a problem where the version I was using had a significant editorial change in the dialogue tags. The published editions from the 1960s onwards sometimes smooth over Hemingway's original punctuation choices, and in this case, it changed the tone of how the colonel responds to his own wife's death. I ended up cross-referencing three different editions against the original 1925 print to confirm the correct wording before assigning it. That process took about forty-five minutes and saved me from looking foolish when a student pointed out a discrepancy.
How the story actually works on the page
Hemingway writes this one in a deceptively simple style. The sentences are short. The vocabulary is unadorned. But the meaning lives in what isn't said. Take the ending, for example. The narrator watches the colonel walk past his window every day, pretending his wife isn't dead. When the narrator finally tells him the truth directly, the colonel turns away and says nothing about it. That silence is the whole point. The story is built around avoidance, and Hemingway makes you feel the weight of every refusal to speak plainly. Students often miss the structural symmetry here. The narrator is an American outsider. The officers are Italians who've lost limbs and are treated with machines that are supposed to restore function. The colonel has lost his hand and his wife. Everyone in that hospital is dealing with loss in their own way, and everyone is doing it poorly. The machines don't really work for the colonel. His grief doesn't get treated. The narrator doesn't understand what's happening to any of them. That gap between suffering and the inability to communicate about it is what holds the story together. Another thing that tends to get overlooked is the religious imagery. The narrator keeps seeing statues of saints in the square outside the hospital. The connection between bodily suffering and spiritual martyrdom isn't something Hemingway states outright, but it's there if you look for it. The officers aren't asking for salvation. They're just trying to get through the day.
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Pitfalls you'll run into
The biggest one is treating the narration as reliable. The narrator claims he doesn't understand what's happening, and in a way he doesn't. But Hemingway gives you more information than the narrator has. You're meant to notice things the narrator misses. When the doctor says the machines will make the amputated hands work again, the narrator reports this fact without questioning it. You should be questioning it. The doctor's claim is contradicted by what you see happening to the colonel. That contradiction is the story's critique of blind faith in technology and institutional authority. A second issue is the temptation to over-interpret the war itself. This isn't a story about the horrors of combat. The war is background, not subject. The focus is on what happens after the shooting stops, when people have to figure out how to live with damage. If you spend your analysis time on battle scenes or military strategy, you've missed the point entirely. I also find that readers sometimes project modern trauma frameworks onto the text without checking whether they actually fit. The colonel's behavior could be read as PTSD from a clinical angle, but Hemingway wrote this before that language existed in its current form. The story is about a specific cultural moment and a specific kind of emotional restraint that was expected of men at that time. Mapping contemporary psychology directly onto it flattens the historical context.
What the story doesn't do
It doesn't resolve anything. The narrator doesn't learn a lesson. The colonel doesn't heal. The machines don't work. If you're looking for a clear arc where the protagonist gains insight and changes, you won't find it here. The story ends with the narrator alone in his apartment, writing about how he didn't believe in the machines anymore, and how he felt remote from other people. That feeling of isolation is the destination, not a problem to be solved. There's also no romantic subplot despite the presence of the colonel's wife. Her death is reported in a way that almost dismisses her existence, which is deliberate. She mattered to the colonel. The narrator treats her as an inconvenient detail. That difference in perspective is another layer of the story's exploration of who gets to matter and who gets left out.
