The excerpt from Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” reveals Harold Krebs as a young World War I veteran who has returned home emotionally hollowed out by combat. He is disconnected from his family, his community, and even his own ability to feel. Everything about his behavior points to a man who craves simplicity and numbness because the alternative, engaging honestly with the world around him, feels impossible.
A Veteran Who Came Home Too Late
Krebs enlisted in 1917 from a Methodist college in Kansas and served in some of the bloodiest engagements of the war: Belleau Wood, Soissons, the Champagne, St. Mihiel, and the Argonne. He didn’t return to the United States until the summer of 1919, when the second division came back from the Rhine. By then, the parades and celebrations were long over. The men who had been drafted from his Oklahoma hometown had already been welcomed home with fanfare. Krebs arrived to silence.
That timing matters. The excerpt reveals that his late return strips him of any public recognition for what he endured. No one celebrates. No one is curious. The town has already heard so many war stories that the real ones bore people. Krebs is left carrying the weight of five major battles with no audience and no outlet.
The Lying and the Nausea That Follows
One of the most telling details the excerpt reveals is Krebs’s complicated relationship with honesty. At first, he doesn’t want to talk about the war at all. Then, when he finally feels the need to speak, nobody wants to listen. His town “had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities.” So he starts lying, exaggerating his experiences to get people to pay attention.
The lies work briefly, but they poison something inside him. Hemingway writes that Krebs “acquired the nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration.” In other words, the act of distorting his real memories to make them palatable for civilians corrupts those memories entirely. He becomes disgusted, not just with the lying itself, but with the gap between what actually happened to him and what people are willing to hear. He stops talking about the war altogether. This detail reveals a man whose inner life is becoming inaccessible, even to himself.
Emotional Numbness and Withdrawal
The excerpt paints a clear picture of someone who has shut down emotionally. Krebs sleeps late, drifts through the day, reads books, and spends time in the pool hall. He watches girls walking around town and finds them attractive, but he has no interest in actually approaching them. He doesn’t want to talk to them. He doesn’t want to go through the “intrigue and the politics” of courtship. He remembers that in France and Germany, interactions with women involved far less talking, and he prefers that memory to anything his hometown offers.
This isn’t laziness or shyness. The excerpt reveals a deep aversion to complexity of any kind. Krebs does not want consequences. He repeats this to himself like a mantra. The war taught him that you didn’t need a girl unless you thought about them, and he has internalized that lesson completely. Looking from a distance is fine. Engagement is not. He wants a life where things happen smoothly and simply, without requiring him to perform, persuade, or pretend.
The Rift With His Mother
The family dynamic in the excerpt is one of its most revealing elements. Krebs’s mother is deeply religious, devoted to her values, and unable to comprehend what her son has been through. She wants him to find a job, settle down, get married, and live in “God’s Kingdom” like the other young men in town. She compares him to his peers, telling him the other boys are “all settling down” and “determined to get somewhere.”
These comparisons only deepen Krebs’s isolation. His mother’s sermons and expectations carry no power to reach him because the war has stripped away his belief in the framework she’s offering. He feels he cannot love anymore. He feels he cannot pray. When pressed by his mother, he tells her he doesn’t love her, a moment of brutal honesty that he immediately tries to walk back by calling it a lie. But the damage is done. The excerpt shows that his mother’s approach, well-meaning but completely blind to his psychological state, pushes him further away rather than drawing him back into family life.
What Krebs Wants and Why He Leaves
Everything the excerpt reveals about Krebs points toward one central desire: he wants his life to be uncomplicated. He doesn’t want to lie. He doesn’t want to perform emotions he can’t feel. He doesn’t want to compete with other young men for jobs or women or social standing. He wants to exist quietly, without being asked to explain or justify himself.
By the end of the story, Krebs decides to leave town for Kansas City, where he plans to find a job and live on his own terms. This decision is not growth in any traditional sense. He isn’t resolving his problems or reconnecting with the people around him. He is choosing to flee, because staying means continuing to navigate a world that demands things from him he can no longer provide: love, ambition, faith, conversation. The excerpt reveals a man whose soul, as the analysis often puts it, has been removed by the war. What remains is someone who functions but does not feel, someone who observes life but refuses to participate in it.
Hemingway’s Iceberg Technique at Work
The excerpt also reveals something important about how Hemingway tells this story. Very little of Krebs’s inner pain appears directly on the page. Hemingway never describes flashbacks, nightmares, or the horrors of combat. Instead, he gives the reader flat, simple sentences about a man who sleeps late and watches girls and doesn’t want to talk. The enormous trauma underneath is left for the reader to piece together.
This is Hemingway’s “iceberg” method: only a small fraction of the story’s meaning sits above the surface. Krebs fought in five of the war’s deadliest battles, but the text never describes a single one. His emotional devastation is communicated entirely through what he avoids, what he refuses, and what he can no longer bring himself to do. The restraint of the prose mirrors Krebs’s own silence, making the reader experience the same frustration his family feels when trying to understand what happened to him.