In order to understand Ernest Hemingway's writing one must know more about his philosophy. Hemingway endeavored to write truthfully and often said he wanted to write "one true sentence." Hemingway also believed in omitting certain events and emotions from his writing. He explains,
"It was a very simple story called “Out of Season” and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood."
Once you understand Hemingway's philosophy it is easier to see how he conveys events and emotions. One thing Hemingway omits from the story "In Another Country" is a direct statement of the pain and emotional toll the war has taken on the men portrayed in the story. Instead, he hints at the death caused by the war in describing the dead animals which hang in the butcher shops and how cold and windy the weather has been.
Similarly he doesn't directly tell us that Nick Adams and the Italian major will probably never be physically the same again. The doctors are employing new machines which promise miracle results but Nick and the major don't believe it. At the end of the story photographs showing good results fail to impress the major who has lost both the strength in his hand and his young wife:
"The photographs did not make much difference to the major because he only looked out the window."
In this "one true sentence" Hemingway expresses the major's emotions. He is lost. His wife is dead and his ability to continue his fencing career is over. He is obviously suffering from a deep depression.
Nick too is not without emotional scars. Hemingway omits the deep shame and sense of cowardice that Nick must have felt when he showed the citations for his medals to the three Italian soldiers who had been wounded in battle:
"I showed them the papers, which were written in very beautiful language and full of fratellanza and abnegazione, but which really said, with the adjectives removed, that I had been given the medals because I was an American. After that their manner changed a little toward me, although I was their friend against outsiders. I was a friend, but I was never really one of them after they had read the citations, because it had been different with them and they had done very different things to get their medals. I had been wounded, it was true; but we all knew that being wounded, after all, was really an accident."
Nick leaves unstated the reason he got the medals other than that he was wounded. Hemingway himself was wounded on the Italian front by mortar fire while procuring chocolate and cigarettes for the men on the front line. For both Nick and Hemingway it must have been terribly disconcerting to have not actually been wounded in the line of battle like the Italian soldiers. He describes one of the soldiers:
"The tall boy with a very pale face who was to be a lawyer had been a lieutenant of Arditi and had three medals of the sort we each had only one of. He lived a very long time with death and was a little detached.
Eventually Nick stops hanging out with the three soldiers. He explains,
"The three with the medals were like hunting-hawks; and I was not a hawk, although I might seem a hawk to those who had never hunted; they, the three, knew better and so we drifted apart."
Nick never offers a direct admission of guilt over feeling like a coward but nevertheless we feel that he thinks less of himself in the presence of the soldiers.
Hemingway employs his philosophy of omission in several of his works, most notably in The Sun Also Rises where Jake Barnes has been basically castrated in World War I. Instead Hemingway inadvertently shows us Jake's injuries through veiled dialogue and the use of the steers in the Pamplona bullfighting scenes.
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