Ernest Hemingway was a man intrigued by the complexity that love and war brought to intimate relationships. Not only was Hemingway intrigued by love and war, but he also once experienced them. During World War I, Hemingway served as a Red Cross ambulance driver; after being seriously injured, he spent six months in the Red Cross hospital in Milan where he fell in love for the first time. Falling in love with the nurse also led to Hemingway's first heartbreak. Hemingway was a "damn handsome man", which allowed him to have many relationships with women. Having been married four times to four different women also explains why the relationships he writes about always fail in his stories. Even though Hemingway never served as a soldier in the war, even if he wanted to, he knew that the burdens of war always resulted in failed love. Ultimately, Hemingway uses war to attack romantic illusions that individuals had before World War I in order to signify the effects of war on romance. Nick Adams is a fictional character about whom Hemingway made a short story sequence. In the short story Now I Lay Me, Hemingway introduces us to Nick who is a soldier in the First World War. We quickly learn that Nick is an insomniac and is afraid of going to sleep at night because if he closed his eyes in the dark and let himself go, "[His] soul would come out of [His] body" (276). . The reason Nick is afraid to go to sleep at night during the war is because he exploded at night and once he felt his soul leave him and then return. Every night, Nick tries to ignore his fear of war by lying awake and remembering the trout stream he fished in as a child, or sometimes he would just stay awake and say his prayers and pray... ... middle of paper ... and war, we saw how they were correlated with each other, but also differed from each other in their own ways. Nick Adams, a soldier in World War I, was left mentally and emotionally unable to accept love and marriage due to his traumatic experience. Jake and Brett, like Nick, were both affected by the war in their own ways, but both were unable to allow their relationship to succeed. As for Henry and Catherine, who seemed to have fallen in love at the perfect time, they also had a love that was affected by the war, and in the end we find ourselves alone. All the characters are victims of the lost generation of the First World War. Hemingway clearly shows that in every story, love has the capacity to profoundly change people, but war imposes limits on those who hope to return to their outdated pre-war value system of honor and romance..