A Farewell to Arms

“A Farewell to Arms” is a novel about love in wartime, about the desire to live and be loved despite everything. World War I. An American, Frederic Henry, volunteers to serve in the Italian army. He is a lieutenant in the medical service and hardly sees any fighting. The monotony of everyday life is enlivened by gatherings with fellow soldiers, heavy drinking, and visits to an officers’ brothel. One day, Frederic’s friend and roommate, the surgeon Rinaldi, introduces him to the nurses of a British hospital. Frederic himself decides to pursue one of them—an Englishwoman, Catherine Barkley—but she shows more sympathy for Frederic. Catherine is also a volunteer; her fiancé was killed in France. Their mutual interest—partly born of loneliness and emotional wounds—gradually grows into a love affair. After he is wounded by shellfire, Henry is taken to a hospital with a badly injured leg. He is removed from the front line and brought to a field hospital, from where he is later transferred to Milan, where he faces surgery and rehabilitation. In Milan, Frederic is assigned to a newly opened American hospital, and Catherine Barkley is transferred there as well. They are reunited with Frederic, and it turns out that their feelings for each other are the most serious, though the affair must be hidden from others. After returning to the front, Henry becomes a witness to and participant in the catastrophic Italian retreat from Caporetto, but he can’t manage to escape—military police detain him for desertion. Seeing no other way out, Frederic jumps into the water and, while staying hidden, reaches Milan. With the war, he has decided to end things once and for all. In Milan, he is reunited with Catherine, finding brief happiness.

Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899—1961) is an American writer, war correspondent, and the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1954). Even at school, Ernest decided he would be a writer, and he steadily pursued it: after graduating, he became a correspondent for a local newspaper in Kansas City. But, like many others, World War I changed everything for him. In 1918, eighteen-year-old Ernest Hemingway voluntarily went as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross to the Italian front. Already in July he received serious wounds from mortar fire; 26 fragments were removed, and one kneecap was replaced with an aluminum prosthesis. And it was the first time Hemingway “outwitted” death—later he would deceive her several more times. Out of the experiences of that period came the novel “A Farewell to Arms.”