Paul Haspel's Reviews > A Farewell to Arms

Far away though we are, in both place and time, from the First World War, Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms can give the interested reader a sense of the horrors of that war, and of the despair and disillusionment that the vast blood-letting of the war caused throughout the Western world. Hemingway seamlessly combines an epic story of World War I battle action with a tender and affecting love story. It is, for many admirers of the work of this great American author, their favorite Hemingway novel. I know that it is mine.

Hemingway fans and scholars alike know how closely A Farewell to Arms corresponds with key events from Hemingway’s life. Hemingway wanted to serve in the First World War, even though the United States Army had rejected him for military service on account of his poor eyesight; and therefore, he travelled to Europe and volunteered as an ambulance driver for the Italian Army in 1918. Seriously wounded by mortar fire along the Italian Front, Hemingway convalesced in a hospital near Milan, and became involved in a passionate though ill-fated love affair with a Red Cross nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky.

These bare-bones details were fleshed out by Hemingway to become A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway’s fictional counterpart for this novel is Frederic Henry, who like Hemingway is an American. A commissioned officer with the rank of lieutenant, Henry serves on the Italian front, is wounded, recovers in hospital in Italy, and falls in love with a nurse – not someone with a “von” in her name (might confuse the readership – aren’t we supposed to be fighting the Germans?), but rather a demure young Englishwoman named Catherine Barkley.

Part of the novel’s interest inheres in Frederic Henry’s changing attitudes toward war. At first, the wounded Frederic is eager to return to the front, to the camaraderie of men-at-arms and the shared dangers and joys of a soldier's life, as shown in this conversation between Frederic and the house doctor at his hospital:

“You are in such a hurry to get back to the front?”

“Why not?”

“It is very beautiful,” he said. “You are a noble young man.”

As the novel continues, however, Frederic comes to feel that his primary duty is to Catherine, and to the child that eventually results from their love for each other – hence Frederic’s ultimate willingness to declare his “farewell to arms,” to separate from the warrior code that has hitherto sustained him, and to place a simple, peaceful human relationship with wife and child at the center of his life.

Many readers back in 1929 would no doubt have sympathized with Frederic’s decision. Eleven years after the Armistice of Compiègne concluded the “War to End All Wars,” most observers would no doubt have seen the First World War as a vast exercise in futility – a monstrous conflict that killed ten million people, left another 28 million wounded or missing, and resulted in a Europe more vulnerable and less stable than it had been before the guns of August 1914 first roared to life. That attitude toward the carnage of World War I can be seen when Hemingway writes that “abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”

That attitude toward war also comes forth in Hemingway’s recounting of the Italian retreat from Caporetto, a dramatic highlight of the novel. Historically, the Battle of Caporetto (24 October – 19 November 1917) was an Italian defeat at the hands of Austro-Hungarian troops supported by German reinforcements. Italy suffered over 300,000 casualties in what has been called the worst loss in Italian military history.

But wait: the story gets even worse. The Italian commander, Marshal Luigi Cadorna, compounded his many strategic and tactical errors before and during the battle by ordering the execution of any officer found retreating from the battle lines, as if the loss of the battle was his officers' fault and not his own.

In Hemingway’s hands, these cold, sad facts of history take on the texture and drama of lived experience, as Frederic Henry and various Italian officers face the prospect of execution for their commander’s blunders:

Two carabinieri took the lieutenant-colonel to the river bank. He walked in the rain, an old man with his hat off, a carabinieri on either side. I did not watch them shoot him but I heard the shots. They were questioning someone else. This officer too was separated from his troops. He was not allowed to make an explanation. He cried when they read the sentence from the pad of paper, and they were questioning another when they shot him. They made a point of being intent on questioning the next man while the man who had been questioned before was being shot. In this way there was obviously nothing they could do about it. I did not know whether I should wait to be questioned or make a break now.

Small wonder that Frederic and Catherine make their own “farewell to arms,” crossing the border into Switzerland and enjoying an idyllic winter interlude so complete that Catherine is able to say, “You’ve forgotten the army.” Yet just as Hemingway’s real-life relationship with Agnes von Kurowsky did not end happily, so complications attendant upon the birth of Frederic and Catherine’s child pose the danger that their love, while true and intense, may be short-lived.

I returned to A Farewell to Arms in the context of a trip, some years ago, to Havana, Cuba, where my wife and I saw various sites associated with Hemingway and his life, including the Floridita bar where he drank daiquiris and the Ambos Mundos hotel where he lived and wrote during the 1930’s. And perhaps this novel occupies my thoughts today because it is Veterans’ Day, a federal holiday in honor of American veterans, and a day that had its historical antecedents in the armistice that ended the First World War on November 11, 1918. For me, no other American novel of World War I captures the horror of that war, or the cruelty with which war separates people from one another, so well as A Farewell to Arms.