First published: 1929

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Impressionistic realism

Time of plot: World War I

Locale: Northern Italy and Switzerland

The Story:

Lieutenant Frederic Henry is a young American attached to an Italian ambulance unit on the Italian front. An offensive is soon to begin, and when Henry returns to the front from leave, he learns from his friend, Lieutenant Rinaldi, that a group of British nurses arrived in his absence to set up a British hospital unit. Rinaldi introduces him to Nurse Catherine Barkley. Between ambulance trips to evacuation posts at the front, Henry calls on Miss Barkley. He likes the frank young English girl in a casual sort of way, but he is not in love with her. Before he leaves for the front to stand by for an attack, she gives him a St. Anthony medal.

At the front, as Henry and some Italian ambulance drivers are eating in a dugout, an Austrian projectile explodes over them. Henry, badly wounded in the legs, is taken to a field hospital. Later, he is moved to a hospital in Milan. Before the doctor is able to see Henry in Milan, the nurse prohibits his drinking wine, but he bribes a porter to bring him a supply that he keeps hidden behind his bed. Catherine comes to the hospital, and Henry knows that he is in love with her. The doctors tell Henry that he will have to lie in bed six months before they can operate on his knee. Henry insists on seeing another doctor, who says that the operation can be performed the next day. Meanwhile, Catherine manages to be with Henry constantly.

After his operation, Henry convalesces in Milan with Catherine as his attendant. Together they dine in out-of-the-way restaurants, and together they ride about the countryside in a carriage. Henry is restless and lonely at nights and Catherine often comes to his hospital room. Summer passes into autumn. Henry’s wound heals, and he is due to take convalescent leave in October. He and Catherine plan to spend the leave together, but he comes down with jaundice before he can leave the hospital. The head nurse accuses him of bringing on the jaundice by drink, in order to avoid being sent back to the front. Before he leaves for the front, Henry and Catherine stay together in a hotel room; already she has disclosed to him that she is pregnant. Henry returns to the front with orders to load his three ambulances with hospital equipment and go south into the Po valley. Morale is at a low ebb. Rinaldi admires the job that has been done on the knee and observes that Henry acts like a married man. War weariness is all-pervasive. At the front, the Italians, learning that German divisions have reinforced the Austrians, begin their terrible retreat from Caporetto. Henry drives one of the ambulances loaded with hospital supplies. During the retreat south, the ambulance is held up several times by wagons, guns, and trucks, which extend in stalled lines for miles. Henry picks up two straggling Italian sergeants. During the night, the retreat is halted in the rain for hours.

At daybreak, Henry cuts out of the long line and drives across country in an attempt to reach Udine by side roads. The ambulance gets stuck in a muddy side road. The sergeants decide to leave, but Henry asks them to help dislodge the car from the mud. They refuse and run. Henry shoots and wounds one; the other escapes across the fields. An Italian ambulance corpsman with Henry shoots the wounded sergeant through the back of the head. Henry and his three comrades strike out on foot for Udine. On a bridge, Henry sees a German staff car with German bicycle troops crossing another bridge over the same stream. Within sight of Udine, one of Henry’s group is killed by an Italian sniper. The others hide in a barn until it seems safe to circle around Udine and join the mainstream of the retreat toward the Tagliamento River.

By that time, the Italian army is nothing but a frantic mob. Soldiers are throwing down their arms and officers are cutting insignia of rank from their sleeves. At the end of a long wooden bridge across the Tagliamento, military carabiniere are seizing all officers, giving them drumhead trials and executing them by the riverbank. Henry is detained, but in the dark of night he breaks free, plunges into the river, and escapes on a log. He crosses the Venetian plain on foot, then jumps aboard a freight train and rides to Milan, where he goes to the hospital in which he was a patient. There he learns that the English nurses went to Stresa.

During the retreat from Caporetto, Henry made his farewell to arms. He borrows civilian clothes from an American friend in Milan and goes by train to Stresa, where he meets Catherine, who is on leave. The bartender of the hotel in which Henry is staying warns Henry that authorities plan to arrest him for desertion the next morning; he offers his boat by means of which Henry and Catherine can escape to Switzerland. Henry rows all night. By morning, his hands are so raw that he can barely stand to touch the oars. Over his protests, Catherine takes a turn at the rowing. They reach Switzerland safely and are arrested. Henry tells the police that he is a sportsman who enjoys rowing and that he comes to Switzerland for the winter sports. The valid passports and the ample funds that Henry and Catherine possess save them from serious trouble with the authorities.

During the rest of the fall and winter, the couple stay at an inn outside Montreux. They discuss marriage, but Catherine will not be married while she is pregnant. They hike, read, and talk about what they will do together after the war. When the time for Catherine’s confinement approaches, she and Henry go to Lausanne to be near a hospital. They plan to return to Montreux in the spring. At the hospital, Catherine’s pains cause the doctor to use an anesthetic on her. After hours of suffering, she delivers a dead baby. The nurse sends Henry out to get something to eat. When he gets back to the hospital, he learns that Catherine had a hemorrhage. He goes into the room and stays with her until she dies. There is nothing he can do, no one he can talk to, no place he can go. Catherine is dead. He leaves the hospital and walks back to his hotel in the dark. It is raining.

Critical Evaluation:

Ernest Hemingway once referred to A Farewell to Arms as his version of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (pr. c. 1595-1596, pb. 1597). Several parallels exist. Both works are about star-crossed lovers; both show erotic flirtations that rapidly develop into serious, intense love affairs; and both describe the romances against a backdrop of social and political turmoil. Whether A Farewell to Arms finally qualifies as tragic is a matter of personal opinion, but it certainly represents, for Hemingway, an attempt to broaden his concerns from the aimless tragicomic problems of the expatriates in The Sun Also Rises (1926) to the fundamental question of life’s meaning in the face of human mortality.

Frederic Henry begins the affair as a routine wartime seduction, “a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards.” He feels mildly guilty, especially after learning about Catherine’s vulnerability because of the loss of her lover in combat, but he still foresees no complications from the temporary arrangement. It is not until he is wounded and sent to her hospital in Milan that their affair deepens into love—and from that point on, they struggle to free themselves in order to realize it. However, they are constantly thwarted, first by the impersonal bureaucracy of the military effort, then by the physical separation imposed by the war itself, and, finally, by the biological “accident” that kills Catherine at the point where their “separate peace” at last seems possible.

As Henry’s love for Catherine grows, his disillusionment with the war also increases. From the beginning of the book, Henry views the military efforts with ironic detachment, but there is no suggestion that, prior to his meeting with her, he has had any deep reservations about his involvement. Hemingway’s attitude toward war was always an ambiguous one. He questioned the rationales for fighting them and the slogans offered in their defense. Like Henry, he felt that “abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.” For the individual, however, war could be the necessary test. Facing imminent death in combat, one either demonstrated “grace under pressure” and did the “one right thing” or one did not; one either emerged from the experience as a whole person with self-knowledge and control, or one came out of it lost and broken.

There is little heroism in this war as Henry describes it. The hero’s disengagement from the fighting is made most vivid in the extended “retreat from Caporetto,” generally considered one of the great sequences in modern fiction. The retreat begins in an orderly, disciplined, military manner. As it progresses, however, authority breaks down, emotions of self-preservation supersede loyalties, and the neat military procession gradually turns into a panicking mob. Henry is caught up in the momentum and carried along with the group in spite of his attempts to keep personal control and fidelity to the small band of survivors he travels with. Upon reaching the Tagliamento River, Henry is seized, along with all other identifiable officers, and held for execution. After he escapes by leaping into the river—an act of ritual purification as well as physical survival—he feels that his trial has freed him from any and all further loyalty to the Allied cause.

Henry then rejoins Catherine, and they complete the escape together. In Switzerland, they seem lucky and free at last. Up in the mountains, they hike, ski, make love, prepare for the baby, and plan for their postwar life together. Even in their most idyllic times, however, there are ominous hints; they worry about the baby; Catherine jokes about her narrow hips; she becomes frightened by a dream of herself “dead in the rain.” Throughout the novel, Hemingway associates the plains and rain with death, disease, and sorrow; the mountains and the snow with life, health, and happiness. Catherine and Henry are safe and happy in the mountains, but it is impossible to remain there indefinitely. Eventually everyone must return to the plains. When Catherine and Henry descend to the city, it is, in fact, raining, and she does, in fact, die.

Like that of Romeo and Juliet, the love between Catherine and Henry is not destroyed by any moral defect in their own characters. Henry muses that Catherine’s fate is the price paid for the good nights in Milan, but such a price is absurdly excessive. Nor, strictly speaking, is the war responsible for their fate, any more than the Montague-Capulet feud directly provokes the deaths of Shakespeare’s lovers. Nevertheless, the war and the feud provide the backdrop of violence and the accumulation of pressures that coerce the lovers into actions that contribute to their doom. In the final analysis, both couples are defeated by bad luck—the illness that prevents the friar from delivering Juliet’s note to Romeo, the accident of Catherine’s anatomy that prevents normal childbearing. Thus, both couples are star-crossed. If a “purpose” can be vaguely ascertained in Shakespeare’s version—the feud is ended by the tragedy—there is no metaphysical justification for Catherine’s death; it is, in her own words, “a dirty trick,” and nothing more.

Hemingway does not insist that the old religious meanings are completely invalid but only that they do not work for his characters. Henry would like to visit with the priest in his mountain village, but he cannot bring himself to do it. His friend Rinaldi, a combat surgeon, proclaims atheism, hedonism, and work as the only available meanings. Count Greffi, an old billiard player Henry meets in Switzerland, offers good taste, cynicism, and the fact of a long, pleasant life. Catherine and Henry have each other: “You are my religion,” she tells him.

All of these things fail in the end. Religion is only for others, patriotism is a sham, hedonism becomes boring, culture is a temporary distraction, work finally fails (the operation on Catherine was “successful”), and even love cannot last. Catherine dies; they both know, although they will not admit it, that the memory of it will fade.

All that remains is a stoic acceptance of the above facts with dignity and without bitterness. Life, like war, is absurd. Henry survives because he is lucky; Catherine dies because she is unlucky. There is no guarantee that the luck ever balances out and, since everyone ultimately dies, it probably does not matter. What does matter is the courage, dignity, and style with which one accepts these facts as a basis for life, and, more important, in the face of death.

Further Reading