A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Rating: 3 & ½ Stars

One of the strengths of this book is its straightforward narrative. Published first in 1925, the story chronicles the experiences of a young American, Frederic Henry, caught in the thick of World War I. Lieutenant Henry (‘Tenente’) serves in the ambulance corps of the Italian army. The book is as much about love, as it is about war.

Frederic is half-hearted about the war, and in no mind for love when he first meets Catherine Barkley, an English nurse. Both his mind and heart are changed fairly soon, though Hemingway is more eloquent about Henry’s growing disillusionment with the seemingly endless campaign than he is in developing the relationship between Frederic and Catherine. The reader must infer their own reasons beyond what is stated in the book: that Catherine is beautiful, and ‘a grand girl’, and that she is lonely and grieving. In the despair of war, perhaps that is enough.

After the Battle of Caporetto and the ensuing Italian retreat, Henry finally decides that he will make ‘a separate peace’. He deserts the Italian army and pursues Catherine to Stresa. Catherine is by now pregnant with his child, and together, the two escape to Switzerland. There, they enjoy a blissful idyll, that alas, proves short-lived.

Hemingway seems to know what he’s talking about when he writes about war. Well, he should. ‘A Farewell to Arms’ is not autobiographical, but several incidents were based on the author’s own experiences in the Italian ambulance brigade, and being wounded during service. Many of the key characters were inspired by men and women he met during that period. Catherine Barkley was the fictional alter ego of a nurse called Agnes Von Kurowsky. The affair between Hemingway and Kurowsky did not end tragically, but came to a more mundane conclusion. While the character of Henry has a force and presence that rings true, Barkley is a fairly two-dimensional and insipid romantic lead. At the end of the book, there is not much we know about her, other than that she for no particular reason, makes Henry her raison d’être and has a tendency to fatuously state that things are ‘grand’ even when they very obviously are not.

But whatever the deficiencies in Hemingway’s take on love, he makes up for it with a perspective on war that is clear-eyed and authentic - its chaos, stupidity, madness, and the collateral damage it inflicts. Hemingway strips away any pretensions of glory in his account of people displaced, in the awarding of military ‘honors’, and the treatment of service personnel in wartime. His style of prose is minimal – terse yet effective. While his writing is unsentimental, his descriptions of natural landscapes are a thing of beauty in themselves; the immutable loveliness of nature stands serenely untouched by mankind’s self-destruction.