A Farewell to Arms

Summary

Frederic Henry, an American serving as a lieutenant in the ambulance service of the Italian army, tells the story of his war and his love in plain, retrospective first-person prose. In 1915-16 his unit is quartered in Gorizia, near the Isonzo front. His roommate is the high-spirited surgeon Rinaldi, and at the officers' mess the captain baits a gentle young priest from the Abruzzi. Rinaldi introduces Frederic to Catherine Barkley, an English volunteer nurse whose fiancé was killed on the Somme; their courtship begins as a game and slowly becomes serious. During an offensive, while Frederic and his drivers eat cheese and macaroni in a dugout, a trench-mortar shell wounds him in the legs and kills the driver Passini. He is treated at a dressing station, visited by Rinaldi and the priest, and sent to a new American hospital in Milan. There Catherine is posted, and Dr. Valentini operates on his knee. Through a summer of convalescence the lovers dine, go to the races at San Siro and spend nights together; Catherine becomes pregnant. The stern superintendent Miss Van Campen finds his empty bottles, his jaundice is blamed on drink, and his convalescent leave is cancelled. Frederic returns to Gorizia in autumn 1917 to find Rinaldi exhausted and the priest worn by the summer's losses. Then the Austrians and Germans break through at Caporetto. Frederic leads three ambulances and his drivers Aymo, Bonello and Piani in the vast retreat; he shoots an engineer sergeant who refuses an order, Aymo is killed by Italian rear-guard fire, and Bonello slips away to surrender. At the Tagliamento bridge the battle police are executing officers separated from their units; Frederic breaks away, plunges into the river and escapes on a freight train. Having made what he calls a separate peace, he finds Catherine at Stresa on Lake Maggiore. Warned that he is to be arrested, he rows her through a stormy night up the lake into Switzerland. They spend a happy winter in a chalet above Montreux and move in spring to Lausanne for the birth. After a long labour the doctor performs a Caesarean; the son is stillborn, and Catherine dies of repeated haemorrhages. Frederic sends the nurses out, finds that saying goodbye is like speaking to a statue, and walks back to the hotel in the rain. The novel was serialized in Scribner's Magazine from May to October 1929 and published by Charles Scribner's Sons in September 1929.

Plot or Argument

• Book I, Chapters I-V: Gorizia and the meeting

  The dusty troops and the cholera of the first winter; the mess, the captain and the priest; Frederic's leave and the Abruzzi he did not visit; Rinaldi introduces him to Catherine Barkley and Helen Ferguson at the British hospital.

• Book I, Chapters VI-XII: The game turns serious; the wound

  Frederic and Catherine meet in the hospital garden; the drivers argue that the war must end; the trench-mortar shell in the dugout; Passini's death; the dressing station, the blood dripping from the stretcher above; Rinaldi's and the priest's visits; transfer to Milan.

• Book II, Chapters XIII-XVIII: The Milan hospital

  The new American hospital and its nurses; Catherine's arrival; three cautious doctors and the confident Dr. Valentini, who operates on the knee; summer evenings in Milan with Catherine.

• Book II, Chapters XIX-XXIV: Summer's end

  The races at San Siro with the Meyerses; the boastful Ettore Moretti; Catherine tells Frederic she is pregnant; jaundice and Miss Van Campen's discovery of the bottles; a last night in a hotel and the train to the front.

• Book III, Chapters XXV-XXVIII: Back at the front and the retreat

  Rinaldi's fatigue and fears; the priest on the hopes of peace; the Bainsizza and the rain; the breakthrough at Caporetto; Frederic's three cars join the columns of soldiers and refugees and leave the main road.

• Book III, Chapters XXIX-XXXII: The Tagliamento

  The cars stick in the mud; the engineer sergeant is shot; Aymo is killed by Italian fire and Bonello leaves; the battle police at the bridge; Frederic escapes into the river and rides a flatcar of guns toward the plain, his anger washed away.

• Book IV, Chapters XXXIII-XXXVII: Stresa and the lake

  Civilian clothes from the singer Simmons; the reunion with Catherine at Stresa; billiards with the ancient Count Greffi; the barman's warning; the night row up Lake Maggiore to Switzerland and the arrest at Brissago.

• Book V, Chapters XXXVIII-XLI: Switzerland

  A winter of happiness in the Guttingens' chalet above Montreux; the move to Lausanne; the labour, the Caesarean and the stillborn son; Catherine's death and Frederic's walk back in the rain.

Characters

• Frederic Henry, narrator and protagonist

  An American lieutenant in the Italian ambulance corps, wounded, who deserts after the retreat from Caporetto.

• Catherine Barkley, beloved

  An English volunteer nurse who has lost her fiancé in France; brave, playful and devoted.

• Rinaldi, friend

  An Italian army surgeon and Frederic's roommate, generous, mocking and overworked.

• The priest, friend

  A young chaplain from the Abruzzi, teased at mess, who understands love and the war better than Frederic does.

• Helen Ferguson, Catherine's friend

  A Scottish nurse who fiercely disapproves of Frederic on Catherine's behalf.

• Passini, ambulance driver

  A driver who argues that the war must stop, killed by the shell that wounds Frederic.

• Aymo, Bonello and Piani, ambulance drivers

  Frederic's men in the retreat; Aymo is killed, Bonello surrenders, Piani stays with him.

• Miss Van Campen, hospital superintendent

  The disapproving head of the Milan hospital who has his convalescent leave cancelled.

• Dr. Valentini, surgeon

  The cheerful major who operates on Frederic's knee without waiting six months.

• Count Greffi, acquaintance

  A ninety-four-year-old diplomat at Stresa who plays billiards with Frederic and talks of love and devotion.

Lessons

• Big words and the names of places

  In Chapter XXVII Frederic says that the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice embarrass him, and that only the names of villages, roads and rivers keep their dignity. The novel's spare style follows the same rule: it reports what was seen, eaten and felt, and leaves large abstractions unspoken.

  • Why does Frederic trust numbers and place names more than the words on proclamations?
  • How does Hemingway's plain style shape the way you feel the retreat or Catherine's death?
  • Is Gino, the patriot in the same chapter, wrong to use the words Frederic distrusts?

• The priest's knowledge

  The priest from the Abruzzi is teased by the officers, but Frederic admits that the priest always knew what he did not, and what he could forget even after learning it. In Chapter XI, at Frederic's bedside, Frederic tells the priest he does not love God; the priest answers that he will, and that love is the wish to do things for another. The book's quiet test is whether Frederic's love for Catherine ever becomes that kind of love.

  • Why does Frederic go to the cold, clear country around the cities instead of to the priest's Abruzzi?
  • What does the priest mean when he says that when you love you wish to do things for someone?
  • Does Frederic pray at the end, and what does his prayer show?

• A separate peace

  After the battle police at the Tagliamento, Frederic decides the war is no longer his. Hemingway shows both the reason for his flight, the senseless shooting of officers, and its cost: Frederic leaves Piani and the men he led, feels like a truant, and cannot read the war news without guilt.

  • Was Frederic right to run from the battle police? Was he right not to go back?
  • Why does he feel like a boy playing truant rather than a free man?
  • How does his shooting of the engineer sergeant complicate the way we judge him?

• The world breaks every one

  In Chapter XXXIV Frederic reflects that the world kills the very good, the very gentle and the very brave without distinction. Catherine's courage in the labour room, and her death after the stillbirth, make this his final word, but the reader is left to ask whether courage and love were wasted or were the only things that mattered.

  • What does Frederic mean by being strong at the broken places?
  • Is Catherine's bravery in Book V a defeat or a victory?
  • What does the rain stand for across the novel?

Context

Italy entered the First World War against Austria-Hungary in May 1915 and fought a series of offensives along the Isonzo River and on the Bainsizza plateau. In October 1917 an Austro-German force broke through at Caporetto (now Kobarid in Slovenia); the Italian Second Army collapsed and the armies fell back to the Piave, with hundreds of thousands taken prisoner. Military police executed some retreating officers and soldiers. Many American volunteers drove ambulances for the Allied armies before and after the United States entered the war in 1917.

Composition

Hemingway served in Italy only in 1918, after Caporetto; his own wounding near the Piave and his love for the American nurse Agnes von Kurowsky in the Milan hospital lie behind parts of the story, but the retreat is drawn from reading, maps and others' accounts. He began the book in 1928 in Key West and wrote much of it in Piggott, Arkansas, and Kansas City, where his son Patrick was born that June by Caesarean section. It was serialized in Scribner's Magazine in 1929, when the June issue was banned in Boston, and was published as a book by Scribner's on 27 September 1929. The title comes from a poem by the Elizabethan George Peele. Hemingway said he rewrote the ending many times; a 2012 edition printed dozens of alternative endings from the manuscripts.

Reception

The novel was Hemingway's first great commercial success and confirmed him as a leading writer of the generation that had come of age in the war. It was filmed in 1932 with Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes and again in 1957. Its account of the Caporetto retreat and its closing chapters are among the most studied passages in American fiction, and the lines from Chapter XXVII on abstract words are often cited in histories of how the war changed literary language.

Comparisons

• all-quiet-on-the-western-front

  Published the same year, Remarque's novel stays with a German infantry company to the end, while Frederic, an American volunteer on the Italian front, walks out of the war and tries to build a private life beyond it.

• the-old-man-and-the-sea

  Santiago, defeated but not destroyed, answers Frederic's claim that the world breaks every one; read together they show how Hemingway's idea of endurance deepened over twenty-three years.

• testament-of-youth

  Vera Brittain served as a VAD nurse like Catherine and lost her fiancé in France; her memoir gives the nurse's side of the hospitals and of a love shadowed by the war.

• romeo-and-juliet

  Frederic and Catherine, like Shakespeare's lovers, make a private world against a public conflict, and their haste and secrecy end in a death that no one in the story can prevent.

• the-great-gatsby

  Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway and Hemingway's Frederic both narrate after the event in a postwar voice, one from the Long Island of the 1920s, the other from the war itself.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Rain: in the first chapter, during the retreat, on the night row up the lake, and in the last sentence.
• The priest's conversations with Frederic in Chapters III, XI and XXVI (the mess, the field hospital, and the return to Gorizia), and what Frederic says he has learned from him.
• The moment in Chapter XXX when Frederic decides to escape the battle police, and how he describes himself afterward.
• How Catherine speaks of being brave, from the early games in Gorizia to the labour room in Lausanne.
• What Hemingway leaves out: how rarely Frederic names his feelings directly.

Key terms and names

Caporetto

The town on the Isonzo where the Austro-German breakthrough of October 1917 began; the Italian retreat that followed fills Book III.

Battle police

The carabinieri at the Tagliamento bridge who question and shoot officers separated from their units; Frederic escapes them by diving into the river.

Separate peace

Frederic's phrase in Book IV for his private decision to leave the war after his escape.

Abruzzi

The priest's mountain home, where it is clear and cold and the peasants take off their hats; Frederic promises to go there on leave and does not.

V.A.D.

Voluntary Aid Detachment, the British corps of volunteer nurses in which Catherine and Helen Ferguson serve.

Gorizia

The town near the Isonzo front where Frederic's ambulance unit is quartered in Books I and III.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension How is Frederic wounded in Chapter IX, and what happens to Passini?
2. Comprehension Why does Frederic flee the battle police at the Tagliamento, and how does he escape?
3. Comprehension How do Frederic and Catherine reach Switzerland, and where do they live there?
4. Interpretation At first Frederic treats his courtship of Catherine as a game. When and why does it stop being one?
5. Interpretation Why does Frederic say the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice embarrass him, and how is that reflected in his own way of telling the story?
6. Interpretation What does the old Count Greffi say about devotion and love at Stresa, and why does Hemingway place that conversation just before the escape?
7. Big Question Is a soldier ever justified in leaving his army, and what does he still owe the men he leaves?
8. Big Question Frederic says the world breaks everyone. Is suffering only destructive, or can it make people strong at the broken places?

Faith Connections

• 1 John 4:18 (Scripture)

  John writes that there is no fear in love, for mature love drives fear out. The priest tells Frederic that love is the wish to serve another; Catherine, frightened of the rain, tries to be brave for Frederic to the end.

• Psalm 39:4-7 (Scripture)

  The psalmist asks to know the measure of his days and puts his hope in God. Frederic's helpless prayer at Catherine's bedside is a voice from the other side of this psalm, a man with no hope but the asking.

• Ecclesiastes 9:11 (Scripture)

  Time and chance happen to all; the race is not to the swift. Frederic's reflection that the world kills the good and the brave impartially echoes the Preacher's observation, without the Preacher's final turn to fear of God.

• C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (Great Conversation)

  Lewis records the numbness and questions that follow his wife's death in 1960. Set beside Frederic's walk in the rain, it shows a believer facing the same silence and refusing to stop addressing God.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: The grand words of war promised meaning, but at the front only concrete things kept their reality. Frederic therefore leaves the public war for private love. Yet the private world proves as exposed as the public one, since Catherine dies in childbirth. The novel concludes that courage and love do not protect anyone from the world, though they may be what makes a life worth having lived.

Rhetorical device: polysyndeton. The opening paragraph of Book I, Chapter I joins the troops, the dust, the leaves and the road with repeated and, a rhythm that runs through the novel; compare the double and in the cholera sentence quoted from the same chapter.

Debate: Resolved: that Frederic Henry's separate peace was an act of desertion rather than a justified escape.

Memory Work

The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Trace the priest through the novel. Argue whether Frederic, by the last chapter, has learned what the priest knew.

Comparison with All Quiet on the Western Front: Paul Bäumer stays in the war to the end; Frederic Henry walks away from it. Compare what each novel says about duty, comradeship and the possibility of a private life in wartime.

Medical Lens

The novel follows a wounded man through the whole chain of First World War medicine on the Italian front: the field dressing station where a sergeant-adjutant records multiple superficial wounds and a stretcher-bearer's patient haemorrhages onto Frederic, the field hospital, the new American hospital in Milan with its X-rays and nurses, and the dispute among surgeons over whether to wait six months for the foreign bodies to encyst before opening the knee, which the confident Dr. Valentini resolves by operating at once. Rinaldi, an army surgeon, is shown as both skilled and exhausted, and in Book III fears he has contracted syphilis. Frederic's jaundice in Book II is blamed by Miss Van Campen on alcohol, and heavy drinking runs through the book as anaesthetic and habit. Cholera in the first winter is reported in a single flat sentence. The final chapter describes, step by step and in the period's terms, a prolonged labour managed with gas analgesia, a Caesarean section, a stillborn son with the cord around his neck, and a mother's death from repeated haemorrhage, a sequence drawn partly from Hemingway's own experience of his wife's difficult labour in 1928. Readers sometimes describe Frederic's numbness and insomnia as war trauma; Hemingway names no diagnosis, and such readings are interpretive.

• Book I, Chapters IX-X

  The trench-mortar shell in the dugout, Passini's mortal wound, the dressing station and the haemorrhaging soldier on the stretcher above Frederic.

  WAR Wounds Death Dying Pain
• Book II, Chapters XIV-XVI

  The Milan hospital: X-rays, the three doctors who advise waiting six months, and Dr. Valentini's decision to operate on the knee at once.

  Surgery Physicians Doctors Nursing Caregiving
• Book II, Chapter XXII

  Frederic's jaundice; Miss Van Campen finds the empty bottles and accuses him of bringing it on with alcohol to avoid the front.

  Alcohol Physicians Doctors
• Book III, Chapter XXV

  Rinaldi, worn out by the summer's operations, drinks heavily and fears he has syphilis.

  Syphilis Venereal Physicians Doctors Alcohol
• Book V, Chapter XLI

  Catherine's long labour with gas, the doctor's advice to perform a Caesarean, the stillborn son, the repeated haemorrhages and her death.

  Childbirth Maternal Surgery Death Dying Grief

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write the letter the priest might have sent Frederic after Caporetto, not knowing whether he was alive.

• Essay

  Compare the rain in Book I, Chapter I with the rain in the final sentence. Argue what the image comes to mean by the end of the novel.

• Classroom

  Have students rewrite a paragraph of Frederic's narration about the retreat using the abstract words he says he distrusts, then discuss what is gained and lost.

Further Reading

• In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway

  Early stories and vignettes, including the wounded Nick Adams on the Italian front.

• Hemingway's First War: The Making of A Farewell to Arms, Michael S. Reynolds

  A study of the historical sources Hemingway used for the Caporetto retreat.

• The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell

• Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky, Henry S. Villard and James Nagel

• The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919, Mark Thompson