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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Book III, Chapter XXV

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

• 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.