The gamut of emotions of war in Hemingway’s Arms

Holy cow I loved this book. I really like Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, but A Farewell to Arms blew me away. It starts quickly in the first few pages and runs a roller coaster of emotions throughout. The book follows Frederic Henry, a paramedic at the Italian front in World War I.

Frederic is an American who had been living in Italy when the war broke out, so he joined up with the Italian army. As a paramedic, Frederic is often near battles, so he tries to keep it loose when he has downtime. He meets a young English nurse at the local hospital named Catherine. He flirts with her but doesn’t see anything serious developing. However, shortly thereafter Frederic is gravely wounded from shrapnel from a mortar, and while recovering in Milan, Catherine finds him there and they begin a serious relationship. After a couple months, Frederic is just about fully healed to head back to the front when Catherine tells him she is pregnant.

Frederic meets back up with his old troop, but is seeing life differently now. When they begin a retreat from advancing Austrian forces, Frederic convinces his fellows that the retreating army is moving too slowly and they can set off on their own to get to their destination faster. Frederic, who’s been living a dream with Catherine for so long, finally sees his luck run out. One friend is killed by friendly fire, and then another abandons them to give up to the nearby German forces. When Frederic does finally get back with the army, he sees that angry Italian soldiers are killing all non-Italians, calling them German spies or charging them with abandoning their posts. To escape his fate, Frederic jumps in the nearby river and rides the current downstream.

Coming out a few miles away, Frederic treks up to the train tracks and jumps a train to Milan, hoping to reunite with Catherine. He has decided to go AWOL and abandon his troop and the war in general. In Milan he finds she has moved on to a new hospital in Stresa. He finds her there, and the two plan an escape to Switzerland. With help from a friend, they cross a border lake and find their way to the Swiss, where they pretend to be husband and wife.

A few months later, Catherine is about to give birth. She and Frederic have been living a comfortable life together, but the peace is about to come to an end. Catherine’s birth ends in tragedy, with the baby being stillborn. Shortly after, the book ends suddenly as Frederic watches Catherine die to internal hemorrhaging.

Obviously for most of the book, I thought the title referred to Frederic giving up his fight in the army and going to live a peaceful life, but I think it takes on more meaning with Frederic losing the love of his life in Catherine. Frederic comes off as a pretty self-absorbed individual; he cares a lot for Catherine but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he only did so for what she provided him. And when his baby was born dead, he shrugged it off and admitted he hated the child for what it did to Catherine. The whole book is written in Hemingway’s short, almost curt style. It lacks the prose of a Faulkner or James novel, but that doesn’t make it any less absorbing. A fantastic read.