IN THE LATE SUMMER OF THAT YEAR we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.
Troops march past the house. Artillery flashes in the mountains. The fall brings rain and mud. The King comes nearly every day to see how things are going, and things go very badly.
At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.
These pairs of sentences bookend the descriptive first chapter of a great war novel. In five paragraphs, the author moves from mundane peace to muddy suffering.
Moments of mundane peace are fleeting in the rest of the story. It takes place during what was, at the time, the most destructive war in history. The author is Ernest Hemingway. The book, A Farewell to Arms.
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
Lieutenant Frederic Henry, the protagonist of A Farewell to Arms, does not consider himself very good or very gentle or very brave. He is an American in the Italian ambulance corps. He is reticent about his reasons for joining the war effort, saying only that he was in Italy and spoke Italian. Later, we learn he was studying architecture in Rome before World War I started.
During a bombardment, Henry takes shelter in a dugout with a group of cynical ambulance drivers. He risks his life to bring them food. When a trench mortar shell explodes nearby, his first thoughts are for them. He doesn’t even notice his own wounds until he’s tried to help the man next to him. At the dressing station, he insists—unsuccessfully—that other wounded be treated first.
Henry receives a medal. He downplays his bravery, telling a friend he was “blown up while we were eating cheese.” The words “sacred,” “glorious,” and “sacrifice” embarrass him. He does his duty quietly.
Why does such a man desert his station?
Ernest Hemingway in 1918. Like his character Frederic Henry, he served as an ambulance driver in World War I. (Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
After Henry recovers, he returns to the front. He is caught up in the Italian retreat after the disastrous Battle of Caporetto. He, along with two engineers, two civilian girls, and another group of cynical ambulance drivers, leaves the main column, believing that taking side roads will be faster and safer. Their vehicles get stuck in the mud and Henry shoots one of the engineers who try to run away. They abandon the vehicles and the girls and continue on foot.
One of the drivers gives himself up to the Germans. Another is killed by friendly fire from trigger-happy retreating Italians. When Henry reaches safety, he finds a group of vigilante “battle police” interrogating officers. He stands in the rain as they execute everyone they question. He knows his foreign accent will be enough justification for them to shoot him. He escapes by jumping into a river and floating downstream.
Fed up with the war and betrayed by his own army, Henry deserts his station. He satisfies his conscience with an analogy: “If they shot floorwalkers after a fire in the department store because they spoke with an accent they had always had, then certainly the floorwalkers would not be expected to return when the store opened again for business.”
The dutiful tenente (Italian for lieutenant) reaches his breaking point after the retreat. But Henry’s always been frustrated and depressed by the war and he escapes any way he can—often through alcohol.
Early in the book, Frederic Henry meets English nurse Catherine Barkley. They both need distraction—he from the war, she from the death of her fiancé at the Battle of the Somme. They start a love affair. At first their relationship is a game, a diversion. As it progresses, they grow dependent upon each other.
After Henry deserts, he and the now-pregnant Catherine flee to Switzerland. He says a farewell to arms and makes a separate peace and they are happy for a time. But Hemingway’s world breaks—or kills—everyone, so it does not last.
There’s an old joke in literary circles that goes something like this:
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Hemingway: To die. Alone. In the rain.
After reading A Farewell to Arms, it’s easy to see the origin of the joke. The omnipresent rain is both a reality of the fall and winter campaigns and a literary device, a symbol for the constant pressure upon Hemingway’s characters. It brings cholera. It soaks Frederic Henry as he says goodbye to Catherine before journeying back to the front. The mud it creates thwarts his retreat.
“I’m afraid of the rain.” [Catherine said.]
“Why?” I was sleepy. Outside the rain was falling steadily.
…
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me.”
“Don’t make me.”
“Tell me.”
“No.”
“Tell me.”
“All right. I’m afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it.”
“No.”
“And sometimes I see you dead in it.”
“That’s more likely.”
…
“It’s all nonsense. It’s only nonsense. I’m not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn’t.” She was crying. I comforted her and she stopped crying. But outside it kept on raining.
When they arrive in Switzerland, the rain is deceptively “fine” and “cheerful,” but during their happiest times—the winter of 1917-18—there is no rain. Its return in the spring forewarns tragedy.
Hemingway’s world does not break Frederic Henry suddenly. It breaks him monotonously, like rain falling. Is he strong at the broken places afterward? It’s hard to say for certain.
When Henry is convalescing, he discusses the war with a gung-ho soldier who takes pride in decorations and martial prowess. Henry considers him a legitimate hero. Catherine points out that heroes are usually “much quieter,” like Henry.
Later, he paraphrases a famous quote from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, saying “The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one.”
Catherine contradicts him. She says Shakespeare “knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he’s intelligent. He simply doesn’t mention them.”
Lieutenant Frederic Henry dies many deaths during A Farewell to Arms, but they are not the thousand deaths of a coward. Rather, they are the two thousand deaths of a quiet hero pushed to his breaking point.