About Author:
Born on July 21, 1899, in Cicero (now in Oak Park), Illinois, Ernest
Hemingway served in World War I and worked in journalism before
publishing his story collection In Our Time. He was renowned for novels like The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, which won the 1953 Pulitzer. In 1954, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize. He committed suicide on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho.
A Farewell to Arms begins in the Alps
around the frontier between Italy and present-day Slovenia. Allied with
Britain, France, and Russia against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and
Germany, Italy is responsible for preventing the Austro-Hungarian forces
from assisting the Germans on the war's western front, and Russia in
the east. The novel's narrator and protagonist is eventually identified
as Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American who has volunteered for the
Italian army because the United States has not yet entered the war.
Henry supervises a group of Italian ambulance drivers.
After a wintertime leave spent touring the
country, Lieutenant Henry returns to the captured town at the front
where his unit lives. One evening his roommate, a surgeon and lieutenant
in the Italian army named Rinaldi, introduces Henry to two British
nurses: Catherine Barkley and her friend Helen Ferguson. Catherine and
Henry talk of the war and of her fiancé, killed in combat the year
before; clearly she has been traumatized by the experience. On his
second visit to the British hospital, they kiss. When Henry again visits
Catherine, she tells him that she loves him and asks whether he loves
her. He responds that he does.
One night, Lieutenant Henry and his fellow
ambulance-drivers settle into a dugout across the river from the enemy
troops. While the drivers are eating, the Austrian bombardment wounds
Henry in the leg and kills one of the other drivers. Henry is
transported by train to an American hospital in Milan.
Catherine Barkley arrives at the hospital, to
which she has been transferred. Once again, she and Lieutenant Henry
declare their love for each other, after which they have sex in the
hospital bed. Henry and Catherine spend the summer together while he
recuperates from an operation on his leg, visiting restaurants around
Milan in the evening and then spending nights together. At summer's end,
however, Lieutenant Henry is ordered back to the front, and Catherine
tells him she is three months pregnant. On their last evening together
in Milan, Henry buys a pistol, and he and Catherine take a room in a
hotel.
Soon after Lieutenant Henry's return to the
front, the Austrians (now joined by German troops) bombard the Italian
army and eventually break through the lines near the town of Caporetto.
Henry and the other ambulance drivers retreat with the rest of the
Italian forces in a long, slow-moving column of troops and vehicles.
They pick up two Italian engineer-sergeants. Finally, the ambulances
pull off the main road. When one of the vehicles becomes stuck in the
mud, the two sergeants refuse to assist in the effort to dislodge it and
disobey Lieutenant Henry's order to remain with the group. He fires at
them, wounding one; another ambulance driver then uses Henry's pistol to
finish the job. Henry and the three drivers abandon the ambulances and
set out on foot for the Tagliamento River, across which lies safety.
Soon they spot German soldiers in the distance.
One driver is shot to death by fellow Italians firing in error. Another
driver flees, to surrender to the Germans. Finally safe from the enemy,
Lieutenant Henry observes that Italian army officers like himself are
being shot by the military police for deserting their troops. He also
fears being mistaken for a German spy. And so he dives into the
Tagliamento River, deserting the Italian army, and swims ashore
downstream. Henry crosses part of the Venetian plain on foot, then
boards a moving train, hiding among guns stored beneath a tarpaulin.
Frederic (no longer Lieutenant) Henry arrives in
Milan, incognito. Catherine Barkley and Helen Ferguson are absent from
the hospital, having gone on holiday to the Italian resort town of
Stresa. So Henry travels via train to Stresa, where he finds Catherine
and Helen. Discovering late one night that Henry will be arrested as a
deserter in the morning, Henry and Catherine quickly prepare to escape
into neutral Switzerland. Through the stormy night, they travel in a
small, open boat across Lake Maggiore. The following day they are
arrested and briefly detained by Swiss officials, after which they are
released.
Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley move into a
chalet on a mountain above Montreaux and spend an idyllic winter there.
At winter's end, they leave the mountains for a hotel in Lausanne.
Finally, Henry takes Catherine to the hospital, where her baby is
stillborn. Then, as a result of multiple hemorrhages, Catherine dies as
well.
Cited:
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/farewell/summary.html
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/f/a-farewell-to-arms/book-summary
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