A Farewell to Arms

This semi-autobiographical novel, published in 1929, is largely set in northern Italy during the First World War. The central character, Frederic Henry, an American student of architecture, is serving as a volunteer paramedic serving with an Italian military ambulance corps on the Isonzo Front, where Italy fought Austria-Hungary across the mountainous terrain of the Julian Alps. While receiving treatment at the American hospital in Milan, he falls in love with Catherine, an English nurse. When he recovers, his return to the front coincides with a chaotic retreat in which Italian military police execute lone soldiers amidst paranoia about enemy infiltration. Fleeing from this mayhem, he returns to Milan and flees to Switzerland with Catherine.

The author, Ernest Hemingway (born 21 July 1899), grew up in Chicago. Active in school journalism, on leaving school, he worked as a junior reporter. Unfit for the United States Army due to poor eyesight, he enlisted in the Red Cross in December 1917 and went on France in April 1918. Like the central character of this novel, he served, from June, as a volunteer with an Italian ambulance corps on the Isonzo Front . He was seriously wounded by a mortar shell on 8 July and recuperated at the American Red Cross hospital in Milan. He returned home in January 1919 and returned to journalism, firstly as a freelance correspondent for the Toronto Star and then as an associate editor of a Chicago periodical. In late 1921, newly married, he went to Europe to work as  a foreign correspondent of the Toronto Star and was based in Paris where he met influential writers and artists in the circle of Gertrude Stein. His first publication (a collection of short stories and poems) appeared in 1923. A second collection was published in 1925 and his first novel appeared in 1926. Perhaps his most famous novel, The Old Man and the Sea, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953. In the following year Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for Literature “for his mastery of the art of narrative... and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style”.

The narrator and central character describes the shell attack in which he is wounded in a graphic way:
“...there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died. Then I floated, and instead of going on I felt myself slide back. I breathed and I was back. The ground was torn up and in front of my head there was a splintered beam of wood. In the jolt of my head I heard somebody crying. I thought somebody was screaming. I tried to move but I could not move. I heard the machine-guns and rifles firing across the river and all along the river.”