‘A Farewell to Arms’: Love in a Time of War

A review of ‘A Farewell to Arms’, by Ernest Hemingway; Scribner, 1929.

Harry Readhead
3 min readJan 10, 2025

‘They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.’ So wrote Ernest Hemingway, who volunteered to serve in Italy during World War I as an ambulance driver. He was wounded by an Austrian mortar while serving chocolate and cigarettes to soldiers. His hatred of war in the aftermath was total.

A Farewell to Arms, a novel set amid the chaos of the Great War, grew out of his experience. It tells of Frederic Henry, an ambulance driver in the Italian army, and his love affair with Catherine, a British nurse. They are introduced by Frederic’s friend Rinaldi, who pursues Catherine briefly before shifting his attention to someone else. For Frederic, in hospital with a wounded knee, Catherine is a pleasant distraction. She, meanwhile, is still mourning her fiancé’s death. But soon, what for both is a break from the war matures into something deeper.

As the pair fall more deeply in love, there is a foreboding sense that things will not endure. From the first, when soldiers express a hollow camaraderie, and young men are blown to bits in passing, Hemingway charges his story with fatalism. For the world, as Frederic reflects, ‘breaks everyone’, even if ‘afterward many are strong at the broken places.’ The war has stripped him of illusions; but it also fuels his desperation to protect his relationship with Catherine.

If the book is ‘about’ something, it is about disillusionment. War is not heroic but absurd. It works like a big, indifferent machine that grinds real people to dust. Frederic tried to treat it with a cool indifference, and at first he succeeds, insulated by his job as a driver. But more and more the war seems to reach out towards him, and pull him into its deathly embrace. It renders monstrous and insane the notion that war could be other than a crime. A Farewell to Arms is the prose companion to Owen’s ‘Dolce et Decorum Est’:

‘My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.’

The meaning of that final phrase, in case your Latin is rusty: ‘It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.’

Love is the counterpoint to war. For war is fear, power, greed, ideology, violence, failure. Love is the opposite. But it is no perfect solution, no cure. Catherine and Frederic share a romance that is intense and comforting, but also fragile. It is a threadbare lifeline thrown into an abyss. Where Frederic tries to defy the stars, Catherine accepts what is to come. She, having lost her fiancé, is more at peace with life’s caprice, even as she suffers. It is in part why she takes up with Frederic. She understands that, however fleeting, it is a refuge from despair.

The spare dialogue and clipped sentences in which the book is written adds to the fatalism with which the text is charged. Hemingway writes in the language of cause and effect: reflection takes place through and in events. Often it is implicit. He will not indulge in sentimentality; emotional truth lies between his words. It is the iceberg of which he shows just the tip. We perceive it, which is to feel it; but we do not see it. And the quieter moments—a drink, a glance, a second's relief from the ceaseless chaos of war—speak to us loudest.

Hemingway said he wrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. It was later found he did so forty-seven times. The version that he went with is pitch-perfect, completing one of literature’s great testaments to the resilience – and the limits – of the spirit.

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Harry Readhead
Harry Readhead

Written by Harry Readhead

Writer and cultural critic ✍🏻 Seen: The Times, The Spectator, the TLS, etc. Fond of cats. Devastating in heels.

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