A Farewell to Arms

As an officer for the ambulance corps, Frederic is not in the trenches fighting. His job is to help save the men injured from this kind of fighting. Being at the northern Italian front since 1915 has forced Frederic to face the grim realities of this type of war, a war that slaughtered so many young men. Trench warfare saw little significant movement of troops. Battle lines shifted back and forth but not by very much. At the beginning of the novel, the Italian troops are set up one side of the river, and the next year they are drawn up on the other side of the river. The new technology makes 19th century weaponry like swords obsolete, while gas masks are the new requirement with the development of poison gas as a weapon of war. The mountainous terrain makes the fighting even harder. As Frederic notes, just because there is victory in one mountain, there is always the next mountain that needs to be conquered. And the next one. And the next. The war seems endless. The seasons seem to have been reordered in order to accommodate this new entrenched reality. Fighting blossoms with the spring thaws and then ends with the snows of winter.

But despite living through this backdrop of violence and death, it is not until Frederic is wounded that he feels the horror of war. When he sees Passini, one of his drivers, who, in the middle of eating cold macaroni and cheese, is hit by mortar shells which rip his legs off, Frederic tries desperately to save him before realizing he is dead. Then he realizes the extent of his own injuries. Before, he was the ambulance driver, but now he is the one to be loaded into an ambulance car. The soldier above him begins hemorrhaging and dripping blood on to him, and there is nothing he can do because now he has joined the ranks of the injured.

This reality of war is so horrific that many try to escape the war by various self-inflicted wounds. As a surgeon, Rinaldi has seen many of these wounds. Frederic himself gives advice to an American soldier on how he can hurt himself to escape the front. And as the doctors are assessing Frederic’s own injuries, they make sure to indicate in their notes that his wounds are not self-inflicted. Some soldiers are willing to do anything they can in order to escape the trenches.

Frederic distrusts abstract words like "glory" and "honor" (161). False words such as these are what tricked millions of soldiers to join and fight in the war. Instead, Frederic relies on concrete words. He describes what he sees in the simplest terms, but he knows that even these simple concrete words have great power to create emotion. Hemingway’s words on the page, as stripped bare as they are, are not simple. They are meant to evoke the complexity of Frederic’s psychology. Frederic’s detachment from the war and from life has rendered him passive and laconic, but his ability to see is not diminished. His eyes see a landscape where war has seeped into every crevice of life. Even the seasons of nature have blended with the seasons of war. There are almost two seasons now: the season of fighting (spring – fall) and the season of no fighting (winter, because of the snow).

Hemingway is not interested in describing the scenes with a great amount of visual detail so that the reader can picture the scene like a photograph. Often, he makes his scenes timeless by stripping away the identity of places and people, rarely mentioning names of towns or people. Other times, the word choices are searing and specific, such as when Frederic describes the feeling of mortar shells hitting him or when he describes his vivid escape in the swirling currents of the Tagliamento river. Hemingway labored at revision, cutting away as much as possible in order to create “one true sentence”—a pared down sentence that was not part of the bloated inflated language that filled war propaganda. He wanted to create a fresh new American voice using his simple monosyllabic words to create a new rhythm of speech that was able to evoke the disenchanted, disillusioned mood of the Lost Generation.

Almost like an Impressionist painter not interested in the hard outlines of each separate object, Hemingway is interested, not so much in how the light hits his objects, but how war hits all of his subjects. He writes prose like a poet, interested in presenting the reader with a succession of images that are carefully chosen to create a dominant emotion, an emotion often of despair over the unending war and how it affects everyone, whether officers or nurses or the common soldier or civilians. He is not interested in writing like a journalist, although Hemingway’s background as a reporter helped him achieve an economical style stripped of adjectives, adverbs, and other decorations. He has tight control over language except where intense emotion bursts through and he uses stream of consciousness in order to show how the narrator is overwhelmed.