A Farewell to Arms

The Italian front in summer. Frederic Henry established as an ambulance officer among Italian troops. He meets Rinaldi and the priest, attends mess, visits the local brothel, and first encounters Catherine Barkley at the British nurses' station.

Frederic and Catherine's courtship develops — he thinks of it as a game, she plays along but is more fragile than she pretends. He returns to the front, is wounded by a mortar during a mess-line bombardment, and is evacuated to Milan.

Three months in Milan. Frederic and Catherine's love becomes real and mutual. He undergoes surgery, learns to walk again, they spend his leave in the city. Catherine reveals she is pregnant. Frederic returns to the front.

Frederic rejoins his unit as the Italian army prepares to collapse. The catastrophic retreat from Caporetto begins — rain, mud, chaos, thousands of troops and civilians in a broken column. Frederic shoots a deserting sergeant. The battle police execute officers arbitrarily. Frederic escapes by jumping into the Tagliamento River and deserts.

Frederic reunites with Catherine in Stresa. They are warned by the barman Emilio that Frederic is about to be arrested as a deserter. They row through the night across Lake Maggiore to Switzerland, arriving cold and exhausted at dawn. Swiss authorities briefly detain them, then allow them to stay.

Frederic and Catherine spend a winter idyll above Montreux in the Alps. In spring they descend to Lausanne for the birth. The baby is stillborn. Catherine hemorrhages through the night and dies at dawn. Frederic walks back to the hotel in the rain.

A Farewell to Arms is not an anti-war novel in the propaganda sense — it is a novel about the absurdity of abstract language applied to concrete suffering, and about what happens to a man who sees through that language.

Catherine and Frederic's love is the novel's counter-argument to the war — but Hemingway refuses to let love win. Fate, biology, and the 'nada' that underlies the world destroy both the war and the love with equal indifference.