A Farewell To Arms By Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms is Ernest Miller Hemingway's second novel, first published in 1929 by Scribner, a publishing company known for publishing many writers whose works are considered classics of American literature, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut and Hemingway himself.

In early 1918, Hemingway volunteered to become an ambulance driver in the Italian army. This experience affected him greatly and from it a book was born, telling the tale of Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver in the Italian army during the Great War and his relationship with Catherine Barkley, a Scottish nurse which he meets during the war and falls in love with. Before the war Frederic Henry was an architecture student in Rome but seemingly not by plan

That doesn't last long as the Austrians begin to advance and they manage to break through the Italian lines at the Battle of Caporetto, forcing the Italians to retreat. During the retreat Frederic and his troop's ambulances get stuck in the mud and when two officers that they had picked up along the way refuse to help dislodge them Frederic shoots at them while they run away, hitting one but missing the other before they themselves are forced to keep retreating on foot. After their defeat, the Italians have become paranoid, seeing enemies everywhere and shooting before asking questions. On their way to they lose one of the ambulance drivers when he is shot by Italians and another one who surrenders in fear of being shot. Despite his worries Frederic and the rest manage to get to . In the Italians have begun to round up everyone speaking with an accent, fearing them to be spies, and executing officers found without their troops. The executions are ruthless, questions are asked but answers are ignored and so Frederic decides to make a run for it before his turn is up. He manages to dive into the river and float to safety where he snuck onto a train headed for

Other than the fact that Frederic volunteers to be an ambulance driver in the Italian army, the story is based on Hemingway's service during the war. Frederic's story begins considerably earlier than Hemingway's own experience – the Battle of Caporetto and the following retreat of the Italian army took place in late 1917, placing the first chapters at around 1916 – and so it is not autobiographical as Hemingway was not present at the battles in the novel but Frederic and Ernest follow similar arcs. Hemingway was injured in a mortar strike and sent to a hospital in Milan where, while recuperating, he fell in love with a nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky. Like Frederic and Catherine they were going to marry but before they did Ernest lost Agnes, not to childbirth but to an Italian