Adios A Las Armas

I remember the first time I heard about Hemingway, my brother introduced him to me. I can still remember his face full of wonder and excitement “I just found out of an amazing author”, he told me with a huge smile on his face. Later on, that huge smile faded away when he realized E.H. had killed himself. But still, it is important to acknowledge he is one of greatest the American authors, even with all his mental problems. I always wanted to read one of his books, I wanted to experience what my brother felt when he first heard of Hemingway. The feeling that arrived in my body after reading A Farewell to Arms was depressing and sad, but also moving and beautiful.

I was shocked when my classmates talked horrible things referring to the book. I could not believe a great novel was being criticized in such a harsh way. Then I realize, whenever a person sees something different, like a book that ends in such a depressing way, tends to hate it instead of treasure the beauty that is inside of it.

The book begins in the Alps around the frontier between Italy and present-day Slovenia. The novel's narrator and protagonist is eventually identified as Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American who has volunteered for the Italian army because the United States has not yet entered the war. Henry supervises a group of Italian ambulance drivers.

After a wintertime leave spent touring the country, Lieutenant Henry returns to the captured town at the front where his unit lives. One evening his roommate, a surgeon and lieutenant in the Italian army named Rinaldi, introduces Henry to two British nurses: Catherine Barkley and her friend Helen Ferguson. Catherine and Henry talk of the war and of her fiancé, killed in combat the year before; clearly she has been traumatized by the experience. When Henry again visits Catherine, she tells him that she loves him and asks whether he loves her. He responds that he does.

One night, Lieutenant Henry and his fellow ambulance-drivers settle into a dugout across the river from the enemy troops. While the drivers are eating, the Austrian bombardment wounds Henry in the leg and kills one of the other drivers. Henry is transported by train to an American hospital in Milan.

Catherine Barkley arrives at the hospital. Henry and Catherine spend the summer together while he recuperates from an operation on his leg, visiting restaurants around Milan in the evening and then spending nights together. At summer's end, however, Lieutenant Henry is ordered back to the front, and Catherine tells him she is three months pregnant. On their last evening together in Milan, Henry buys a pistol, and he and Catherine take a room in a hotel.

Soon after Lieutenant Henry's return to the front, the Austrians bombard the Italian army and eventually break through the lines near the town of Caporetto.

Soon they spot German soldiers in the distance. One driver is shot to death by fellow

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