Soliloquy

Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms is a poignant tale of a fierce romance set in the heart of World War I. The fable makes for easy reading with the American legend’s famed iceberg theory of writing making constant entrances into the narrative proper. The book goes along at an easy pace but picks up speed ferociously and leaves you in tatters at the end of it. The reader puts it down misty-eyed and better for the experience of having read such masterly work by a writer who can be spoken of in the same breath as Faulkner, Maugham and Dumas. 

Although it is a love story, it speaks as much, if not more about the horrors of war and its surrounding grimness. Lieutenant Frederick Henry, an American ambulance driver in the Italian army in World War I, develops a romance with Katherine Barkley, an English nurse while working on the front. On the edge of enemy lines in rural Italy, Henry gets wounded and is shipped off to Milan to recuperate. Coincidentally, Barkley too gets posted there and they have a good reunion. Henry gets operated upon his knee which got hit by the mortar shell and strangely gets decorated for his deeds by the army even though he had done no heroic deed to earn it. He is eventually summoned back to the front. 

The sight of the arrival of the Austrians makes the Italian army quiver and they make a hasty retreat. Henry, along with a few others in the Ambulance Corps, while going back, lose their way and end up walking right through the heartland inhabited by the German army. A few of his compadres lose their lives but Henry manages to escape in dramatic conditions on a river across which he has to wade through. From there, a situation arises which forces him to desert the army and leads to the climax of the story in the cold confines of neutral Switzerland, of all places, involving Barkley. 

Hemingway’s gentle storytelling skills are not appreciated enough. He had the ability to tell the most dramatic of tales in such subtle manners that it almost managed to take the juice of the theme. However, readers delving deep can find gentle irony hidden in most of his words in A Farewell To Arms. The perils of war are often spoken about by Henry and his mates in the army and invariably all of them denounce it. The title has two distinct meanings but that will become clear to the reader only when they read it. 

The author signed up to fight in World War I when he was just nineteen years old in 1919. Out of this experience came A Farewell To Arms in 1929. The fact that it makes as much good reading now as it did back then is more than enough tribute to the Nobel Prize winner. Although classified as a classic, Hemingway’s language in this book is lucid and extremely vivid. A Farewell To Arms is a winner.