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The war is coming back to life with the spring. It\'s still only a nuisance, but it has moved closer, further disturbing the natural rhythms of the town. The dewy garden next door is now the site of an artillery battery.
Henry checks his ambulances and finds that while he was gone things went on pretty much as usual. He\'s mildly miffed. Maybe he\'s not as necessary in this war as he thought he\'d be.
He goes to his room. Rinaldi is all shined up, ready to visit Miss Barkley, and he persuades Henry to go along with him. The two officers meet Catherine Barkley and another nurse, Helen Ferguson; Catherine and Henry pair off, Rinaldi talks to Helen.
In conversation Catherine lets you in on some of her past when she answers Henry\'s question about an officer\'s swagger stick she carries. She explains that it belonged to her fiance, who died last year in the Somme. Note the way Hemingway shows you some of the romantic notions held by many people at the start of World War I. Catherine volunteers as a nurse\'s aide, half hoping that her boyfriend will come to her hospital with a picturesque wound, looking like somebody out of an old painting, Instead--and she states it with brutal directness--\"they blew him all to bits.\" The memory of the loss loosens her tongue and she tells Henry how she stayed chaste throughout her engagement but now wishes she hadn\'t.
The chapter closes with some banter about the rivalry between the English and the Scots that Rinaldi finds incomprehensible. Then Rinaldi acknowledges that he\'s lost Catherine to Henry, if indeed he ever had her to lose.
NOTE: HISTORY Today the Somme is just another French place name. To readers in 1929, the year this novel was published (and only ten years after the end of World War I), the Somme was a symbol not only of a horribly mismanaged battle but of an entire mismanaged and brutal war--a war that at its start both sides felt would be quick and painless, but that became an endless bloodbath. One statistic tells it all. In one day, July 1, 1916, the British attackers suffered 60,000 casualties, over 19,000 of them killed, while gaining little ground. The battle went on in that fashion for months.
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