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The gap between humanity\'s noble words and its ignoble deeds was never more apparent than during World War I. For this reason the war serves brilliantly as the setting for Hemingway\'s novel of love and disillusionment, A Farewell to Arms.
The war began with the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife. Soon sides were drawn--France, Great Britain, Italy, Russia, and (three years later) the United States against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey. Poets and propagandists screamed of the necessity of sending young men to fight. Though the major powers had spent years and millions of dollars building their arsenals, both sides seemed strangely confident that victory would be quick and painless. No one was prepared for the enormous brutality of modern warfare: Catherine Barkley was undoubtedly not the only person who hoped and half-believed that all that could happen to her loved one would be a picturesque, minor wound, perhaps a saber cut.
Instead, her fiance was blown \"all to bits.\" And far from ending within weeks, the war dragged on for four years. The human cost was enormous: Great Britain saw three quarters of a million of her men die; Germany and France a million each; Russia perhaps as many as all the other combatants combined. Even the United States, late to enter the war, lost eighty-eight thousand. For this reason, the \"war-disgust\" Frederic Henry mentions to the priest was felt not just by him but by an entire generation. In the face of such brutality, values weaken. Life becomes \"a dirty trick.\"
Hemingway\'s choice of Italy as his setting reinforces his theme. One reason for its effectiveness is that Italy was where he served as an ambulance driver: he knew its terrain, and its military history, very well. But Italy is also a setting that further demonstrates the ironies of war. To most of the world, France was where the real war was taking place; even today our memories of World War I are drawn mainly from the Western front: the Somme, Belleau Wood, Verdun. Italy was, as Henry says, \"the picturesque front.\" Yet in this picturesque land men are being slaughtered by the tens of thousands.
To Hemingway the war was a botch, cheerfully begun by men with romantic notions of glory and honor, but fought with ruthless, mechanized cruelty. And to the end, as soldiers groveled in foul trenches their leaders, safely away from the front, told tales of valor, patriotism, and duty. Small wonder that many who fought became cynical and disillusioned.
What better time and place could serve for Frederic Henry\'s farewell to arms?
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