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Completed	30 November 2007
Title	A Farewell to Arms
Author	Ernest Hemingway
Published	1929
Quote	"I ate the piece of cheese and took a swallow of wine. Through the other noise I heard a cough, then came the chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh----then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died. Then I floated, and instead of going on I felt myself slide back. I breathed and I was back. The ground was torn up and in front of my head there was a splintered beam of wood. In the jolt of my head I heard somebody crying. I thought somebody was screaming. I tried to move but I could not move. I heard the machine-guns and rifles firing across the river and all along the river. There was a great splashing and I saw the star-shells go up and burst and float whitely and rocks going up and heard the bombs, all this in a moment, and then I heard close to me some one saying, "Mama Mia. Oh, mama Mia." I pulled and twisted and got my legs loose finally and turned around and touched him. It was Passini and when I touched him he screamed. His legs were toward me and I saw in the dark and the light that they were both smashed above the knee. One leg was gone and the other was held by tendons and part of the trouser and the stump twitched and jerked as though it were not connected. He bit his arm and moaned, "Oh mama mia, mama Mia," then, "Dio te salve, Maria. Dio te salve, Maria. Oh Jesus shoot me Christ shoot me mama mia mama mia oh purest lovely Mary shoot me. Stop it. Stop it. Oh Jesus lovely Mary stop it. Oh oh oh oh," then choking, "Mama mama mia." Then he was quiet, biting his arm, the stump of his leg twitching. "Porta feriti" I shouted holding my hands cupped. "Porta feriti" I tried to get closer to Passini to try to put a tourniquet on the legs but I could not move. I tried again and my legs moved a little. I could pull backward along with my arms and elbows. Passini was quiet now. I sat beside him, undid my tunic and tried to rip the tail of my shirt. It would not rip and I bit the edge of the cloth to start it. Then I thought of his puttees. I had on wool stockings but Passini wore puttees. All the drivers wore puttees but Passini had only one leg. I unwound the puttee and while I was doing it I saw there was no need to try and make a tourniquet because he was dead already. I made sure he was dead. There were three others to locate. I sat up straight and as I did so something inside my head moved like the weights on a doll's eyes and it hit me inside in back of my eyeballs. My legs felt warm and wet and my shoes were wet and warm inside. I knew that I was hit and leaned over and put my hand on my knee. My knee wasn't there. My hand went in and my knee was down on my shin. I wiped my hand on my shirt and another floating light came very slowly down and I looked at my leg and was very afraid. Oh, God, I said, get me out of here. I knew, however, that there had been three others. There were four drivers. Passini was dead. That left three. Some one took hold of me under the arms and somebody else lifted my legs."
Review	I love this book. I love war stories. And I love Hemingway. For me, reading Hemingway is like sitting down to my favorite meal. I just want to devour it. A Farewell to Arms is such a great, classic World War One book. I loved it. Hemingway has this way of simplifying things, so that the reading is accessible and digestible. Apparently, due to his background and training in journalism, he intentionally wrote at a sixth grade level. Which, also apparently, is the level at which newspapers are written. Which means that the writing is quick and to the point. Case in point, read the following passage. "The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war...The Germans won the victories. By God they were soldiers. The old Hun was a soldier. But they were cooked too. We were all cooked. I asked about Russia. He said they were cooked already. I'd soon see they were cooked. Then the Austrians were cooked too. If they got some Hun divisions they could do it. Did he think they would attack this fall? Of course they would. The Italians were cooked. Everybody knew they were cooked. The old Hun would come down through the Trentino and cut the railway at Vicenza and then where would the Italians be? They tried that in 'sixteen, I said. Not with Germans. Yes, I said. But they probably wouldn't do that, he said. It was too simple. They'd try something complicated and get royally cooked. I had to go, I said. I had to get back to the hospital. 'Good-by,' he said. Then, cheerily, 'Every sort of luck.' There was a great contrast between his world pessimism and personal cheeriness." Another thing I liked about the book was the embedded history and geography lesson. The book was especially interesting to me as I recall my Italian grandparents telling stories about growing up in the Alps, north of the Vicenza of the above passage. Nonna and Nonno would talk of how the war affected them. Nonna would tell the tale about how her mother (my great-grandmother, who I never met) would keep a backpack behind the door, all packed and ready to go with food and clothing, should they need to flee their home in an instant. In their home, they could hear the fighting. And up behind their house were the trenches. That part of Northern Italy was hit hard by both World War One and World War Two. People still talk about it. War history is still very much alive in Northern Italy, as it should be. And today, you can hike up and see the trenches. I plan on doing just that, when I visit Italy with my family next summer. I can't wait. This book was interesting from a historical point of view, but it was also a story of love in wartime. Which is something that Hemingway does best. The main first-person character meets Catherine, a nurse, and they start a fling. As you do. It is, after all, wartime, and all bets are off during wartime. You do what you have to do to get through the day. Apparently. Catherine eventually gets knocked up. As you do. And they decide, for various reasons, to go to Switzerland, and Catherine says, "If we're in Switzerland let's have a big breakfast. They have wonderful rolls and butter and jam in Switzerland." Catherine is amazingly calm and somewhat of an airhead throughout the book. She doesn't give her beau any grief, though. She is, therefore, his perfect companion for their new life in Switzerland, as described as follows. "That fall the snow came very late. We lived in a brown wooden house in the pine trees on the side of the mountains and at night there was frost so that there was thin ice over the water in the two pitchers on the dresser in the morning. Mrs. Guttingen came into the room early in the morning to shut the windows and started a fire in the tall porcelain stove. The pine wood crackled and sparked and then the fire roared in the stove and the second time Mrs. Guttingen came into the room she brought big chunks of wood for the fire and a pitcher of hot water. When the room was warm she brought in breakfast. Sitting up in bed eating breakfast we could see the lake and the mountains across the lake on the French side. There was snow on the tops of the mountains and the lake was a gray steel-blue." How beautiful is that scene? I would like to go there. I love the mountains and the snow, especially if you're indoors and someone delivers breakfast in bed. Of course, there's a sudden, sad ending to the novel. That's another thing Hemingway does so well. But I won't complain. I loved this book that much.

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