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. Once again, she and Lieutenant Henry declare their love for each other, after which they have sex in the hospital bed. Henry is transported by train to an American hospital in Milan.Ĭatherine Barkley arrives at the hospital, to which she has been transferred. While the drivers are eating, the Austrian bombardment wounds Henry in the leg and kills one of the other drivers. One night, Lieutenant Henry and his fellow ambulance-drivers settle into a dugout across the river from the enemy troops. When Henry again visits Catherine, she tells him that she loves him and asks whether he loves her.

On his second visit to the British hospital, they kiss. 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. 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. Henry supervises a group of Italian ambulance drivers.Īfter a wintertime leave spent touring the country, Lieutenant Henry returns to the captured town at the front where his unit lives. 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. Allied with Britain, France, and Russia against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany, Italy is responsible for preventing the Austro-Hungarian forces from assisting the Germans on the war's western front, and Russia in the east. Weather Symbolism in A Farewell to ArmsĪ Farewell to Arms begins in the Alps around the frontier between Italy and present-day Slovenia.

Ernest hemingway a farewell to arms