The setting for this story is the Italo Austrian front during WW1 where Frederick Henry, an American studying architecture in Rome, decides to enlist as a lieutenant in the Italian ambulance service. Sent North to the front line in the mountains, he and his drivers ferry wounded personnel to field hospitals for emergency treatment before they are moved to Milan.
Whilst in Milan he meets an English nurse working at a hospital and forms a relationship with her. Later he is wounded and sent to the hospital where she works and, while convalescing, continues the relationship before returning to the front where the Austrians, now bolstered by some German divisions, launch an offensive and the Italians are forced to retreat. During the retreat he is suspected of being a deserter and threatened with being shot but he escapes and makes his way to Milan where he and the nurse, who is pregnant, escape to Switzerland. That isn't the end of the story but to avoid spoilers I have given only a broad outline of the plot.
There are a number of things that should be mentioned in respect of the writing and first there is the question of dialogue that is often fey and repetitious. Secondly, as one might expect from a war novel by Hemingway, it is resolutely masculine with frequent references among the men to whoring and drinking, so that the machismo lies too heavily on the page.
The relationship between the male and female lead protagonists is unbelievable as they are calling each other darling almost immediately after meeting.
That being said, there are some vivid descriptions of the landscape in which the story unfolds and the misery of the Italian retreat, and whatever faults are to be found with the writing, Hemingway can suddenly hit the reader with a passage such as this:
I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain.
We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by bill posters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything.
Abstract words such as glory, honour, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
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