Farewell To Arms War

A Farewell to Arms Thomas Paine once said, “The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph” (“Thomas Paine Quotes”). Thomas Paine’s attitude in this quote is reminiscent of the way many people before World War I romanticized and glorified war. After the devastation and brutality of World War I, many people started to understand that war was not at all glorious. One of those people was Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s classic novel, A Farewell to Arms, which is based on his own war experience, made his feelings about war very apparent. A Farewell to Arms is about an American ambulance driver named Lieutenant Henry, who while serving in the Italian military meets an English nurse and falls in love. Throughout A Farewell to Arms, war and

At the beginning, Lieutenant Henry seemed to be very shallow and emotionally immature. He was a very heavy drinker and frequently visited the whorehouses. Later in the book, soon after Lieutenant Henry came back to the war front after being injured, there was a confusing large-scale retreat. During the confusion of the retreat, Lieutenant Henry ended up heartlessly shooting at fellow officers and killing one because they refused to help him after getting stuck on some back roads. Then, as they continued to retreat, they met a large group of people on a bridge where they were pulling out officers without their troops and were killing them. They pulled Henry, but instead of accepting his fate he escaped into the river. He then decided to fully desert the war. Hemingway’s point is that war is a horrible and confusing and that can be seen through Henry’s emotions and experiences during the war. While Henry is at the war front, he seems to be very emotionally detached. Hemingway is trying to say that in order to get through such a horrible experience such as war, people must become shallow. Henry reflects on this later in the book in his thoughts, “If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them” (Hemingway 249). In a way, Hemingway is trying to show that war brings out the absolute worst in