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A farewell to arms

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Title: A farewell to arms

Author: Ernest Hemingway

Release date: January 24, 2025 [eBook #75201]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 1929

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75201

Credits: Cindy Beyer & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A FAREWELL TO ARMS ***

[Cover Illustration]

BOOKS BY ERNEST HEMINGWAY

A FAREWELL TO ARMS
MEN WITHOUT WOMEN
THE SUN ALSO RISES
THE TORRENTS OF SPRING
IN OUR TIME

A FAREWELL TO ARMS

By
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1929

Printed in the United States of America

[Illustration]

TO
G. A. PFEIFFER

BOOK 1

CHAPTER I

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that
looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of
the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and
the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops
went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered
the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the
leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the
road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and
the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for
the leaves.

The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees
and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was
fighting in the mountains and at night we could see the flashes from the
artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightning, but the nights were
cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming.

Sometimes in the dark we heard the troops marching under the window and
guns going past pulled by motor-tractors. There was much traffic at
night and many mules on the roads with boxes of ammunition on each side
of their pack-saddles and gray motor-trucks that carried men, and other
trucks with loads covered with canvas that moved slower in the traffic.
There were big guns too that passed in the day drawn by tractors, the
long barrels of the guns covered with green branches and green leafy
branches and vines laid over the tractors. To the north we could look
across a valley and see a forest of chestnut trees and behind it another
mountain on this side of the river. There was fighting for that mountain
too, but it was not successful, and in the fall when the rains came the
leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and
the trunks black with rain. The vineyards were thin and bare-branched
too and all the country wet and brown and dead with the autumn. There
were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain and the trucks
splashed mud on the road and the troops were muddy and wet in their
capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather
cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with
the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward
under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though
they were six months gone with child.

There were small gray motor-cars that passed going very fast; usually
there was an officer on the seat with the driver and more officers in
the back seat. They splashed more mud than the camions even and if one
of the officers in the back was very small and sitting between two
generals, he himself so small that you could not see his face but only
the top of his cap and his narrow back, and if the car went especially
fast it was probably the King. He lived in Udine and came out in this
way nearly every day to see how things were going, and things went very
badly.

At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain
came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand
died of it in the army.

CHAPTER II

The next year there were many victories. The mountain that was beyond
the valley and the hillside where the chestnut forest grew was captured
and there were victories beyond the plain on the plateau to the south
and we crossed the river in August and lived in a house in Gorizia that
had a fountain and many thick shady trees in a walled garden and a
wistaria vine purple on the side of the house. Now the fighting was in
the next mountains beyond and was not a mile away. The town was very
nice and our house was very fine. The river ran behind us and the town
had been captured very handsomely but the mountains beyond it could not
be taken and I was very glad the Austrians seemed to want to come back
to the town some time, if the war should end, because they did not
bombard it to destroy it but only a little in a military way. People
lived on in it and there were hospitals and cafés and artillery up side
streets and two bawdy houses, one for troops and one for officers, and
with the end of the summer, the cool nights, the fighting in the
mountains beyond the town, the shell-marked iron of the railway bridge,
the smashed tunnel by the river where the fighting had been, the trees
around the square and the long avenue of trees that led to the square;
these with there being girls in the town, the King passing in his motor
car, sometimes now seeing his face and little long necked body and gray
beard like a goat's chin tuft; all these with the sudden interiors of
houses that had lost a wall through shelling, with plaster and rubble in
their gardens and sometimes in the street, and the whole thing going
well on the Carso made the fall very different from the last fall when
we had been in the country. The war was changed too.

The forest of oak trees on the mountain beyond the town was gone. The
forest had been green in the summer when we had come into the town but
now there were the stumps and the broken trunks and the ground torn up,
and one day at the end of the fall when I was out where the oak forest
had been I saw a cloud coming over the mountain. It came very fast and
the sun went a dull yellow and then everything was gray and the sky was
covered and the cloud came on down the mountain and suddenly we were in
it and it was snow. The snow slanted across the wind, the bare ground
was covered, the stumps of trees projected, there was snow on the guns
and there were paths in the snow going back to the latrines behind
trenches.

Later, below in the town, I watched t

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