A Farewell to Arms

“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.” 

In the opening chapter, Hemingway describes how the marching soldiers create dust that rises and envelops the entire landscape. Everything is covered in dust, including the tree trunks. Hemingway uses the word “and” seven times in this one sentence. He refuses to use subordinate clauses, which would end up emphasizing certain details and de-emphasizing other details. Instead, his reliance on the word “and” flattens the language so that everything becomes equal. The dust on the trees is just as important as the soldiers marching onward, and one gets the sense that this dust will linger and last longer than some of the soldiers. In fact, it will not go away, and when the rains come, it will be transformed into mud. 

“People lived on it and there were hospitals and cafes and artillery up side streets and two bawdy house, 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.” 

Chapter 2 takes place a year later, and the Italian victories against the Austrians have made this year much better than the dismal scene in Chapter 1, when 7,000 men died from cholera alone. However, despite the victories, the markings of war are everywhere, as architecture bears the scars of wars, such as the “shell-marked” bridge and the missing walls of homes, and the military has taken over the “very nice” town (Gorizia). Hemingway’s flattened