Melvin Aponte
1/30/18
Honors American Literature

In “A Farewell to Arms”, the main protagonist Lt. Frederick Henry, an american, is working in the Italian army as a paramedic on the front lines. The story begins with Henry being introduced to a girl by the name of Catherine Barkley by his dear friend Rinaldi. Henry really doesn’t want anything serious with Catherine, although as time passes, their feelings for each other begin to grow. Soon, Henry is sent to the front lines and gets injured by a mortar shell explosion. He is sent to receive medical care in a hospital in Milan where, coincidentally, Catherine is also being sent to. During the summer that Henry is there recuperating, he and Catherine spend much more time together and begin to get even closer. During that summer, they fell so in love …show more content…
Once he was all better after the jaundice, they essentially kicked him out of the hospital and sent him back to the front lines.
From there, things would be relatively calm for Henry, at least until, “... the Austrians had broken through the twenty-seventh army corps up toward Caporetto”(187). This attack caused for the orders for them to retreat and evacuate the Bainsizza, which was where Henry was at the time. During the retreat, Henry and three other drivers had to take the ambulances full of hospital equipment to Pordenone. On the way to Udine, Henry and the drivers were stuck in traffic for possibly a day or two. When they got tired of waiting in traffic, they all decided to take a side road in order to get away from the traffic and hopefully get to eat something on the way to Udine. On the side road they took, the cars had become stuck in mud about ten kilometres from Udine and they could not get them out no matter how hard they tried. After the first attempt , two sergeants that they had picked up on the way decided to give up and started to walk away from the group rather