In Chapter 9 of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Lt. Frederic Henry, the idealistic young American ambulance driver serving in Italy during World War I, learns a valuable lesson regarding the realities of war and the extent to which so many are destroyed in deference to the political machinations of a few. When the United States entered the war in 1917, it had already been raging across Europe for over two years, with the horrors of trench warfare already well-known to the European combatants. The United States, however, sent its troops across the Atlantic with the most altruistic of motivations, but with the least sense of European history and of the brutal realities of modern, increasingly mechanized warfare. Hemingway’s protagonist , Frederic Henry, is the embodiment of American naiveté. He is also the author’s alter ego, only, unlike Hemingway, who had served as an ambulance driver under the aegis of the Red Cross and was categorized as a conscientious objector,...
(The entire section contains 889 words.)
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