In Chapter XXVII of "A Farewell to Arms," as he converses with Gino who "was born a patriot," Henry becomes

embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain.  We had heard them....and heard them...shouted...and read them....but I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing were done with the meat but bury it.

These abstract words have become meaningless to Lt. Henry who has seen and heard them used in connection with a war that he begins to perceive as senseless. Since these abstract words no longer have meaning and are "obscene besides the names of villages," etc., Henry says that only concrete nouns such as the name of places have "dignity."  For, these nouns have not been sullied by being used to dignify killing and destruction.

This remark foreshadows Henry's later reflection in Chapter XXXII in which concludes that he will abandon all dreams of glory and bid his "farewell to arms" and no longer fight for a country that is not his own:

It was no point of honor....I was through....That life was over....I was not made to think.  I was made to eat.

Here, also, some of the nihilistic philosophy of Hemingway comes through as his character thinks that only the basic desires of man make any sense.  The rest is senseless in a world in which man vs. man and calls it "glory."

Very similar to many thinkers that emerged from the horrific shadow of World War I, Hemingway uses Henry as a character to raise serious and probing questions into the nature of humanity in the wake of the first World War.  The First World War raised some unsettling questions about the values the war generation had inherited. People began to question the validity of their national leaders and institutions which seemed to have led directly to such an incredible loss of life and economic devastation.  In a setting where the established orders of politics, religion, ethics, and nearly every other setting failed to explain why the war was started, how the cruelty in the war was so prevalent, how so little seemed to make sense in its aftermath, Henry is driven to raise unsettling questions about unsettling times.  Frederic represents, for Hemingway, this questioning of what is man that he can cause such awful destruction and human suffering.  Throughout the novel, Henry reveals that each teacher's moral order or lessons imparted could not explain the awful reality of war and the agonizing reality that it could not be explained with any sort of traditionalist moral or ethical order.  In the quote, human dignity has vanished from this world of war, cruelty, and sadism.  There can be no dignity when war takes away our most sacred and honored values of justice, fairness, and truth.  Even the places we once believed in have lost their dignity as a result of what one witnesses in war.  Henry being an outsider can speak to that better than anyone else.  The people and their places have lost all hope in this world where "the falcon cannot hear the falconer", to quote Yeats in the same setting.  In such a setting, where people have dishonored themselves through the hell of war, only "the names of the places have dignity."