It is also soured by irony: "At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. The chapter sets up a tired mood, with troops trudging incessantly through the mud. The image of fertility is compared to soldiers carrying artillery in front of their bellies. The clear and swift-moving river water is juxtaposed against images of rain and mud as well as slow-moving troops. The thick, green leaves not found on the trees are instead used by the troops to conceal guns in the trucks. There are trees, but they are coated in dust and the leaves fall off early because of it.
In the chapter, war and death are juxtaposed against nature and life. The opening chapter is an important one, introducing many major motifs to be developed later. A few days later, Henry comes back to see Catherine and the two kiss. Rinaldi convinces Henry to visit the hospital with him and Henry finds himself attracted to Catherine. His roommate, Rinaldi, is enamored of a British nurse, Catherine Barkley, at a nearby British hospital. The main action of these first few chapters begins when Henry returns from winter leave in early spring. Henry is currently in the Italian army, at the Italian front during World War I. One of these men is the American Frederic Henry, an ambulance driver. The novel opens with a description of artillery-laden troops marching slowly through the rains of late summer and autumn. The 'arms' in question for Frederic Henry, Hemingway's hero, were those he and some half-million Italian soldiers gladly dropped in the retreat from Caporetto in the autumn of 1917 and those of nurse Catherine Barkley, who dies so suddenly at the end that no farewell is possible. Hemingway took his title from a 16th century poem by George Peele, in which Peele expresses regret to Queen Elizabeth I that he is too old to bear arms for her. On this day in 1929 Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms was published.
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