The context of A Farewell to Arms is not simply the First World War, however, but all the wars that preceded it, as well — or rather, the general notion of war as an opportunity for heroism. Hemingway writes here in the tradition of the greatest war stories ever told: Homer's Iliad and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. And certain techniques of Homer and Tolstoy (for instance, juxtaposing what we might call a "wide-screen" view of battle with "close-ups") were put to extremely effective use in A Farewell to Arms, starting in the book's very first chapter.
But like The Red Badge of Courage, the famous novel of the Civil War written by Stephen Crane (one of Hemingway's favorite American authors), A Farewell to Arms also reacts against the Iliad and War and Peace and many lesser stories of battlefield bravery. It tries to tell the often-ugly truth about war — to honestly depict life during wartime rather than glorifying it. Thus this book contains not just deserters (Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley themselves), but illness and injury and incompetent leadership; it contains profanity (or at least implies it) and prostitution at the front. Frederic Henry's injury is incurred not in valorous combat but while he is eating spaghetti. The retreat from Caporetto disintegrates into sheer anarchy.
A Farewell to Arms is probably the best novel written about World War I (with Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front a strong runner-up), and it bears comparison to the best American books about World War II (Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller among them), Korea (James Salter's The Hunters), and Vietnam (The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien).
