The first chapter is short, but it could hardly be more significant, as it is here that Hemingway sets the tone for the entire novel to follow. This is to be a story of war, but one that tells the harsh truth about war rather than glorifying the topic: War is not picturesque and glamorous but rather dull and dangerous in equal measure.
Thus death and dying take center stage in the opening pages of A Farewell to Arms. Although these pages are set in a plain "rich with crops," rain will serve as a symbol of death in this novel. And so our narrator reports that "in the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain. The vineyards were thin and bare-branched too and all the country wet and brown and dead with autumn." The narrator also tells us that the rain was followed by disease. Thus Hemingway makes an explicit, even causal, connection between rain and death. He then foreshadows the novel's tragic conclusion when the soldiers weighed down by weapons and ammunition are said to march "as though they were six months gone with child."
Notice how the war moves past the narrator while he remains stationary, an observer of marching troops, mules, and trucks transporting weapons and supplies, and finally cars carrying officers as high-ranking as generals — even the King himself. Although we don't yet know the circumstances of the narrator's involvement in the conflict, we can tell that he is less than fully engaged in this war. (Later, we will learn that he is Frederic Henry, an American volunteer in the ambulance corps and a second lieutenant in the Italian army.) He is on its periphery, literally and perhaps philosophically as well.
