Upon the narrator's return to the front, what he earlier referred to as the "permanent rain" of winter is over for the time being, and in its place are warm sunshine and spring greenery. The absence here of the novel's primary symbol of death would seem to bode well. And yet the snow, the only thing that truly halts the fighting each year, has melted. Battle is therefore inevitable: "Next week the war starts again," Lieutenant Rinaldi reports.
Rinaldi is a humanist whose sensual values will be contrasted with the spiritual values of the priest. Rinaldi's relationship with the narrator is warm and easy and of a piece with Hemingway's treatment of male friendship in other books and stories. Miss Barkley, who will prove to be the heroine of A Farewell to Arms, is introduced almost as an aside. This is consistent with Hemingway's valuing of understatement, and it is also a realistic touch, as we often meet the most important people in our lives without great fanfare, even by accident.
The narrator's talk with the priest reiterates the mountains-plains dichotomy. Our narrator knows he should have traveled to Abruzzi, a "place where the roads were frozen and hard as iron, where it was clear and cold and dry and the snow was dry and powdery and hare-tracks in the snow and the peasants took off their hats and called you Lord and there was good hunting." Instead he has visited bars and whorehouses in the cities of the lowlands. For now, the narrator's strategy vis-à-vis the war specifically and the unpleasantness of the world in general could be referred to as obliteration, which he achieves via alcohol and sex. He is spiritually lost for the time being, and much of A Farewell to Arms will trace his movement toward self-realization.
