There Is Nothing Worse Than War

“There is nothing worse than war” – This is a story about war and its effect on human beings. Discuss

It is evident that Ernest Hemingway portrays war, in his novel “A Farewell to Arms”, as the ultimate act of destruction, chaos and turmoil. Through contrasts in the landscapes Hemingway is able to depict the ferocity in which war can tear apart nature and through characters such as Henry and Catherine, Passini and Rinaldi he expresses the futility and devastation of war, how it dehumanises people to the point where death becomes a mere statistic and how war changes all those involved, sometimes for the better, but on the most part for the far worst.

The environment is perhaps the most visual aspect in the novel by which the absolute destructive nature of war is shown. Hemingway is able to depict this bleak imagery by constantly contrasting the beauty of nature to the ravaging force that is the military and war itself. He describes with awe the splendour that is the natural environment but then instantly replaces that with the “instruments of death” tearing through “with ammunition boxes secured under their capes making them look like they were six months gone with child”. He uses this imagery as a way of contrasting the life and fertility of nature with the death and destruction of war. He also shows that for victories to be had in war, everything including the landscape suffers, telling of how the Italian army had seen success in their campaign but how the forests “had been green in the summer...but now there were stumps and the broken trunks and the ground torn up”. The mere fact that the environment is not mentioned as often later on in the novel as it is in the beginning shows that the beauty that once was, is all but gone through the effects of war.

The tragedy and horror of war is then explored by Hemingway in his characters, as is first seen in the ambulance driver Passini but also, later on, through Rinaldi. Passini is one of the few men portrayed in the novel that has a positive outlook on the war and seems to believe that it is stoppable, mentioning his belief that if the Italians stopped fighting the war would be over as the Austrians “[would] get tired and go away”. The irony however is that, just mere hours after expressing this view, he is suddenly and without reason, killed by a trench mortar while eating pasta with his comrades. Rinaldi is another character who war takes its toll upon. While not directly killed in the war effort itself, it is almost implied that through his love of prostitution, he is killed by syphilis. Even before this, the war has already claimed him when he recounts that he finds himself “dry and empty”. This shows the senselessness of war and how it has no pre-requisites on those it affects; it kills or destroys all men equally.

In the novel, war also effects people’s morals and leads them to dehumanise others so that the emotional aspect of loss is removed from the idea of death. This process is most clearly visible when Henry, for no real cause, kills one of the engineering sergeants. This action is almost inexplicable as Henry shoots at the fleeing engineers with ease when in fact they were doing the very same thing he was. The reasoning behind his and many others actions is that, through war, killing has become arbitrary. For everyone in the war effort, there is no difference in taking one life amongst the hundreds of thousands that have already been lost. People are no longer seen as human, which leads to committing murder in the war all the more explainable if not at the very least acceptable. This disregard of the value of life is also shown when Henry, mentioning the cholera epidemic says that “only seven thousand died of it”. This lack of concern for the vale of others is perhaps one of the more grave effects of war as it enables destruction to thrive as emotions are put aside for the efforts of the war itself.

Hemingway looks to not only show how war enables people to dehumanise and devalue life, but also how it changes people’s most basic of attitudes towards it. Catherine Barkley is one such character in which a change in her outlook of life occurs through her experiences of war. Following the death of her fiancé’, Catherine is transformed and led to question her very beliefs in faith and morality. For Catherine it was not so much that her fiancé’ was killed that changed her views of life but rather, the ways in which it happened. He wasn’t injured in a romantic way “with a sabre cut and a bandage” but was in fact “[blown] all to bits”. This mode of dying led Catherine to not only question what life meant but ultimately to disregard it altogether “he was killed and that was the end of it” and form a new belief system with Henry.

In a “Farewell to Arms”, war is shown to be a force that effects every character and even the environment itself detrimentally. The novel demonstrates the impact that it has on those involved emotionally, physically and even mentally and shows that ultimately, war is the catalyst to most turmoil both internal and external in the majority of characters within it.