Summary: Chapter XXX
Crossing a bridge, Henry sees a German staff car crossing
another bridge nearby. Aymo soon spots a heavily armed bicycle troop.
Fearing capture, Henry and the men decide to avoid the main road, which
the retreat follows, and head for the smaller secondary roads. They
start down an embankment and are shot at. A bullet hits Aymo and
kills him almost instantly. Realizing that their friend has been shot
by their own troops—the Italian rear guard, which is afraid of everything—Henry
and his men realize that they are in more danger than they would
be facing the enemy. They look for a place to hide until dark and
come across an abandoned farmhouse.
Henry camps out in the hayloft, while Piani and Bonello
search for food. Piani returns alone and reports that Bonello, fearing
death, left the farm in hopes of being taken prisoner and thereby
escaping death. The men hide in the barn until nightfall and then
set out to rejoin the Italians. They come upon a large gathering
of soldiers where officers are being separated and interrogated
for the “treachery” that led to an Italian defeat. Suddenly, two
men from the battle police seize hold of Henry. He watches as a
lieutenant colonel is led away, questioned, and shot to death. Sensing
the opportunity to escape, Henry runs for the water and dives in.
As he swims away he hears shots, but as he gains distance from shore,
the sounds of gunfire fade.
Summary: Chapter XXXI
After floating in the cold river water for what seems
to him a very long time, Henry climbs out, removes from his shirt
the stars that identify him as an officer, and counts his money.
He crosses the Venetian plain that day and jumps aboard a military
train that evening. He freezes when a young soldier with a helmet
that is too large for his head spots him, but the boy assumes that
Henry belongs on the train and does nothing. Henry then hides in
a car stocked with guns. While crawling under a huge canvas tarp,
he cuts his head open. He waits for the blood to coagulate so that
he can pick the dried blood off of his forehead. He does not want
to be conspicuous when he gets out.
Summary: Chapter XXXII
Exhausted, lying under the canvas, Henry thinks about
how well the knee upon which Dr. Valentini operated has held up
under the circumstances. He reflects that his thoughts still belong
to him, and thinks about Catherine, though he realizes that thinking
about her without promise of seeing her might drive him crazy. Thoughts
of loss plague him. Without his men, an army to which to return,
or the friends that he remembers, like the priest and Rinaldi, Henry
feels that the war is over for him. “It was not my show anymore,”
he ruminates. Soon, though, the needs of his body distract him from these
thoughts. He needs to eat, drink, and sleep with Catherine, whom
he dreams of taking away to a safe place.
Analysis: Chapters XXX–XXXII
In these last chapters of Book Three, the already delicate
world of the Italian military falls apart. This unraveling begins
in Chapter XXIX with the crumbling of Henry’s normally
calm exterior, which leads him to shoot the engineering sergeant.
The world descends even further into chaos: the panicky Italian
rear guard begins shooting at its own men; Bonello, fearing death,
abandons Henry and Piani; and the neat columns
that characterized the retreat at its beginning have broken into
a terrifying mob. Battle police randomly pull officers from the columns
of retreating men and execute them on sight. Hemingway expertly
evokes the horror, confusion, and irrationality of war.
Chapter XXX presents two types of characters as a counterpoint to
Henry. The zealous patriotism of the moblike battle police stands in
contrast to Henry’s distrust of noble ideals. Their rhetoric of
God, blood, and soil, in its senselessness and cruelty, makes Henry’s
skepticism appear saintly. The character of the officer who is executed
is more complex. The grim and sobering tone of his question—“Have you
ever been in a retreat?”—resonates with Henry’s realistic outlook.
The officer, however, is resigned to his defeat. He neither flees nor
protests his execution. Still, he tries to salvage a quiet dignity
by asking not to be pestered with stupid questions before he is
shot. Henry, however, is neither defeated nor interested in saving
face. Because he doesn’t believe in the sacredness of war or victory,
he cannot muster a response comparable to the officer’s. He flees
not out of cowardice but out of an unwillingness to make a sacrifice
for a cause that, to him, seems meaningless. In the context of total
irrationality, self-preservation seems to him as valid a choice
as any.
