Frederic Henry, an American serving as a lieutenant in the Italian army's ambulance corps during the First World War, meets Catherine Barkley, an English nurse's aide, while on leave near the front. Wounded soon after by a mortar shell on the Isonzo front, he is sent to recover in a hospital in Milan, where Catherine is posted; over the following months their relationship deepens into a wartime love affair, and Catherine tells him she is pregnant.
Sent back to the front, Henry is caught up in the Italian army's disastrous retreat after the Battle of Caporetto and is nearly executed by his own side's military police in the chaotic aftermath. He deserts, reunites with Catherine, and the two row a small boat across Lake Maggiore by night to reach neutral Switzerland, where they spend the following months waiting for the birth of their child in quiet isolation.
Ernest Hemingway drew on his own experience as a Red Cross ambulance driver wounded on the Italian front to write the novel, published in 1929. Written in his characteristically spare, understated prose, it follows the private intensity of Henry and Catherine's relationship against the impersonal machinery of a war that neither of them can affect or escape, and ends without the sentimental resolution its early chapters might promise.