Ernest Hemingway · 1929 · exile

Ernest Hemingway's 1929 novel, from his own months as an ambulance driver on the Italian front. Frederic Henry is wounded on the Isonzo, falls in love with a nurse in Milan, and is caught in the retreat from Caporetto - where the Italian military police are shooting their own officers at a bridge, and he goes into the river and stops being a soldier.

1. 1
   Gorizia

   The Italian front on the Isonzo, where Frederic Henry drives ambulances, drinks with Rinaldi and the priest, and starts an affair with an English nurse without meaning much by it.

2. 2
   Plava

   North on the Isonzo, and a trench mortar comes in while the drivers are eating cold pasta in a dugout - Passini killed beside him and Henry's knee smashed, which is where the novel actually begins.

3. 3
   Milan

   The American hospital, an operation on the knee, and a summer of the races and cold drinks and Catherine on night duty - and by the time he is sent back to the front she is three months pregnant.

4. 4
   Caporetto

   October 1917, and the Austrians and Germans break the line. The retreat is the finest thing Hemingway wrote about war: a column stopped in mud, side roads that lead nowhere, and one of his own drivers shot for refusing to dig.

5. 5
   The Tagliamento

   At the bridge the carabinieri are pulling officers out of the column, questioning them for a minute and shooting them by the riverbank - and Henry breaks and goes into the river, which ends his war.

6. 6
   Milan

   Across the Venetian plain on foot and into Milan under a tarpaulin on a gun-truck, in civilian clothes borrowed from a friend - and at the hospital he learns the English nurses have gone to Stresa.

7. 7
   Stresa

   Lake Maggiore, billiards with Count Greffi, and a few days of something like peace - until the barman wakes him at three in the morning to say the police are coming for him at daylight.

8. 8
   Brissago

   Thirty-five kilometres up the lake in an open boat through a storm, rowing all night with an umbrella for a sail - and arrested by Swiss customs in the morning, and released as art students wanting winter sport.

9. 9
   Montreux

   A wooden house in the mountains above the lake, and the happiest months of both their lives - which Hemingway lets run just long enough for the reader to start believing it.

10. 10
    Lausanne

    They come down to the city for the birth. The baby is strangled by the cord, Catherine haemorrhages, and Henry walks back to the hotel in the rain - which is the last paragraph, and there is nothing after it.