Earnest Hemingway wrote and published this novel in 1929. This passage includes
the first chapter.
A Farewell to Arms
CHAPTER I
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a
village that looked across the river and the plain to the
mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and
boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was
5 clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops
went by the house and down the road and the dust they
raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the
trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and
we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust
10 rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the
soldiers marching and afterwards the road bare and white
except for the leaves.
The plain was rich with crops; there were many
orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains
15 were brown and bare. There was fighting in the moun-
tains and at night we could see the flashes from the
artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightning, but
the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a
storm coming.
20 Sometimes in the dark we heard the troops marching
under the window and guns going past pulled by motor-
tractors. There was much traffic at night and many mules
on the roads with boxes of ammunition on each side of
their pack-saddles and grey motor-trucks that carried men,
25 and other trucks with loads covered with canvas that
moved slower in the traffic. There were big guns too that
passed in the day drawn by tractors, the long barrels of
the guns covered with green branches and green leafy
branches and vines laid over the tractors. To the north
30 we could look across a valley and see a forest of chestnut
trees and behind it another mountain on this side of the
river. There was fighting for that mountain too, but it
was not successful, and in the fall when the rains came
the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches
35 were bare and the trunks black with rain. The vineyards
were thin and bare-branched too and all the country wet
and brown and dead with the autumn. There were mists
over the river and clouds on the mountain and the trucks
splashed mud on the roads and the troops were muddy and
40 wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under their
capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the
belts, grey leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of
thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the
capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as
45 though they were six months gone with child.
There were small grey motor-cars that passed going
very fast; usually there was an officer on the seat with the
driver and more officers in the back seat. They splashed
more mud than the camions even and if one of the officers
50 in the back was very small and sitting between two
generals, he himself so small that you could not see his
face but only the top of his cap and his narrow back, and if
the car went especially fast it was probably the King.
He lived in Udine and came out in this way nearly every
55 day to see how things were going, and things went very
badly.
At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and
with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and
in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner, 1957
The narrator’s attitude toward the main subject of the passage can best be described as:
Elimination Tool
Select one answer
A
Concerned and Insistent
B
Indifferent and Disinterested
C
Distant and Disengaged
D
Curious and Cautious
A - Concerned and Insistent
The narrator's detailed descriptions of the war-torn landscape, the effects of the fighting, and the presence of troops and artillery suggest a sense of concern and urgency. The narrator is also insistent on conveying the harsh realities of war and its impact on the surroundings.