A Farewell to Arms is Ernest Hemingway's 1929 novel of love and war on the Italian front, and its family tree is deliberately small. Frederic Henry, an American lieutenant driving ambulances for the Italian army, is estranged from the relatives he left at home, and Catherine Barkley, an English V.A.D., has already lost the fiancé she was engaged to for eight years. What stands in for family is the circle that forms around them in wartime: comrades, a chaplain, a protective friend, and in the end a child who does not survive.
At the centre is a fused couple. Frederic meets Catherine through his roommate Rinaldi, a surgeon who teases him as 'baby' and treats him like a younger brother. Catherine begins the affair half-pretending, still grieving the boy killed on the Somme, but after Frederic is wounded by a mortar shell and sent to hospital in Milan the two become lovers in earnest. They call themselves one person and shut out the war, the army and almost everyone else. Helen Ferguson, Catherine's Scottish friend and a nurse, sees the danger plainly and accuses Frederic of ruining her.
The men around Frederic give the tree its other branches. The young priest from the Abruzzi, mocked at the officers' mess, becomes his confidant on love and faith, while Rinaldi grows bitter as the war wears on and fears he has caught syphilis. After the retreat from Caporetto in 1917, Frederic escapes execution by the battle police, deserts, and finds Catherine at Stresa, where the ninety-four-year-old Count Greffi talks with him over billiards like a grandfather. The couple row across Lake Maggiore into Switzerland, and in Lausanne in 1918 their son is stillborn and Catherine dies after hemorrhaging.
Hemingway drew the novel from his own war: he served as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy, was wounded at Fossalta di Piave in July 1918, and fell in love with his nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, in a Milan hospital. This tree follows the published novel, whose characters are fictional. It matters because the book turns family into its argument: the couple try to build a private household against history, and the genogram ends where the story does, with Frederic alone and no line continuing.
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