SOURCE: A review of A Farewell to Arms, in Hemingway: The Critical Heritage, edited by Jeffrey Meyers, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, pp. 134–35.

In the following review, originally published in 1929, Hartley states that A Farewell to Arms is particularly interesting because of its account of war on the Italian front.

Mr. Hemingway is a novelist of the expatriated. Fiesta showed us a group of Americans and one Englishwoman being violently idle, first in Paris and then in Spain. They went to bull-fights, they made love, they drank. Above all, they drank. They were not congenial company even in a book, but they knew how to get the utmost out of their emotions, and though bored and desperate, they were seldom dull.

The same characters, or others like them, reappear in A Farewell to Arms. There is an English woman serving as a nurse in the Italian Red Cross, there is...