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One of the central issues on which critics of A Farewell to Arms focus is the vexed relationship between love and war, a response Hemingway invites with his punningly ambiguous title. Certainly Frederic Henry rejects the arms of war in his “separate peace” (243), an act of desertion validated by the confused and murderous actions of the Italian officers in the army he serves. Yet Frederic is also pulled from the arms of war by the arms of love in the person of Catherine Barkley. The two flee the war arena—she abandoning her post as nurse in the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan—for a safe retreat in neutral Switzerland, an idyllic haven that protects them from wartime reality. That Frederic must ultimately say farewell to the arms of love when Catherine dies in childbirth is tragedy of a different order from his first farewell—existential or perhaps ontological tragedy, the tragedy of life itself, not the sociopolitical tragedy of war.

Some nine years later Hemingway revisits this same vexed relationship in his 1938 play The Fifth Column, whose setting is the Spanish Civil War. Whereas Frederic Henry ultimately chooses love over war, Philip Rawlings chooses war over love, declaring, “We’re in for fifty years of undeclared wars and I’ve signed up for the duration” (80). He rejects his lover Dorothy Bridges, along with her fantasy of sharing “a long, happy, quiet life at some place like

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Saint-Tropez or, you know, some place like Saint-Tropez was”(23)—that is, an idyllic haven outside of time. Instead, he embraces the wartime reality, declaiming, “Where I go now, I go alone, or with others who go there for the same reason I go” (83). Loyalty to his comrades in arms supersedes loyalty to his lover, whom he pointedly stops calling “comrade” in a politically and emotionally significant act. Not a separate peace but voluntary enlistment “for the duration” is the fate Philip Rawlings chooses.

Why love over war in the novel and war over love in the play? Independent critical discussions of the two works point to several explanations, including differing composition circumstances, differing perceptions of the wars’ meanings, and differing characterizations of the female protagonists. These three reasons deserve brief discussion here because they point to an additional issue that has not been discussed in this context, that of the increasing breakdown of the boundary between the foundational western categories of “home front” and “war front.” This breakdown had two causes. One cause was the increasing penetration of the home front by so-called total war, which was enabled by changing military technology and a concomitant changing ethic of war. Another cause was the increasing penetration of the war front by women in various professional roles—a change less abstract, more personalized, than the first. As home front and war front became increasingly difficult to distinguish, confusion and anger inevitably resulted.

Hemingway’s significance as a cultural icon reveals itself in his own confusion at this breakdown of boundaries. On the one hand, he repeatedly expressed anger at the impersonal forces of technology that characterize the “strange new kind of war” represented in all his war fiction (“New Kind” 267). On the other hand, he also expressed anger at the strange new kind of woman who was invading the male war front, displacing his anger onto the personal behavior of individual women and expressing it dramatically by his characterization of his female protagonists. He thereby transformed geopolitical war into what he called “the great unending battle between men and women” (Baker 481–82). As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar brilliantly explore in their No Man’s Land trilogy, the sexual struggle initiated by the suffrage movement of the mid-nineteenth century became “a key theme in late Victorian literature and ultimately a shaping element in modernist and post-modernist literature. . . [such that] writers increasingly represented women’s unprecedented invasion of the public sphere as a battle of the sexes”

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(1:4). Hemingway thus valorizes in Farewell the war nurse who abandons her military hospital for life as a wife at home in neutral Switzerland, whereas he repudiates in Fifth Column the female war correspondent who refuses to leave the war front of Madrid when her lover directs her to do so. Not one war but two—the geopolitical and the sexual—are thus fought in the pages of Hemingway’s works.

The composition circumstances of the novel and play are markedly different. Hemingway wrote Farewell some ten years after World War I had ended in victory for the Allies. The years between the war’s conclusion and the novel’s composition provided time for reflection on the war’s meaning. Hemingway’s post-war novel offered the opportunity to call the war itself into question—in effect, to argue against the war while not endangering the chance of victory. In contrast, Hemingway wrote Fifth Column while living in war-ravaged Madrid at the Hotel Florida, some fifteen blocks from the front. Ronald Fraser sums up many first-person accounts in his oral history by noting that Madrid was “the only city where you could go to the front by tram” (455), citing an interview subject as remembering that conductors called out “To the front—five céntimos”(265). Peter Wyden notes that secret-police chief Alexander Orlov once told war correspondent Louis Fischer of The Nation,“There is no front. Madrid is the front” (202). The Hotel Florida was shelled over thirty times in the fall of 1937 while Hemingway was drafting his play, during the second and longest of his four wartime visits to Spain (completing a clean typescript manuscript titled A Play in Madrid on 23 November 1937, and revising the manuscript in Key West in the summer of 1938, between his third and fourth visits to Spain). Published in October 1938, the play was largely a propaganda vehicle designed to encourage American sympathy for the Republican cause, which might result in a change in American policy that would allow the sale of war material to Republican Spain. It was thus necessary that Philip Rawlings choose war over love, else the play would have seemed to support the American neutrality policy.

Perceptions about World War I and the Spanish Civil War were also markedly different. The causes of World War I were murky, the conduct of the war disconcerting because traditional ways of battle had been rendered obsolete, and the meaning of the Allied victory in this war of attrition was unclear. The only hope was that this was the war to end all wars—ironic, given that the Treaty of Versailles in effect set up the circumstances that led to World War II. Speaking for an entire generation, Hemingway’s Frederic

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Henry famously says, “I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it” (185)—in short, a slaughter without meaning or higher purpose.2 As such, Frederic Henry is justified in making his famous “separate peace” (243).

In contrast, the Spanish Civil War was “a most passionate war” (Thomas 616), indeed a cause célèbre perceived as a fight for the soul of Spain and ultimately that of the world. Those who sympathized with the democratically elected Republican government of Spain regarded the war as a conflict between freedom and tyranny, offering an opportunity to stop fascism (most immediately in the person of General Franco and the rebellious Spanish Army, which was supported with material and men by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy). A war to determine who would govern Spain—in this regard “a conflict small enough to be comprehensible to individuals” (Thomas 616)—it was more largely an ideological war, a war of competing belief sys- tems. The Loyalists who supported the Republican government included a complicated coalition of Spanish and foreign communists, socialists, syndicalists, anarchists, and democratic liberals, ultimately subsumed into the Popular Front.3 Moreover, both sides regarded the war as important not only in itself and for what it represented, but also for what it presaged—either the containment of fascism, or its expansion and a resultant world war. Everyone involved knew that the war’s outcome would profoundly matter to the course of history. To make a “separate peace” from the Spanish Civil War, as indeed England and France in effect had done via the Non-Intervention Pact and America via a revision of the Neutrality Act, would unwittingly encourage the triumph of fascism, the destruction unleashed by another world war, and the possible end of political freedom and self-determination in the modern world. In these terms, it is unthinkable that Philip Rawlings not commit himself to the fight “for the duration.”

The attributes of the female protagonists of Hemingway’s two works also differ significantly, especially insofar as they reflect Hemingway’s attitudes toward the actual women on whom they were based. Catherine Barkley is based on Agnes von Kurowsky, Hemingway’s first love, a World War I nurse he asked to marry him during his convalescence under her care, who jilted him for an Italian artillery officer after Hemingway’s return to the American home front. The lyric passages of A Farewell to Arms, especially in Switzer- land, reflect Hemingway’s love for Agnes, just as Catherine’s death (however

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tragic to Frederic) reflects Hemingway’s anger at Agnes’s betrayal, as does the bitter portrait of Luz in “A Very Short Story” (1925).

Dorothy Bridges is based on Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s lover during the Spanish Civil War and later his third wife—once Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer had divorced, a long process whose conclusion was often in doubt, Pauline insistent on maintaining the marriage, and Hemingway wavering between his wife and his lover. The few lyric passages of The Fifth Column occur at night, when Philip expresses his love for Dorothy and asks her to marry him, a reflection of Hemingway’s own intensifying love for Martha. The daytime exchanges between Philip and Dorothy are marked by argu- ments and Philip’s contempt, reflecting Hemingway’s anger at Martha for threatening his domestic life with Pauline and their sons. In a telling hand- written letter to Martha in June 1943, Hemingway reminisced about their Spanish Civil War love affair and their subsequent marriage, about which she had hesitated, to his terrible distress. He thanked her for “interven[ing]” in his life, but he first wrote “interf” (that is, interfering) and then marked out this slip of the pen that unconsciously revealed his continuing ambiva- lence.4

Though the characterization of Dorothy Bridges is typically read only in relation to Hemingway’s personal and psychological struggle concerning Martha Gellhorn, it is also a reflection of Hemingway’s complicated attitude toward the appropriate role for women at a time of radical change that was simultaneously independent of and precipitated by modern warfare. While the “New Woman” in America and England had been demanding more political, economic, and social rights since the nineteenth century, the role women played in modern wars—notably World War I, when women were first encouraged to do “male” jobs to free men for the battle front—exacerbated this sense of entitlement. If not on the surface of the text, at the subtextual level Dorothy Bridges threatens a set of foundational categories more or less operative in the western world since the chivalric code of the Middle Ages—that is, the home front in binary opposition to the battle front. Love is for the home front, war is for the battle front. Women are for the home front, men for the battle front. Women are idealized because they symbolize the stakes of male combat, while men are realized by their role as combatants. According to this binary opposition, the role of “wife” is at the home front, away from the intensity of battle, which enables male self-realization while also encouraging an inevitable live-for-the-moment mentality that socially

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and morally justifies brief sexual liaisons. Melissa Herbert notes that “the military is a ‘gendered institution’ because soldiering has been about not only war, but being ‘a man’” (7), and she argues that “much of the strategy [designed to establish one’s status as soldier] seems to rely on being that which is not feminine”(8). To be a soldier in this sense is to not be a woman. Historically, the visible roles for women in the male arena of war have been limited. Always, of course, and especially in civil wars (“the best war for a writer,” Hemingway claims in Green Hills of Africa [71]), women have been war victims, often victims of rape, whereby the woman’s body is regarded as enemy property to be looted, or as enemy military terrain to be invaded and conquered, as is Maria’s body by the Nationalist soldiers in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Women are even at risk from their own army, whose soldiers may regard use of the female body as rightful recompense for placing their own bodies on the line. Marion Merriman, the wife of Robert Merriman of the Lincoln Battalion, who was the figure on whom Hemingway based Robert Jordan, recounts her own rape by a Lincoln Battalion officer in her 1986 memoir, American Commander in Spain. Having traveled to Spain to nurse her husband after his first wounding, she chose to remain with him in the only way possible, International Brigade officials allowing her to enlist “if [she] would promise to never, under any circumstances, try to get to the front lines” (78). One of only two American women actually in the Lincoln Battalion (women comprising a majority of the staff of the twenty-five-or-so American medical units), she was assigned largely to office duties, at one point making an official trip with two officers under her husband’s command. She recounts her thoughts after one of her fellow officers raped her in the night: