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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
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place like 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 su- persedes 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.