Avalanches were also a constant fear and often intentionally caused by opposing Armies.

In those freezing conditions, a single mortar round could inflict casualties as far as one mile away, as the shards of ice cut through the air like daggers. Soldiers fought against the enemy but also against the hostile weather that could reach as low as -45c during the winter months. The Italian Front could be every bit as deadly a killing field as the Somme or Passchendaele on the Western Front, with some 650,000 casualties inflicted on the Italian Army alone. The Italian Front stretched from more than 400 miles, with much of the fighting being conducted in or around the Alps, with the Italians on one side and the Austro-Hungarian armies on the other. A scene he vividly described years later in his book Death in the Afternoon.Ī few days later he was transferred to Fossalta di Piave on the Italian Front. He arrived in Milan and immediately received a baptism of fire when he was sent to the scene of a bombed munitions factory to collect 'the fragments' of female workers. In 1918, as war raged in Europe, an 18 year old Ernest Hemingway responded to a plea for ambulance drivers on the Italian front, and left for Europe. On its original publication, in 1928, A Farewell to Arms reached the bestseller list and cemented Hemingway’s reputation as a literary heavyweight.Īlthough Hemingway is most commonly associated with Florida’s Key West, Spain and Cuba, the latter serving as inspiration for his Nobel Prize Winning novella The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway also had a long, and sometimes painful, relationship with Italy.

The new edition includes not only the original artwork, but also 47 alternative endings that give new insight to this First World War masterpiece. In the summer of 2012, American Publishing giants Scribner released a revised version of Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel, A Farewell to Arms.

A farewell to arms hemingway