A
Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
CHAPTER I
In the late summer of
that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the
plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and
boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving
and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the
dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too
were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching
along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling
and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the
leaves.
The plain was rich
with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the
mountains were brown and bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night
we could see the flashes from
the artillery. In the
dark it was like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not
the feeling of a storm coming.
Sometimes in the dark
we heard the troops marching under the window and guns going past pulled by
motor- tractors. There was much traffic at night and many mules on the roads
with boxes of ammunition on each
side of their
pack-saddles and gray motor-trucks that carried men, and other trucks with
loads covered with canvas that moved slower in the traffic. There were big guns
too that passed in the day drawn by tractors, the long barrels of the guns
covered with green branches and green leafy branches and vines laid over the
tractors. To the north we could look across a valley and see a forest of
chestnut trees and behind it another mountain on this side of the river. There
was fighting for that mountain too, but it was not successful, and in the fall
when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the
branches were bare and the trunks black with rain. The vineyards were thin and
bare- branched too and all the country wet and brown and dead with the autumn.
There were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain and the trucks
splashed
mud on the road and
the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under
their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray
leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges,
bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as
though they were six months gone with child.
There were small gray
motor-cars that passed going very fast ; usually there was an officer on the
seat with the driver and more officers in the back seat. They splashed more mud
than the camions even and if one of
the officers in the
back was very small and sitting between two generals, he himself so small that
you could not see his face but only the top of his cap and his narrow back, and
if the car went especially fast it was
probably the King. He
lived in Udine and came out in this way nearly every day to see how things were
going, and things went very badly.
At the start of the
winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was
checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.
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