This is one of the best romance novels I have ever read. I love all the romance between Fred and Catherine, it's so sweet and simple. Everyone can relate to Fred when he's all alone on the train and all he wants to think about is Catherine. Fred is an ambulance driver and Catherine is a nurse, their love was kind of forbidden/tragic but not exactly because sometimes they didn't know when they would see eachother again. They were runing away together, loving on eachother, then the ending just ruined it. Catherine and the baby died, leaving poor Fred with no one, and Hemmingway doesn't reflect at all on it or anything. All Fred says is "There's nothing to say.", then he walks out of the hospital to the hotel in the rain. It'a a really depressing end to such an outsatnding love, and I suppse that it was just meant for the reader to reflect on it themselves. Just to observe, that nothing lasts forever. In earlier chapters, I read about how sweet and nice their love for eachother was, and I suspected that she was going to die or that something really bad was going to happen to them. I felt so much for Fred at the end, I wish they both died.

Apart from death and love, this book was during World War 1. Fred was usually on the "front" (which I don't think Hemmingway explains very well), and they were in trenches. Apart from seeing Catherine, Fred was usually on the field, with Rinaldi, or with some other people (like the Preist, officers, old friends) drinking various liquids and ranting about how terrible the war is, telling political jokes, which side will surrender, etc. One things that really annoyed me when reading this was that, literally every other page they drink some sort of wine/beer substance. I love the story, but Hemmingway went overboard with all the characters drinking all the time. Hemmingway had personal experience in this war and being wounded, so he was very good at describinbg the experience of getting "shelled" and having to stay in the hospital.

I also enjoyed how descriptive Hemmingway got with the scenery, it was very detailed and I could imagine the mountains in Switzerland, the river, Italy, etc. Though sometimes Hemminway left certain details in the dark, like when Fred and Catherine decided to stay in Switzerland and find a place to live, he gave no details or prior knowledge, you just have to assume that happened since the second sentence in chapter XXXVII says,"We lived in a brown wooden house in the pine trees on the side of the mountain...". Hemmingway hardly ever described the physical appearance of the characters, he mostly just wrote about their actions and dialougue. So those little details were also left in the dark. The characters' personalities were well written though. I escpecially enjoyed Fred's roommate Rinaldi because he was like the comic relief of the whole story. There's like this terrible war going on, and Rinaldi tries to cheer up Fred by messing with him (though their inside jokes and games also aren't explained very well), he even kisses Fred on the cheek (that's a cultural thing in Italy) and he tells him that he loves him as a brother, it's hilarious. I didn't really like Ferguson because she was acting like Catherine's overprotective mom, and she wasn't really cheeful like Rinaldi. I liked Catherine bacause she was smart and cheerful, and she said really funny things when she was drunk, both of them sort of whispered sweet nothings to eachother. I didn't like Fred because he impregnated Catherine, he was nice but he didn't think things through all the time. Though I do admire how much courage and strength he had when he was running away from officers who were going to shoot him, and when he was caught in the middle of the battlefield.

I rate this book 4/5 stars just because Catherine and the baby died at the end. Everything else was perfect, this is such an awesome hopeless romantic sort of book. There were a few details left unspoken, but the whole story and it's theme of everything not lasting forever was spectacular. I enjoyed this book so much, it inspired me to do background research on World War 1 just to know what everyone was talking about when they used terms such as "carabineri", "anarchist","socialist",etc. I've learned so much from reading this novel, I recommend it to anyone who loves war and romance.