Book Description

A Farewell to Arms – Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American medic, is serving in the Italian Army during the First World War. It is the start of winter when a Cholera epidemic kills thousands of soldiers. Frederic has a brief visit to Gorizia where he meets with other army fellows and the priest. His friend, Surgeon Rinaldi, takes him to a British hospital where Frederic is introduced to Catherine Barkley, an English nurse. However, over the course of the war Henry's duty as a soldier begins to interfere with his love with Catherine. Situations get so murky and tense that Henry is forced to becomea deserter. Will the two ever meet again or will the war be the end of everything? For Whom the Bell Tolls– The novel tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer attached to a Republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. As a dynamiter, he is assigned to blow up a bridge during an attack on the city of Segovia. It was published just after the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), whose general lines were well known at the time. It assumes the reader knows that the war was between the government of the Second Spanish Republic, which many foreigners went to Spain to help and which was supported by the Soviet Union, and the Nationalist faction, which was supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. It was commonly viewed as the dress rehearsal for the Second World War.