Reynolds, Michael.  "Going Back." In Bloom, Harold, ed.  Ernest
    Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.  New York: Chelsea House, 1987: 49-60.

    In 1915, Hemingway was a 16-year-old in Michigan; though the opening of the novel is set in Gorizia with Lt. Henry residing there and observing troop movements.  The entire action of the novel ended before the author actually set foot in Italy.  In June, 1918, Hemingway did serve in the American Red Cross Ambulance service, but it was dull and Hemingway volunteered for canteen work closer to the Austrian front, where he was wounded in July, but he never returned to the active war (49-50).

Many readers see such details about the places in the novel that they assume the author must have been there in person (50-51), but Hemingway had developed a method as early as 1922 of dealing with places he had never been (52), of making it all up (53), based on "the experiences of others treated as his own" (54).  Hemingway knew about and praised the methods of Stephen Crane, who had never seen battle, and certainly not a Civil War battle when he wrote The Red Badge of Courage (54-55) because he interned with Ford Madox Ford, who knew Crane in England and later lectured about the writer.  He read history books, talked to veterans, and used pictures--especially the photos of Matthew Brady (55).  So did Hemingway for his novel.  "Hard facts create an immediate sense of authenticity," Reynolds reminds us (56).  This novel, however, is the only one set on ground he had not seen personally (56).  In his earlier novels, using characters based on real people had got him into trouble (58), so in this novel he avoided doing so, instead compositing characters for the most part, particularly for Catherine Barkley (58).  As he told his publisher, Maxwell Perkins, the best segments and aspects of the novel were totally fiction (59).

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