UDK 820(73) Hemingway E. 7 A farewell to the arms .06 
HEMINGWAY IN THE SOCA VALLEY 
Bruce Mclver 
Hemingway is a very popular writer in Slovenia. One of my students 
in Ljubljana pointed out a very well known passage lin A Farewell to Arms 
about two refugee girls Frederic Henry and his driver, Aymo, pick up in 
Gorizia (Gorica) during the retreat from Caporetto (Kobarid). What interested 
many of my students about the episode was .that the two girls seem to speak 
a dialect that neither Aymo, who is Italiian, nor Frederic, who is :l.iluent in 
Italian,' understands. My students belie¥ed that these girls are speaking Slov­
enian. The only Italian they seem to understand are the words in Italian for 
sexual intercourse,! which makes them very upset, and virgin and sister, which 
calm them down. It is very likely that two S1ovenian girls would know a little 
Italian, particularly if they came from Gorizia, which at the ,time of the first 
world war was predominantly Slovene.
2 
I thought the question interesting enough to warrant a little research. 
I discovered, surprlis:ingly, that Hemingway did not take part in the retreat 
from Caporetto.3 At the 'time of ,the retreat (October 23-27, 1917), he was 
a cub reporter on the Kansas City Star. He did not arrive on the Italian front 
as a Red Cmss ambulance driver until June of 1918, long after the Caporetto 
debacle. He was, moreover, stationed west of Gorizia at Schio and Fossalta 
di Piave, where he indeed was wounded, like his counterpart Frederic Henry 
in the novel. Lastly, Hemingway never even visited the scene of the retreat, 
not Caporetto, not Pla¥e, not the Bainsizza plateau, not the Isonzo River 
(the Soca), not even Gorizia. How then, I thought, could these girls in the 
novel be modeled on ones Hemingway might have met during the campaign? 
Much less, how could he know t:hey might be Slovene girls (even if he had 
met them) since he never came within 100 kilometers of Gorizia either during 
the war or after it when he visited the Fossalta di Piave to show his wife 
Hadley where he was wounded?
4 
1 
Max Perkins, Hemingway's editor at Scribners, for proprietary reasons, left 
a blank space in the text where the word would appear. A Farewell to Arms, New 
York (1929), p. 196. 
' In 1915, 62% of the population of the Gorizia-Gradisca region (or 155,000 
people) was Slovene. Stephen Clissold, ed., A Short History of Yugoslavia, Cam­
bridge (1966), p. 154. 
' Ironically, Hemingway may have taken his description of Caporetto from 
a tourist guidebook - >>I remember it as a little white town with a campanile in 
a valley. It was a clean little town and there was a fine fountain in the square« 
(A Farewell to Arms, p. 164). The current edition of Baedeker's Yugoslavia (1985) 
wrongly implies that Hemingway took part in the fighting there. 
4 
Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemzngway, A Life Story, New York (1969), p. 94. 
2 Acta 
17 

In the novel Heming\vay mentions many eastern europeans - Magyars, 
Bosnians, Montenegrians, and Croauians - but he does not mention any 
Slovenians. The supreme commander of the forces on the Soca was an Ortho­
dox Serb long in the service of the Habsburgs.
5 
It was according to Hemingway 
the fierce fighting Croatrians who attacked the Second Army on the Bainsizza 
in the morning of October 24th. The Croatians were fighting on the Austrian 
side. Were there Slovenian.s among these Croatians, and, I wondered, if not, 
were Slovenians fighting on the Austrian side? These questions seemed rele­
vant to the episode of the two Slovene girls, for what would Slovenian ref­
ugees be doing retreating from the advancing Austrian armies if Slovenians 
were fighting on their side? Perhaps they preferred to be on the Italian side. 
Even though the Habsburgs held sway in the region before the war, the Ital­
ians were assigned the region in the Treaty of London (Apr:il 26, 1915). Perhaps 
the Slovenes had more economic affinities with the Italians than with their 
Austrian neighbors to the north? In fact I discovered that they very likely 
preferred not to fight in either army, being caught up in a desire fo·r autonomy 
and self determination.6 So in a very real way it did make sense that Slov­
eni.an refugees would be swept up in the retreat from Caporetto out of the 
Soca VaHey and onto the plains of Italy. Where else could they go? 
Still I had not answered the question of the probability of the refugee 
girls being Slovene. I thought another approach would be better. How could 
these girls be Italian? In the novel they cannot make themselves understood 
either to an Italian or to an American fluent in Italian. It seemed reasonable 
to assume, I thought, that no Italian di:alects are so far apart that the only 
common words are virgin and sister. In ail.l likelihood, however, foreign girls, 
that is, Slovene Catholic girls, would know these words in Italian if they 
knew any at all. Common sense, then, dictates the probability that the girls 
are not ItaLian but Slovene. 
Of course, the final question is somewhat absurd. If they are Slovene 
girls, did Hemingway know it? Frederic Henry says, »The girl who looked at 
me said something in a dialect I could not understand a word of.« Henry, 
who is fluent, cannot understand her at all. Aymo, who is a native speaker, 
simply says, »I can't understand them.« Aymo doesn't say that the girls are 
speaking 1in dialect. Hemingway, unlike Frederic Henry, was not fluent in 
Italian. Anyone he might have met who did not speak any recognizable Italian 
might well have to him been speaking in a dialect or in a foreign language. 
Another point, then, occurred to me. Hemingway's description of the 
Bainsizza and Gorizia is extremely accurate for one who was not present at 
the retreat from Caporetto. He is in fact so accurate that many war scholars 
are surprised to hear that he was not present at the time of the retreat or 
afterwards. He did, however, do a great deal of research both when he re­
turned home after the war and when he began to write the novel a decade 
later. He was fascinated by military history, battle accounts, and topographic 
maps.7 His accounts, for example, of the rainy weather during the retreat 
and of the behavior of the Second Army are uncannily accurate (Reynolds, 
112ff). His descriptions of Piave and Gorizia are based rin fact upon his careful 
5 
Clissold, p. 161. 
6 
But see John A. Arnez, Slovenia in European Affairs, New York (1958), 
p. 64-65. 
' Michael S. Reynolds has made this point abundantly clear in his Hemingway's 
First War: The Making of A Farewell to Arms, Princeton (1976). 
18 

reading of contour maps (Reynolds, p. 140). Thus, it is not surpmsmg that 
his representation of the retreat is convincing from the standpoint of military 
history and topographic description. Why, then, could it not be accurate 
in terms of linguistic and ethnic descriptions? 
It is quite possible that, in one of the accounts of the retreat from Capo­
retto that Hemingway read, he found a description of Slovenian refugees 
among whom we might well believe were the two girls separated from both 
friends and family. It is, however, a peculiar characteristJic of his fiction that 
he blends events as they actua:lly occurred with events as they might have 
occurred, that is, with events as he imagined them. In this respect, the two 
girls, vulnerable, a mixture of fear and trust, function accurately in the imagi­
native context or£ the novel. They are refugees, thousands of whom got caught 
up 1in the welter of the retreat, along with war weary soldiers, deserters, and 
looters. It is in reflecting on these girls, on their innocence and vulnerability, 
that Frederic Henry begins to dream lyrically of his lover, Catherine, imag­
ining her in his arms aga;in.
8 
These girls are beautifu:l, young, and innocent. They are the victims of 
a war not of their making. They do not deserve to lose that innocence, as 
many Slovene girls did in the wake of the war; they deserve to be at peace 
and in control of their own lives. I began to see why these girls were impor­
tant to my students, and indeed to many Slovenians, for they represented 
the age old role of victim that Slovenia and the Slovene people had played 
for their entire history from the eleventh century onward, forever vulnerable 
to another country',s mercy or cruelty. 
Why, then, were these two Slovene girls - for I shall so call them - so 
important to my students? I now think that the episode of the novel in which 
they appear pays an unwitlling tribute to the bare facts of the reality of war. 
The girls fear the worst, but Frederic treats them well, feeding them and 
giving them a ride in his truck for a little while, and later sends them off 
with a little money to search for friends and family among the refugees. 
Hemingway may not have known what Slovenes suffered in the debacle of 
Caporetto, but he did know the rape, pillage, and carnage that unjust victims 
of war suffered, and it is perhaps for this reason, and for Hemingway's sym­
pathetic understanding of the conditions of war, that Slovenians embrace 
the two young girls in A Farewell to Arms as their own. 
University of Californ~a at Santa Barbara 
' A Farewell to Arms, p. 197. 
2. 
19