The real villain in this story.

Did it ever occur to anyone that Italy was actually the evil party in this forgotten theatre of WWI?

They willingly broke from the triple alliance and turned on their former allies. They could have watched the war from the sidelines, but instead they dove in after some Austrian (now Slovenian) territory. I know that the Germans and Austrians were not always saints in terms of how they conducted themselves during the war, but I have never heard of decimation being practiced in either of those armies. After the war, Italy annexed German speaking territories and repopulated them with Italian speakers. The cost of the war caused many problems for Italian society in the 1920s. A few years later, Mussolini came, and the rest is history.

I wonder about Ernest Hemmingway's choices of causes to fight for. Even the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, infinitely preferable to the Fascist side as it was, was so full of bizarre Marxist and Anarchist thought that it was far from the right side of history. I see why Britain and France did not want to intervene there.

I think that Hemmingway was a conflict tourist, much like these people who are frequently captured and beheaded in The Middle East today. They want stories to tell in bars, maybe a blog or a magazine if they are really lucky. I've been in trouble overseas before myself, and I have no sympathy for those who go out of their way to find it for sake of their own vanity.

That said, this isn't a bad book to read. I also liked the movie. I just wanted to express my thoughts as to who the real villains were here. I thought it best to remind the readers of a few historical facts, so that they might look at this film in a more impartial light.