Hemingway's mock Iliad

The back of our Scribner edition of Farewell to Arms starts out by calling the book, "The best American novel to emerge from World War I." I was thinking about what this quote meant in comparison to all the horror associated with the Great War.

War used to be romanticized in novels, such as the Homer's Iliad and Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. However, WWI shattered many of the idealized perceptions of heroism and courage. Looking at FTA's text, there are many instances in which Hemingway uses images to create somewhat of a mock epic. For example, Hemingway pens in Chapter 1, "The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves." In what appears to be a run-on sentence, Hemingway's use of the the conjunction "and" creates a bond between the leaves and the soldiers. Not only does this paint a picture of the large quantity of soldiers, but it ties these troops to the landscape as well. In other words, one could say that the number of troops was as great as the number of leaves in the countryside. This is actually one technique Hemingway copies from Homer's Iliad. Homer, too, compares troop masses to leaves. However, the backdrop of the bloody World War I gives the image a new sarcastic meaning. Whereas Homer intended to create a beautiful image with this juxtaposition, Hemingway creates an ironic image that foreshadows the pointless waste of life in the novel.