Marching to the Front, many will soon die, as is suggested by the dust they raise. All of this bears down upon the following three sentences late in the novel. Frederic and Catherine are in their final hotel room, in Lausanne, waiting to go to the hospital where she will die in childbirth. Across the street, which sloped steeply, was another hotel with a similar wall and garden. I looked out at the rain falling in the fountain of the garden.
Every word here counts.
We all inhabit such hotel rooms. From its very first sentence this novel has worked to achieve this passage. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain. This novel puts war in the foreground, but its real subject is our nakedness before death. We are all finally outside the window, like the soldiers of the opening.