A Farewell to Arms The novel "A Farewell to Arms" should be classified as a historical romance. Many people in reading this book could interpret this to be a war novel, when in fact it was one of the great romance novels written in its time. When reading this book you notice how every important event of the war is overshadowed by the strong love story behind it. The love story is circled around two people, Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley. Frederic is a young American ambulance driver with the Italian army in World War I. He meets Catherine, a beautiful English nurse, near the front of Italy and