We were listening intently to the audio version of Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms,” and the rental car almost swerved off the road when Frederic Henry got hit by a trench mortar shell. I tried to reconcile the scenery outside the car window with what Hemingway describes in his classic novel, published 90 years ago. The “picturesque front,” his narrator called this area of present-day Slovenia where intense fighting occurred between the Italians and Austro-Hungarian forces during the First World War.
