I've had this on my list of things to read for a while, but was putting it off because the only other Hemingway I've read is The Sun Also Rises, which I did not like at all. But this was such an improvement! It took a while to get going (the second half is much more interesting than the first) and the prose improved, for me, as it went on. I wonder if a person's opinion of Hemingway relies almost entirely on their opinion of his prose. In Sun, I found it painfully bare. Almost stupidly bare. But this time, that prose is in service of a story that I actually care about, which improves it no end, and that stripped-back prose seems genuinely appropriate for all the action (whereas with Sun, it just made a boring story where very little happened even more boring). To be honest, though, the writing here just seems more accomplished all round. There was a line, about halfway through, referring to the war - "...I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it" - and that sentence was the point when I decided I actually like this book.