What does the initial stage of their relationship reveal about the effect of the war upon their lives?

Lieutenant Frederic Henry, a young American ambulance driver with the Italian army during World War I, takes a winter leave from the front. When he returns, he meets and quickly falls in love with Catherine Barkley, an English nurse's aide in the town's British hospital. She mourns the death of her fiancé from the war last year, and she eagerly enters the pleasurable diversion the game of love offers with Henry. Henry, too, is revived by love after the horror he has seen of war. Here we see that love becomes a diversion from war rather than "love" for its own sake. The courtship is involved but it lacks clarity outside the context of war. The war provides a certain freedom of the moment rather than a commitment for the future.