Death in Spain

(2 of 2)

These Spaniards know they may be killed. Jordan senses it when he hears the orders. The general senses it when he gives them. So does Pablo, the pig-eyed, cunning guerrilla leader, when Jordan asks his help. So does Pilar, his big, ugly, wise, foul-mouthed wife. Pilar is a gypsy: she reads doom in Jordan's palm. She smelt death-to-come on the last dynamiter who went through, and he was killed. In one of the book's terrible, eloquent passages ("All right, Ingls. Learn. . . ") the woman with her ancient wisdom actually conveys in words what the smell of death-to-come is like.

The greatness of this book is the greatness of these people's triumph over their foreknowledge of death-to-come if they blow up the bridge. Jordan goes through with it because he is intellectually convinced that he is helping to defeat fascism. Pilar goes through with it because she is part of the revolution and cannot stop. Pablo's strong instinct to live makes him desert at the last moment and destroy the detonator. Then he, too, realizes in his own way that "no man is an iland." He cannot stand the loneliness of desertion, returns to help dynamite the bridge.

For Whom the Bell Tolls, unlike other novels of the Spanish Civil War, is told not in terms of the heroics and dubious politics ot the International Brigades, but as a simple human struggle of the Spanish people.

Leftists may claim the book, but they will not like realistic descriptions of the cynical G. P. U. agents, or of the Spanish peasants liquidating their local bourgeoisie: "And I saw the priest with his skirts tucked up scrambling over a bench and those after him were chopping at him with the sickles and the reaping hooks . . . and there was another scream and another scream and I saw two men chopping into his back with sickles . . . ." However he may fancy himself as a leftist sympathizer, as a great and sensitive artist Ernest Hemingway is well over the Red rash. The bell in this book tolls for all mankind.