For Whom the Bell Tolls

Hemingway tells the story of the Spanish Civil War just like how Tolstoy tell his, in showing us powerful vignettes of real people’s lives. The novel focuses on Robert Jordan, a stoic, capable American who fought on behalf of the Soviet-backed Republicans against the fascist Nationalists. Robert’s quest is to blow up a key bridge, and in the few short days when the novel takes place, Hemingway narrates the whole gamut of possible human experience – from blood-boiling bullbaiting to sadistic mass execution to making passionate love in the open air. The realism of the book hits hard, and I can’t say I completely ingested all the emotional weight or meaning of the book because of my lack of firsthand experience, but even without that experience, the human story behind the premise of war stood tall on its own.

One of the most visceral stories told in the book was a mass execution – staged by a man named Pablo to kill all of his fascist neighbors in a town. Pablo set up the killing so that two lines of civilians with maces formed a gauntlet, and at the end of the gauntlet, a sheer cliff for the person to throw themselves over to die. I can’t do justice to the scene but it’s so brutalizing, not in a gory kind of way, but rather it was full of the calculating, methodical sadism that only humans are capable of. The civilian mob starts hesitant – they hated the fascists, but to bludgeon them with maces while they ran terrified to the cliff… and then one person starts, and then all at once, everyone becomes complicit and the dominos fall. The mob humiliated the gauntlet walkers, their own neighbors. As the crowd grew rowdy and drunken, they grew crueler, and eventually charged into the town hall and maimed all the rest of the rounded-up fascists, the rest of their neighbors. I don’t think the scene was just violent for its own sake, but rather a convincing way to bring brutality to people who don’t know brutality – the scene didn’t feel like reading a book, more like being trapped in an unreal nightmare: illusory, but still so terrifyingly gripping.