The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), fought between General Franco’s Nationalist forces and the Loyalist/Republican faction, was a pivotal conflict shaping Spain’s political landscape but also having a profound impact on the arts, given the involvement of an array of writers, artists, and intellectuals who were compelled to take a stance on this cause célèbre. Perhaps most famously, Picasso’s Guernica was a powerful anti-war painting made in response to the bombing of the small Basque town of Guernica by Nazi Germany in support of Franco. George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia was a memoir of his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Miguel Hernández spent most of the war in prison and wrote a collection of poems now considered one of the finest pieces of Spanish poetry of the 20th century.
In 1936 Ernest Hemingway travelled to Spain to cover the war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. He had already fallen in love with Spain over a decade earlier when he attended the famous bull run at Pamplona, but now he moved from being a cultural observer to an active participant in Spanish history. Three years later he completed his great novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Set in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains during a Republican guerrilla operation, the novel follows Robert Jordan, a young American demolitions expert, in the International Brigades, assigned to blow up a bridge during the Segovia Offensive.
Broad in scope, the novel deals movingly with themes of loyalty and courage, of love and defeat, of identity and the complexities of moral action. “If the function of a writer is to reveal reality,” his editor Maxwell Perkins wrote, “no one ever so completely performed it.” The novel was published in 1940, just after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and is regarded as one of Hemingway’s best works, along with The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea. It stands as one of the best war novels of all time, and here are its opening lines:
He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.
“Is that the mill?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I do not remember it.”
“It was built since you were here. The old mill is farther down; much below the pass.”
He spread the photostated military map out on the forest floor and looked at it carefully. The old man looked over his shoulder. He was a short and solid old man in a black peasant’s smock and gray iron-stiff trousers and he wore rope-soled shoes. He was breathing heavily from the climb and his hand rested on one of the two heavy packs they had been carrying.
“Then you cannot see the bridge from here.”
“No,” the old man said. “This is the easy country of the pass where the stream flows gently. Below, where the road turns out of sight in the trees, it drops suddenly and there is a steep gorge — ”
“I remember.”
“Across this gorge is the bridge.”
“And where are their posts?”
“There is a post at the mill that you see there.”
The young man, who was studying the country, took his glasses from the pocket of his faded, khaki flannel shirt, wiped the lenses with a handkerchief, screwed the eyepieces around until the boards of the mill showed suddenly clearly and he saw the wooden bench beside the door; the huge pile of sawdust that rose behind the open shed where the circular saw was, and a stretch of the flume that brought the logs down from the mountainside on the other bank of the stream. The stream showed clear and smooth-looking in the glasses and, below the curl of the falling water, the spray from the dam was blowing in the wind.
“There is no sentry.”
“There is smoke coming from the millhouse,” the old man said. “There are also clothes hanging on a line.”
“I see them but I do not see any sentry.”
“Perhaps he is in the shade,” the old man explained. “It is hot there now. He would be in the shadow at the end we do not see.”
“Probably. Where is the next post?”
“Below the bridge. It is at the roadmender’s hut at kilometer five from the top of the pass.”
“How many men are here?” He pointed at the mill.
“Perhaps four and a corporal.”
“And below?”
“More. I will find out.”
“And at the bridge?”
“Always two. One at each end.”
“We will need a certain number of men,” he said. “How many men can you get?”
“I can bring as many men as you wish,” the old man said. “There are many men now here in the hills.”
“How many?”
“There are more than a hundred. But they are in small bands. How many men will you need?”
“I will let you know when we have studied the bridge.”
“Do you wish to study it now?”
“No. Now I wish to go to where we will hide this explosive until it is time. I would like to have it hidden in utmost security at a distance no greater than half an hour from the bridge, if that is possible.”
“That is simple,” the old man said. “From where we are going, it will all be downhill to the bridge. But now we must climb a little in seriousness to get there. Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” the young man said. “But we will eat later. How are you called? I have forgotten.” It was a bad sign to him that he had forgotten.
“Anselmo,” the old man said. “I am called Anselmo and I come from Barco de Avila. Let me help you with that pack.”
