Doom and enlightenment in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls

Throughout this crusade of mine to read these classics, every now and then I am completely blown away by a book, and such is the case by Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. A true masterpiece, it is a tremendous novel about the devastation of war and the tenacity of man.

The book follows Robert Jordan, an American volunteer fighting on the side of the Republicans and Communists against Franco’s fascist regime during the Spanish Civil War. Jordan is an expert dynamiter, and has been given orders to blow up a bridge on a key route just before a renewed assault. Jordan is sent to the area alone, and is to team up with the local guerrilla soldiers fighting in the hills to succeed in his mission. It is not a short book, coming in at nearly 500 pages in the version I read, but I’ll try to sum it up succinctly.

Jordan falls in with a group lead by a man named Pablo, who made a name for himself earlier in the war but who has since become complacent, unwilling to take big risks. Jordan recognizes him as a coward who will most likely hurt the outcome of the mission, but has no choice but to go along with him for the moment. In Pablo’s group are several fighters and a gypsy, and two women: Pablo’s girl Pilar, who is the de facto leader of the group because of Pablo’s increasing wariness, and Maria, a beautiful girl rescued from a life of rape and torture during an earlier raid. Jordan is to blow up the bridge in 3 days, and he spends that time learning the land, watching for enemy troop movements on the bridge, and evaluating the members of the troop. Unfortunately, he also falls in love with Maria, and Robert begins to worry how these feelings will affect his mission.

The day before Robert is to carry out the mission, a small band of their group is discovered by the enemy and a gunfight ensues. Not only do none of that group survive, threatening the numbers Robert needed to blow the bridge, but now he has to worry that the enemy is aware of activity in the area. The coward Pablo worries the same, and he attempts to sabotage the mission by stealing the remote detonators and throwing them away. Only just before the attack does Pablo return and fess up, and agree to go through with the attack as planned. The day finally dawns (not without a tense midnight ride by a courier sent by Jordan to give details to the general, telling of their dire straights and cautioning that the overall attack plan may not go well) and Jordan and the group do their jobs. Many are killed in the process, but a handful survive to make the final getaway. In the last dash though, Jordan is cut down too. He is too injured to continue, and after a heartfelt goodbye to Maria, he sets himself with a machine gun to await the enemy cavalry and make a last stand. Jordan reflects on his life, the moments that got him here, and revisits people in his life as he waits for death.

Firstly, the book is masterfully written. Jordan is an American and fluent in Spanish (he was a teacher there before the war), but the dialogue is still written as someone thinking through a second language that is not their native. This style really pulls you into the book, creating an environment in which you feel a part. To go along with the tremendous style, the book is completely engaging from its opening moments. There are side tracks here and there (to tell Pablo’s past story, or the train bombing that brought Maria to the group) but these serve to not only flesh out the main characters, but also these short diversions make you crave more of the current story. And throughout, we feel the impending doom of the mission, an uncertain and increasingly grave, doom-filled event that is approaching with all of the speed of a slow-rolling tank. One of the best books I’ve read in a quite awhile.