For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a 1940 novel by Ernest Hemingway, widely regarded as one of his masterpieces and a landmark of 20th-century American literature. Set during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, it follows Robert Jordan, an American dynamiter and former Spanish professor volunteering for the Republican forces, who is assigned to blow up a strategic bridge behind Fascist lines in coordination with a major offensive. Drawing from Hemingway's own experiences as a war correspondent in Spain, the story unfolds over a few intense days in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains, where Jordan joins a guerrilla band led by the reluctant Pablo and his formidable wife Pilar. The narrative explores Jordan's deepening love for the traumatized young Maria, his internal conflicts over duty and mortality, and the harsh realities of guerrilla warfare, betrayal, and sacrifice. The title is drawn from John Donne's famous meditation "No man is an island," emphasizing themes of human interconnectedness, the inevitability of death, and the shared human condition. A commercial and critical success, it was adapted into a 1943 film starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, cementing its place as a powerful anti-war tale infused with Hemingway's signature sparse prose, stoic heroism, and "iceberg theory" of writing.

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Transcript

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For whom the Bell Tolls, by Ornus Hemingway, Robert Jordan lay on his belly on the brown pine needles high on the mountain. He was watching the oiled road and the steel bridge over the gorge below. And Selmo lay beside him. The old man was thin with a white beard cut square. He knew the country well as a hunter because he had hunted deer and wild boar in these mountains all his life. It is a good bridge, Jordan said quietly. Yes, and Selmo said, It is the only good road. When it is gone they cannot bring their tanks and their trucks through to help their people in the pass. They watched a little longer. Then they went back through the trees and across a meadow and up a small trail to the cave where Pablo's band was living. There were horses picketed among the trees and smoke coming from the mouth of the cave. It was a warm day in May. Pablo came out of the cave when he heard them coming. He was a big man with a heavy black beard and small eyes that did not smile. He carried a pistol on his belt, and he looked at Jordan without saying anything at first. Jordan explained the orders from General Goals. In three days, when the big offensive started against the fascists near Segovia, he was to blow up this bridge to stop the fascists from sending tanks and more men across the gorge to fight against a Republican attack. He had the explosives and the detonators and the exploder in his saddlebags. He needed the band to help him with the sentries and to cover the retreat after the bridge was gone. Pablo listened, and then he shook his head slowly. It is not good if we blow the bridge the fascists will know we are in these mountains. They will send planes and soldiers, and we will lose everything we have here. We have the horses, and we have our life. It is better not to do it. Pilar came out of the cave then. She was a big, strong woman with wide hips and a strong face that was brown and like a man's in some ways. Her hair was black, and she wore a gold earring. She looked at Jordan, and she liked the way he stood and the way he spoke. Do not pay any attention to what he says, she told Jordan. He is frightened. We will blow the bridge. You will see. We are with you. She turned and called into the cave, and Maria came out carrying a big bow stew. Maria was young, and her hair had been cut very short all over her head with machine. It had been long before when the fascists took the town where she lived. They had killed her father and her mother in front of her, and they had done bad things to her, and then they had cut her hair to shame her. Now the hair was growing back a little, and it was the color of dark honey. She gave the bowl to Jordan, and when their hands touched, she looked at him and smiled with her eyes. Jordan thanked her and he ate the stew. It was good. He watched Maria as she went back into the cave. He thought she was beautiful even with the short hair. That night Jordan and Anselmo went down again to bridge to look at it carefully in the dark. They saw where the steel beams were and how the concrete abutments were made. Jordan decided he would put one pack of explosive on each side of the bridge so that both supports would be destroyed at the same time. They worked out how they would place the charges and how they would get away after. When they came back to the cave, Pablo was sitting by the fire drinking wine from a wineskin. He was drunk and he talked again against blowing the bridge. He said Jordan was an American who did not have to live here after it was done. He said the band would have to run and hide and maybe die because of one bridge. Pilar told him to be quiet. The others listened. There was Augustine who was brave and who swore when he talked. There was Primitivo who was old and quiet. There was Fernando who was very serious and who always spoke correctly. There were the brothers Andres and Illido. And there was Raphael the Gypsy who smiled and who liked to take things that were not his. Raphael said they should kill Pablo while he was drunk and make it look like an accident. But Pilar said no. Pablo was not dangerous yet. He was only talking because he was afraid. Jordan went outside and lay down in his sleeping robe under the trees. It was a clear night and warm. After a while Maria came out quietly and she got into the robe with him. She lay close against him, and they held each other. It was the first time she had been with any man since the things had happened in her town. It was good for Jordan and it was very good for her. They did not talk much at first, then they talked in low voices. Jordan told her that what they had done made them married in the only way that counted now. There was no priest and there was no time but it did not matter. Maria said she had never known anything like this. She said she felt as if she had died and come back to life. They were together again before they slept. In the morning Pilar said they must go up a mountain to see El Sordo, who had another band of gorillas. El Sordo could give them extra men to attack the post at the end of the bridge, and he could have horses ready for when they had to get away fast. Jordan went with Pilar and Maria. They climbed a long, steep trail through rocks and pine trees. On the way, Pilar told him the story of what happened in their town when the war began. Pablo had been the leader of the people then. He had taken all the fascists, the mayor and the priests and the shopkeepers and the civil guards, and locked them in the city hall. Then he made them come out one by one and walk between two long lines of the townspeople, who had flails and clubs and sticks, and reaping hooks. The people beat the fascists as they walked the line. Some of the fascists fell and died right there. Some of them took a long time to die. When they reached the end of the line, Pablo was there with his pistol, and he shot any who were still alive. Then they piled all the bodies in the square in front of City Hall. The smell was very bad, especially after it rained a little and the bodies swelled. Pilar had stood there the whole time because she was Pablo's woman. It may or sicken her stomach to see it and to smell it, but she did not leave. After that day Pablo was never the same man. He drank more wine, and he was afraid inside of what he'd done even though he did not say so. Jordan listened to all of it. He did not say much. He thought about how war made men do things and what those things did to the men afterward. He thought about his own father who one day had taken a pistol and put it in his mouth and killed himself when things got too bad for him stand. Jordan carried that same pistol now and a holster under his jacket. He thought about his grandfather who had fought in the Civil War in America a long time ago. His grandfather had been a brave man who was not afraid to die for what he believed. They reached El Sordo's camp high on the mountain. El Sordo was a short, strong man who could not hear well, because a bomb had burst near him in an earlier fight. He listened to what Jordan told him about the bridge and about the time it had to be blown. El Sordo said he would help. He would send men to take care of the sentries and the machine gun at one end of the bridge. He would have horses ready on the trail for the getaway. But he said it was bad that the bridge had to be blown in the daylight, when the planes could see them on the way back down the mountain Jordan, and Maria stopped in a place where the pine trees were thick and the ground was soft with brown needles. They lay down together there under the trees. It was better than the night before. When it was over Maria said that the earth had moved for her. She had felt the earth turn over, and it was as if they were the only two people, and there was nothing else. Later when they were back with Pilar, Maria told her about it. Pilar nodded and said that it did not happen often in any lifetime, and that when it did happen, it was a thing a person remembered until they died. When they got back to Pablo's camp, Pablo was drunk again. He said bad things about Jordan and about the foreigners who came and gave orders and then went away. He said blowing the bridge would bring death to all of them. Jordan tried to get Pablo angry enough to pull his pistol, so that Jordan could kill him cleanly, but Pablo would not draw. He just sat and drank more wine. Later, when Pablo went outside for a while, the others talked among themselves. They said Pablo was dangerous now and that Jordan should kill him before he did something bad. Jordan said he would do it if he had to. But when Pablo came back inside, he suddenly said that he had changed his mind and that he would help with the bridge after all. The next morning Jordan was up before it was light. He took the rifle with a telescopic sight, and he went to a place where he could watch the road. He saw a single fascist cavalryman riding along the road below, scouting. Jordan aimed carefully and shot the man. The man fell from the horse, and the horse ran away into the trees. It was a necessary thing and Jordan did not feel anything bad about it afterward. Later that day they heard the sound of firing far off on the hill where El Sordo had his camp. Then they heard the planes come over, many planes, and the sound of the bombs falling. The planes came back again and again and dropped more bombs. When the firing stopped, there was no more sound from El Sordo's hill. El Sordo and every man with him were dead, the fascists that surrounded the hill, and then used the planes to kill them all from the air. No one from Pablo's band could have gone to help. It would only have meant that they all died too. Jordan knew then that the fascists had found out about the coming offensive. He sat down with a pencil and paper and wrote a dispatch to General Goals. He told Goals what had happened to El Sordo, and he said that the fascists seemed to know the plans, and that perhaps the attack should be stopped or changed. He gave the dispatch to Andres and told him to take it through the lines of Goals as fast as he could go. Andres started down the mountain. He had many difficulties on the way. At one place a political commissar named Andre Marty stopped him and had him put under arrest because he thought Andres might be a spy or a deserter. It took a long time to get him released. By the time the dispatch finally reached goals, the offensive had already started and it was too late to stop or change anything. That night, after it was dark, Pablo came quietly to where Jordan was lying in his robe with Maria. Pablo took the wooden box with the exploder and the small box with the detonators out of Jordan's saddlebags. He went away with them into the darkness. In the morning when Jordan looked, Pablo was gone and the exploder and the detonators were gone too. Pablo had thrown them into gorge and into the river, because he thought that without them the bridge could not be blown and the fascists would not come after the band to punish them. Jordan was angry when he found out, but he did not shout or curse. He said they would blow the bridge anyway. He still had the two packs of explosive, and he had two hand grenades. He would wire the grenades to the charges so that they could be set off from a distance by pulling on wires. It would work. It would just mean they had to be closer to bridge when it blew, and it would be more dangerous. Pilar was very angry with Pablo. She said that if he ever came back, she would kill him with her own hands. But before it was light Pablo came back to camp. He had five more men with him from another guerrilla band that had been broken up and he had extra horses. He told Jordan and Pilar that he had been weak and afraid and lonely, and that was why he had taken the exploder and thrown it away. He was sorry for it now. He had brought these five men to help with the fighting and with the horses, so that they could all get away faster and safer after the bridge was gone. The five men did not know what Pablo had done with the exploder. They made their plans for the next morning. Pablo would take some of the band to deal with the sentries and a machine gun post at one end of the bridge. Other men would go to the other end. Jordan and Anselmo would go right down the bridge itself. Kill any sentries who were close, place the explosive packs against the supports, wire everything and blow the bridge when the time came. The time was when the big guns of the offensive started firing in the distance. Andres finally got back with the answer from Goals, but he was too late. The offensive had already begun, but it was not going well because the fascists had been ready and waiting for it. Just before dawn the whole band moved down from the cave through the trees to their places around the bridge. Jordan and Anselmo went close to the bridge. They crawled forward and killed the two sentries who were on guard there, using knives so there was no sound. Then they placed one pack of explosive against one concrete abutment and the other pack against the other. They wired the charges carefully and set the grenades so they could be pulled from cover a little way off. When the time came and they heard the distant shelling start that meant the offensive was underway. Jordan pulled on the wires to set off the grenades. There was a loud explosion, and then a second one. The bridge shook and the steel in the center span bent and broke and fell crashing down into the gorge. The bridge was destroyed. No tanks or trucks could cross it now. But almost at once there was more firing from the other side of the gorge. A tank or an armored car came up the road. Jordan and the men with him fired at it with rifles and through grenades. There was confusion and shooting. Anselmo was hit by a piece of shrapnel from one of the explosions near the bridge or from the tank's gun. He fell and he did not get up again. He was dead. He had been a good old man and very brave, and he had believed strongly in what they were doing for the Republic. Illidao was killed at one of the posts at the end of the bridge. Fernando was hit badly, and they could not carry him with them when they left. They had to leave him there. Pablo had taken the five new men, he brought to one side during the fighting. After the bridge was blown, he shot all five of them so that he could take their horses for himself and for the others to use in the getaway. Augustine saw Pablo do it, and he knew why, but there was no time to do anything about it then. They got to the horses and started up the trail into the mountains. Jordan was riding his horse when a bullet hit his horse in the chest or neck. The horse went down hard and rolled over on top of Jordan. Jordan's leg was broken in the fall, and the pain was very bad. He could not stand and he could not ride. The others stopped. Maria got down from her horse at once and ran back to him. She knelt beside him in the trail and said she would not leave him there alone. Jordan told her she had to go. He said that she was him now and he was her, and that wherever she went from now on he would be with her. He told her not to be afraid and not to look back. Pilar and Pablo lifted Maria and put her back on her horse again. They started up the trail. Maria looked back once, and then the trees hid them. Jordan lay where he had fallen, behind a tree that gave him some cover from the road below. Augustine came back and said he would shoot Jordan with his pistol, so that Jordan would not be taken alive by the fascists and perhaps tortured. Jordan told him no. He said Augustine must go on and take care of the others, and especially of Maria. Augustine went up the trail after the others. Jordan was alone then with his broken leg and his pistol. He dragged himself a little way to a better place behind a fallen tree and some rocks. He could see part of the road below. He was in great pain, but his arms and his eyes were still good. He saw the fascist soldiers coming up the road, looking for the men who had blown the bridge. There was a young lieutenant riding a horse at the head of them. Jordan rested the barrel of his pistol on the tree trunk and aimed at the lieutenant's body. He thought that if he was lucky, he could kill this officer and maybe one or two more before they saw where the shots were coming from that would slow them down and give Pablo and Pilar and Maria and the others more time to get deep into the mountains where they would be safe. Jordan lay there waiting, feeling the beat of his own heart against the pine needles on the floor of the forest. He was ready.