For Whom the Bell Tolls in 10 Minutes: Three Days, Sixty-Eight Hours, a Whole Life

Opening

The last second of the story is not death. It is a man lying on a bed of pine needles, feeling his heartbeat come up through his chest like a drumbeat, waiting for hoofbeats to spill out of the trees ahead. For three days he has been preparing to blow up a stone bridge; three days later, he finishes the job, sends the woman he loves away, aims his gun down the road, and stops here. The whole of For Whom the Bell Tolls is packed into that stretch.

Hemingway does not grant this book a clean happy ending, and he gives the American volunteer named Robert Jordan no tidy resolution either. He simply lays him down and lets you hear the heart. That is enough. The line from Donne printed on the title page, never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee, has already said the rest for him.

How it came into the world

By 1940, when Hemingway published this book, he had already lived through most of the Spanish Civil War as a war correspondent. A man in his late thirties, he went to cover a war his own country had no obligation to enter, and wrote a novel out of it. The bridge marked for demolition and the Republican offensive supposedly meant to turn the war both trace back to a real event: the Republican push to retake Segovia in late spring 1937, which ended in a rout. Hemingway knew it was a rout, and let his characters walk the clock down to the end anyway.

The book was placed among the great war novels of the twentieth century almost from the moment it appeared. It manages something difficult: it turns the war into neither a monument to heroes nor an indictment. Hemingway puts the fact that both sides have blood on their hands right on the table, then lets an outsider, an American, walk his last stretch of road carrying love, fear, and an order he has to carry out.

Who, where, and for what

Robert Jordan, a Spanish instructor at the University of Montana, went to Spain on his own and joined the Republican side, volunteering as a demolitions man. This time he has orders from General Golz: slip alone into the Guadarrama Mountains, find the guerrilla band holed up in a cave, and blow a stone bridge the instant the planned Republican offensive begins. On the far side of that bridge runs the only road any Fascist reinforcements could take.

When it comes time to blow the bridge, Pablo finally brings back the detonator he had earlier stolen and thrown away, along with a band of reinforcements. Hemingway has no time to dwell on the prodigal's return and gives it barely a line. The bridge goes up. The cost is Anselmo, killed by shrapnel at the bridgehead, seventy years old, and the first of the band to commit himself to blowing that bridge.

On the retreat, a shell knocks Robert Jordan's horse out from under him, and the fall pins his leg with a crack loud enough to hear. Then comes the famous last scene: he orders Maria to go on with the others, sets up his machine gun, and aims it down the road where the cavalry will eventually appear. Hemingway never writes his death. The book stops with his heart pounding like a drum, stops with him lying on the pine needles.