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It\'s now the second night after Robert Jordan\'s arrival. Most of
this chapter features Anselmo at his post, noting the traffic on the
road as Jordan has instructed him. He does a good job of keeping
tabs on the number of vehicles, but doesn\'t distinguish the types of
cars, as Jordan would have. There are many luxury vehicles, indicating
a high concentration of top-level staff. You know from this fact
that something is brewing. But Anselmo doesn\'t realize it and
neither does Jordan.
Hemingway offers the reader this insight by a combination of
omniscient point of view and direct statement. He relates a fact and
then bluntly says, \"But Anselmo did not know this\" and \"Robert
Jordan would have...\"
The main function of this chapter, however, is to collect the
strands of several themes. Anselmo seems the perfect choice of a
vehicle for the task. Throughout, Hemingway has emphasized Anselmo\'s
straightforwardness and integrity.
Across the road is the sawmill. In it are enemy soldiers. Evil enemy
soldiers? Not as Anselmo sees them. They are not even really fascists;
they are simply men who have been forced to serve in the Nationalist
army. Who are they then?
Individual men, just like himself: \"It is only orders that come
between us.\" Anselmo\'s only grudge against them is that they are
warm and he is not. He hopes he won\'t have to repeat the killing and
the cruelty that he\'s been part of in the past (back in \"the great
days of Pablo\"). And he sums it up simply and poignantly: \"I wish I
were in my own house again and that this war were over.\"
Now Hemingway takes you into the sawmill itself, and we see the
men just as Anselmo had pictured them. They\'re ordinary people with
ordinary concerns, not monsters- although the war will no doubt make
them capable of such a transformation.
It\'s an amiable scene. The soldiers realize they have an easy detail
and wonder how long it will last. They\'re confident of the power of
the Nationalist air force.
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NOTE: Anselmo refers to the soldiers in the sawmill as Gallegos,
indicating that they are from Galicia, a region in the far northwest
of Spain. The climate there is generally wet, but snow is rare.
Anselmo wonders what they must think of snow- another facet of
seeing them as ordinary human beings.
Galicians speak a distinctive dialect similar to Portuguese. From
the men\'s speech, Anselmo could tell where they came from.
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After letting us see the Galician Nationalists as simple human
beings, Hemingway returns to Anselmo, who is doing still further
soul-searching. More and more he regrets that any killing has to be
done at all.
And here comes the moral paradox again: Anselmo says that the
killing, even though necessary, is a great sin. (Can a genuine sin
ever be necessary?) He decides there will be a need for penance
after the war is over. God has been abolished by the Republicans, so a
religious penance will be impossible. Perhaps a civil penance of
some sort will suffice. Even without God as a source and judge of
morality, Anselmo feels the reality of evil and just as strongly feels
the need to atone for it somehow.
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NOTE: ATONEMENT/RESTITUTION You might use this section to check
your own feelings about atonement for wrongdoing. Do you think it\'s
enough if a person has an honest change of heart and sincerely
resolves not to repeat a wrong? Or must that be combined with
additional action to make up for what was done?
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Anselmo misses his prayers. He used to pray frequently but has not
done so since the beginning of the movement. His reasons have
nothing to do with a personal rejection of God. Ironically, they\'re
rooted in Anselmo\'s own simple integrity: he figures that praying
would be unfair and hypocritical. Under the Republic\'s official
atheism, none of the others on his side are saying prayers... and he
doesn\'t want special treatment anyway!
What a strange and tragic conflict stirs within Anselmo, a deeply
religious man whose very integrity keeps him from practicing the
religion he misses so much!
The pangs of guilt over the killing will not leave him. He\'s further
tortured by the unresolvable dilemma of \"necessary evil\" and returns
again to the concept of atoning for the sins of the war. He sees these
sins as things that need to be removed from a man\'s soul.
Anselmo has been called the novel\'s \"yardstick of humanity,\"
suggesting that he is the ideal of moral stability by which the
other characters should be measured. Anselmo is thoughtful, brave,
loyal, and one of the few characters in the story concerned about
the penance they will have to do for the killing and destruction of
the war. As the eldest character, 68-year-old Anselmo may represent
Hemingway\'s view that wisdom comes with age. In any case, he is one of
the more admirable characters of For Whom the Bell Tolls and shows how
much Spain lost when it wasted the resource of its people.
Robert Jordan arrives to bring Anselmo back from his observation
post. Hemingway gives us a brief glimpse of the comradeship between
them. Jordan knows that he can count on Anselmo. And perhaps on
Fernando too. But that\'s not many, considering the task ahead.
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