For Whom The Bell Tolls

"Don't forget I am thy superior officer and that a report by me on thee carries weight," the officer said without looking up. "I never read El Debate. Do not make false accusations."

"No. You read A. B. C.," Gomez said. "The army is still rotten with such as thee. With professionals such as thee. But it will not always be. We are caught between the ignorant and the cynical. But we will educate the one and eliminate the other."

"'Purge' is the word you want," the officer said, still not looking up. "Here it reports the purging of more of thy famous Russians. They are purging more than the epsom salts in this epoch."

"By any name," Gomez said passionately. "By any name so that such as thee are liquidated."

"Liquidated," the officer said insolently as though speaking to himself. "Another new word that has little of Castilian in it."

"Shot, then," Gomez said. "That is Castilian. Canst understand it?"

"Yes, man, but do not talk so loudly. There are others beside the Teniente-Coronel asleep in this Brigade Staff and thy emotion bores me. It was for that reason that I always shaved myself. I never liked the conversation."

Gomez looked at Andres and shook his head. His eyes were shining with the moistness that rage and hatred can bring. But he shook his head and said nothing as he stored it all away for some time in the future. He had stored much in the year and a half in which he had risen to the command of a battalion in the Sierra and now, as the Lieutenant-Colonel came into the room in his pajamas he drew himself stiff and saluted.

The Lieutenant-Colonel Miranda, who was a short, gray-faced man, who had been in the army all his life, who had lost the love of his wife in Madrid while he was losing his digestion in Morocco, and become a Republican when he found he could not divorce his wife (there was never any question of recovering his digestion), had entered the civil war as a Lieutenant-Colonel. He had only one ambition, to finish the war with the same rank. He had defended the Sierra well and he wanted to be left alone there to defend it whenever it was attacked. He felt much healthier in the war, probably due to the forced curtailment of the number of meat courses, he had an enormous stock of sodium-bicarbonate, he had his whiskey in the evening, his twenty-three-year-old mistress was having a baby, as were nearly all the other girls who had started out as milicianas in the July of the year before, and now he came into the room, nodded in answer to Gomez's salute and put out his hand.

"What brings thee, Gomez?" he asked and then, to the officer at the desk who was his chief of operation, "Give me a cigarette, please, Pepe."

Gomez showed him Andres's papers and the dispatch. The Lieutenant-Colonel looked at the Salvoconducto quickly, looked at Andres, nodded and smiled, and then looked at the dispatch hungrily. He felt of the seal, tested it with his forefinger, then handed both the safe-conduct and dispatch back to Andres.

"Is the life very hard there in the hills?" he asked.

"No, my Lieutenant-Colonel," Andres said.

"Did they tell thee where would be the closest point to find General Golz's headquarters?"

"Navacerrada, my Lieutenant-Colonel," Andres said. "The Ingles said it would be somewhere close to Navacerrada behind the lines to the right of there."

"What Ingles?" the Lieutenant-Colonel asked quietly.

"The Ingles who is with us as a dynamiter."

The Lieutenant-Colonel nodded. It was just another sudden unexplained rarity of this war. "The Ingles who is with us as a dynamiter."

"You had better take him, Gomez, on the motor," the Lieutenant-Colonel said. "Write them a very strong Salvoconducto to the Estado Mayor of General Golz for me to sign," he said to the officer in the green celluloid eyeshade. "Write it on the machine, Pepe. Here are the details," he motioned for Andres to hand over his safe-conduct, "and put on two seals." He turned to Gomez. "You will need something strong tonight. It is rightly so. People should be careful when an offensive is projected. I will give you something as strong as I can make it." Then to Andres, very kindly, he said, "Dost wish anything? To eat or to drink?"

"No, my Lieutenant-Colonel," Andres said. "I am not hungry. They gave me cognac at the last place of command and more would make me seasick."

"Did you see any movement or activity opposite my front as you came through?" the Lieutenant-Colonel asked Andres politely.

"It was as usual, my Lieutenant-Colonel. Quiet. Quiet."

"Did I not meet thee in Cercedilla about three months back?" the Lieutenant-Colonel asked.

"Yes, my Lieutenant-Colonel."

"I thought so," the Lieutenant-Colonel patted him on the shoulder. "You were with the old man Anselmo. How is he?"

"He is well, my Lieutenant-Colonel," Andres told him.