Chapter 4
The Bell Tolls for the Republic
Hemingway Bears Witness

By early February 1939, after Franco’s troops had captured Barcelona, tens of thousands of Republican soldiers, camp followers, and sympathizers were taking to the roads that led out of the city to the north and east, away from the fascists literally drunk on victory. They were shooting anyone who resembled a Republican. The two-lane highways—really more like country roads with dirt shoulders—overflowed with refugees in cars and trucks, on foot and on the backs of donkeys. Farm women carried chickens and led goats; mothers led their children, all on their way to safe haven in France.1

A few of the trucks were loaded with fascist pilots, prisoners somehow still under the control of the Republican Air Force. The pilots and their enemies traded insults, swearing never to forgive and telling each other to go to hell. But mostly the Republican troops marched quietly and in good order. On a clear, sunny day just before they crossed into France, there was one last formation, then a small parade reviewed by a handful of officials, including the infamous André Marty. Next the soldiers added their rifles to the many piles of arms and other war paraphernalia that littered the rocky ground on the Spanish side of the border. Some of the Internationals who had stayed on to fight to the end closed ranks and sang as they marched into France. They felt a chill when French gendarmes ordered silence, shouting, “Singing prohibited!”2

 

From Key West, the writer read about the death throes of the Republic. His heart was still in Spain, but he finally accepted that the end was near. His attitude was like that of the first veteran to make it home only to hear that his comrades in arms are still fighting. He felt both angry and guilty. He was angry about the journalists who wrote about atrocities by the Reds or claimed that Franco’s men were more humane (certainly a stretch, but one that more than one reputable journalist made). In a letter to his mother-in-law (Pauline Pfeiffer’s mother, to whom he was still deeply attached despite his relationship with Martha Gellhorn) he wrote that the charges were simply not true.3 He had seen “town after town bombed to the ground, the inhabitants killed, the columns of refugees on the roads bombed and machine-gunned again and again.” It was the “sort of lying [that] kills things inside of you.” He could not bear to think about his good friends who were still in the thick of things. It was better to be with them. He had slept “good and sound every night in Spain through the whole war,” he added, and was always hungry but had never felt better. He concluded that “one’s conscience is a strange thing and not controlled either by a sense of security, nor danger of death.”4 A day later he wrote Max Perkins that he had “bad dreams every night. . . . Really awful ones in the greatest detail.”5 It was strange because he had never had any bad dreams in Spain.

None of this changed his feelings about politics. He was still angry that the democracies had done so little for the Republic. Spain had “been betrayed and sold out a dozen different ways.”6 For him the British were still the main villains. He was still promoting his play, The Fifth Column, with its message that antifascist ends can justify harsh means. The producers in New York were in no hurry to stage the play, perhaps because “the war has gone bad,” but Hemingway wanted it produced all the same. “Christ how I wish I’d written that as a novel,” he told Perkins.7 But busy with the war, he had not had the time.

A few weeks later, in March, the war was finally over. When they marched in to Madrid, the Nationalists behaved barbarically, as though they were following a script written by Republican propagandists. At first it was like a party. To celebrate, the conquering army ate and drank everything its soldiers could put their hands on. Priests, Nationalist policemen, and Royalists pulled out their telltale colors and uniforms and felt free to wear them openly again. Along with the celebration came thoroughgoing repression. Bonfires of “Marxist” books raged in the large cities. Just as in Barcelona, Republicans and Republican sympathizers were purged from the body politic. The least they could expect was to lose their jobs and businesses. Untold thousands were simply shot. No one will ever know exactly how many more—perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands—were herded into makeshift camps. Some languished in detention for months or years; many others were sentenced to long terms of forced labor, sometimes after drumhead courts-martial.8

On the road to France, Republican soldiers and refugees flee from Nationalist terror in 1939. Robert Capa Photo, ICP.

The Republicans who managed to flee from Spain did not always fare much better. Except for Mexico, none of the democracies welcomed the refugees. The democracy that was closest, France, was soon overwhelmed and grew more ambivalent as the numbers swelled past the two-hundred-thousand mark. Most Republican refugees in France found themselves in another set of camps, with bad food, poor sanitation, and little protection from the elements.

For Hemingway and Gellhorn, the democracies’ stock could hardly have sunk any lower. The record on Spain was bad enough. But now there was also Czechoslovakia, betrayed at Munich in September 1938. To avoid war, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French prime minister Édouard Daladier had given in to Hitler’s demands for the Sudetenland, the “rightfully” German territory inside Czechoslovakia. Hitler went on to absorb the rest of the country into his sphere of influence, completing the process in March 1939. Like Hemingway, Gellhorn blamed the French and especially the British for what was happening: “Chamberlain has given Europe to the dictators.”9

For Hemingway now was the time to withdraw from the world and work. On March 23 he wrote to his Russian literary friend Ivan Kashkin: “The only thing about a war, once it has started, is to win it—and that is what we did not do. The hell with war for a while. . . . I am not killed so I have to work.”10 He went on to tell Kashkin he was now writing a novel; he had already put fifteen thousand words on paper. He let Kashkin see that his heart was still in Spain, criticizing those who had done nothing to defend the Republic and were now attacking those who had. “We” had “fought as well as possible, and without selfishness.” Two days later he wrote to Max Perkins in a similar vein. After the way the French had treated the Republic, he felt no obligation to side with them against the Germans. It was, in any case, more important for him to write short stories and a novel about the war.11

Hemingway had already written five stories about the war, including “The Butterfly and the Tank,” “The Denunciation,” and “The Night before Battle.”12 All three describe wartime life in the Republic in unvarnished (and sometimes tedious) detail. The upbeat Hemingway whom Alvah Bessie had met on the battlefield was now the realistic Hemingway, willing to air the Republic’s shortcomings and wish that its leaders had been more competent. “The Butterfly and the Tank” sets the tone, telling the story of the senseless death of a man whose practical joke in the bar called Chicote’s (the real-life Hemingway haunt) leads to his death. Like a butterfly coming up against a tank, the man’s prank clashes with the seriousness of the war. “The Denunciation” is a grim story about the need to denounce a fascist officer who has surfaced in Madrid at his favorite bar (not surprisingly, Chicote’s). The problem is that he is now in Republican uniform and asking a lot of questions about the war effort. The story’s two protagonists arrange for the secret police to come for the interloper, taking him away to be shot as a spy. In “The Night before Battle” an American communist soldier is sure he will die in a senseless attack the following day. He believes in the cause and understands the dangers that soldiers must face. But he questions the competence of the leaders who have ordered the attack.

While Hemingway was writing, the situation in Europe continued to deteriorate. The Continent was gearing up for war in the near future. The Western Allies engaged in talks with the Soviet Union, exploring possible military cooperation against Germany. But it was a halfhearted effort that led nowhere. On August 23, 1939, the Soviet and German foreign ministers announced that they had signed a nonaggression pact, promising not to attack each other for ten years. Hitler signed because he wanted a free hand in the west. For his part, Stalin wanted to be sure he would not have to fight Germany until he was ready. (He needed more time to prepare for war because he had murdered so many of his best officers.) Both dictators happily entered into a secret addendum that carved up the small countries of Eastern Europe, starting with Poland, which would soon have both a German and a Soviet zone. Two days later Britain concluded an Agreement of Mutual Assistance with Poland, formalizing earlier guarantees of Polish sovereignty.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact was the bombshell that shattered the remaining barrier on the road to war.13 His eastern flank now secure, Hitler’s forces could focus on the French and the British in the west. The alliance between communist Russia and Nazi Germany also rearranged the political spectrum on the left. It was the end of the Popular Front, that shaky (and often mythical) alliance of liberals, socialists, and communists against fascism; and of the Comintern, which had spent the 1930s promoting antifascist thinking of the Popular Front variety. For many Comintern leaders who would die in the seemingly inevitable purge, the pact was a death sentence. Internationals who had fought for the Republic under the Comintern banner were recalled to Moscow, arrested, and murdered because they were now too cosmopolitan, tainted by having lived in Western Europe. The brilliant Willi Münzenberg, who had served the cause so well, was now on his own. He would be found dead under a tree in France in 1940, probably killed by the NKVD. For left-wing Jews the party was no longer a comfortable political home base from which to fight Hitler and anti-Semitism. If they stayed in the party, they would now find themselves on the same side as their mortal enemy Hitler, a man who made no secret of his intent to eradicate them.

The party line had always been dogmatic, as if there were only one ideologically correct way to view the world. There was never much room for nuance or for individual interpretations. But most members had been able to focus on one or two basics, like fighting fascism, that resonated with them. Now, all of a sudden, the party stood that core doctrine on its head and required the faithful to defend the change. The reversal made liars out of honest men and women.

This was too much for the 25 percent of the Communist Party of the USA who abandoned the movement, never to return. Some of them were literary figures like Granville Hicks, who had been one of the editors at New Masses. He was more than willing, in his low-key, intellectual way, to explain why he was leaving the fold. Astounded by the party’s dictatorial pronouncements, he found them “completely devoid of clarity and logic. . . . If the Party leaders could not defend the Soviet Union intelligently, they would defend it stupidly.”14

Another significant defector was Hemingway’s friend, the humane commissar Regler. At first he could not believe that Stalin had made a separate peace with Hitler. Wasn’t it just another irresponsible, impossible rumor? Only after he saw the newspapers was he convinced that it was true. Like Hicks, Regler could not stomach the kind of doublethink the party was now calling for. He shook his head at what he was hearing from a communist doctor, a brave man and strong healer, who claimed that the pact had prevented “the outbreak of real war,” and that it was “for the benefit of the proletariat.”15

What did Hemingway think of the Nazi-Soviet Pact? There are a few hints in Regler’s books. Regler and Hemingway’s relationship had continued after the Spanish war. They kept in touch through letters, and Hemingway did what he could to help Regler in 1939 and 1940, sending money while the latter was a refugee in France after the collapse of the Republic. Later Hemingway agitated for Regler’s release from senseless internment as an enemy alien at the start of World War II.16 “We were,” Regler would write in his memoirs, “without money and without friends, except for Hemingway, who stood like a rock.”17 Eventually the French released Regler, and he made his way first to the United States and then to Mexico, where he and his wife eked out a living as painters and writers, turning out works that were interesting but did not sell very well. His books would include two novels about the Spanish Civil War, one of which was transparently autobiographical.

Published in 1940, The Great Crusade is the story of a communist with a conscience who comes to reject Stalinism. The hero fights on two fronts: against the fascists on the battlefield, and against the Stalinists who undermine the cause. The book is long and often difficult to follow, but it is written from the heart. A passage from one of the chapters suggests how painful the process of disillusionment was for the faithful. The revolutionary intellectual Nikolai Bukharin, forced to confess to imaginary crimes during the purges in the 1930s, questions the meaning of his life, completely devoted to a revolution that has gone terribly wrong. Searching for answers, he finds nothing but “an absolutely black void.”18

Perhaps without reading every page of the book, or thinking overlong about its implications, Hemingway interrupted work on his own novel about Spain to write the preface to a book about “the golden age of the International Brigades.” He was full of praise for Regler and the Twelfth International Brigade, which Regler had served and which Hemingway visited often. That was where his heart had been during the war, Hemingway wrote. The men of the brigade were wonderfully brave, and nearly always happy, because the period when they thought the Republic would win the war was “the happiest period” of their lives.19

Hemingway went on to write that he was bitter about “a single, idiotic, stupidly conceived and insanely executed” attack in the hills above the Jarama River that had decimated the brigade. He approved of the fate of the man who planned and ordered the attack, and was “afterward shot when he returned to Russia.” Hemingway did not use the commander’s name, but it was almost certainly the communist soldier János Gálicz, described as a Hungarian who hated newspapermen and “should have been shot at the time.” Once again Hemingway was giving the Soviets credit that they did not deserve. It is unlikely that the NKVD shot Gálicz for incompetence. Rather, he was almost certainly shot simply because he had served in Spain, which made him suspect in Stalin’s paranoid worldview.20

In the preface to The Great Crusade, Hemingway also addressed the Nazi-Soviet Pact. His approach could not have been more different from Regler’s. The German faulted Stalin first for giving up on the Spanish Republic and then for sacrificing communist ideals by making a tactical deal with Hitler. Hemingway, on the other hand, was willing to give Stalin the benefit of the doubt: “The Soviet Union was not bound by any pact with Hitler when the International Brigades fought in Spain. It was only after they [the Soviets] lost any faith in the democracies that the [Nazi-Soviet] Alliance was born.”21 Hemingway’s support for the pact leaps off the page at the reader and seems out of context. But it was typical of his thinking at the time. He was saluting Stalin for supporting the Republic and the Internationals from 1936 to 1938, and arguing that, after Munich, the Soviet dictator could not be blamed for doing what he needed to do to protect himself.22

Regler seemed to understand how his friend thought, describing Hemingway as basically “unpolitical.” Ernest had a better grasp of the law of the jungle than of politics. He was more like a hunter than a politician; he thought “in terms of black and white,” of life or death.23 He did not see that “modern dictators had no respect even for the law of the pack.”24 In a similar vein, Regler commented to one of the more sympathetic Soviets in Spain that Hemingway did not stand for Western democracy but for experiencing life in all its fullness in places like the hills of Africa or the waters off Key West.25

 

The months that followed were a confusing time. In September Germany invaded Poland. France and Britain declared war on Germany but could do little for Poland; Hitler easily conquered his hapless neighbor and cleared the way for Stalin to take his share of eastern Poland under the terms of their pact. What happened next was incredible for many devout communists. In November Stalin invaded his small, democratic neighbor, Finland. It was an old-fashioned, great-power landgrab, the sort of thing that a czar or a kaiser might have done. The Finns resisted in a David versus Goliath struggle that lasted until March 1940. Meanwhile Britain and France faced off against Germany along the heavily fortified border of France and Germany. This was the so-called Phony War during the winter of 1939–40, when nothing much happened.

The Phony War ended in May 1940, when the German army attacked through the heavily wooded and supposedly impassable Ardennes Forest in Belgium. Long columns of tanks and motorized infantry outflanked the border fortifications and rolled up the Allied lines with little difficulty. In six short weeks Hitler had conquered France and driven Britain from the Continent. The country that Hemingway blamed most for not supporting the Spanish Republic now stood virtually alone against the Axis, supported only by her dominions overseas. The new prime minister, Winston Churchill, was determined to fight, but Britain’s prospects were grim. Many Americans doubted that she would be able to win against Hitler or that she deserved America’s support. Gellhorn was not alone in thinking that the “English seem to be paying at last for Spain and Czecho [sic], Poland and Finland.”26

 

During the first months of World War II, Hemingway remained deeply absorbed in his book about the Spanish war, occasionally surfacing to write letters or tend to Gellhorn. She commented in a letter that he was “like an animal” with his manuscript, keeping it close to him or hiding it in a drawer under other papers. He never willingly showed it to anyone, and would not talk about it.27 When Gellhorn went off to Finland to cover the Soviet invasion, Hemingway focused only on her pluck in going to this war and, unlike more than one disillusioned communist, said nothing about the way the Soviets had attacked their neighbor.28 When he turned his gaze to the Western Front, it was to denounce the British again. In May 1940, for example, he reminded Max Perkins how degenerate they were. In Spain “they gave us the worst bitching anyone did [while] we fought both Hitler and Mussolini for them for nothing and could have kept them tied up there indefinitely if they had only given any aid at all.” He predicted that they would engage in something he called “Coitus Britannicus”—that is, they would withdraw from the field of battle and leave their allies in the lurch.29

Hemingway reworking a draft of his great novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Robert Capa Photo, ICP.

The catastrophe in Europe spurred Hemingway’s sometime friend Archibald MacLeish to speak out against American neutrality. In a series of talks and articles in the spring of 1940, the recently appointed librarian of Congress lamented the fact that so many young Americans were cynical about war to the point of pacifism. This he blamed on antiwar books like Hemingway’s World War I classic, A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway shot back angrily that MacLeish had gotten it wrong. The Germans knew how to fight, and the Allies didn’t, but it was not on account of antiwar books. MacLeish must have “a very bad conscience” while he, Hemingway, did not, “having fought fascism in every way” he knew how.30 He suggested that MacLeish read The Fifth Column (his play about the counterspy who is not afraid to get his hands dirty) and take another look at The Spanish Earth (the film they had produced together). He included a barb about the front lines in Spain, where he had been and MacLeish had not. Three weeks letter Hemingway went on to complain about MacLeish to Max Perkins, writing that “there is so much panic and hysteria and shit going around now I don’t feel like writing any flag-waving stuff.”31

MacLeish had picked the wrong target. Hemingway’s great novel of the Spanish war, For Whom the Bell Tolls, turned out to be all about engagement in the struggle at hand. It was very different from A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929. The earlier book is a love story about disengagement from the world. The soldier Frederic Henry has left the war behind, forced by an unlucky chain of events to desert. He is headed for neutral Switzerland with his lover, Catherine Barkley. The world shrinks to a tiny sphere around Henry and Barkley, who is carrying their child. The baby is stillborn, and Barkley dies of complications soon thereafter. By contrast, the very title of the Spanish book tells the reader to look for the connection between the story and the outside world; the phrase “for whom the bell tolls” is part of a John Donne poem that begins with the line “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe.”

Based on Hemingway’s experience with the communist saboteurs, the new novel tells the story of four days in the life of a guerrilla band operating behind fascist lines. Their mission is to blow up a bridge to impede fascist movement when the great offensive starts. Far from deserting, the American guerrilla fighter Robert Jordan is ready to give his life for the cause. Jordan has a restless mind and cannot keep himself from thinking about how his life is caught up with politics and the war. He knows why and how the war is being fought and, like Hemingway, believes the Republic needs communist discipline to win against the fascists.

For Jordan, communist discipline was not perfect; it was just the best there was at the time. Jordan admitted to himself that some communist leaders were murderously incompetent and that their actions undermined the cause as surely as if they had been fascist spies. Foremost among them was the Frenchman André Marty, the chief commissar of the Internationals, whom Regler had told Hemingway about. Certain enough about the picture he was painting, Hemingway did not bother to disguise Marty’s identity in the novel.32

It was a given for Jordan that the fascists committed atrocities, such as the gang rape of his lover, Maria. Jordan also knew that the Republican record was far from unblemished. He hears of an atrocity not unlike an event that occurred in a place called Ronda during the war.33 In the novel, after capturing the town, the Republicans decide which of its prominent citizens (who are either actual or suspected Nationalist sympathizers) will be forced to run a gauntlet of men wielding hooks, flails, and sickles. All of the Nationalists die with more or less dignity, not as fascist demons but as individuals. “I try,” Hemingway told Kashkin, “to show all the different sides of [the war] . . . , taking it slowly and honestly and examining it from many ways.”34

Hemingway’s even-handedness met with approval from many critics. Edmund Wilson celebrated the demise of “the Hotel Florida Stalinist” that was Hemingway in 1937 and the return of “Hemingway the artist. . . . It is like having an old friend back.”35 But the same balance cost him friends on the left. When he read For Whom the Bell Tolls in late 1940, Julio Alvarez del Vayo, the onetime foreign minister of the Spanish Republic, spoke for many when he wrote that his fellow exiles were “indignant” about Hemingway’s book, which, for them, had not captured the true “us or them” nature of the war.36 For American communists like Alvah Bessie, who had felt a kinship to Hemingway after meeting him on the battlefield, it was a betrayal, a cruel misrepresentation of a noble cause. With a tinge of regret, Bessie wrote for New Masses that Hemingway could have written a great book about the people’s war, but that instead he fell into the trap of individualism, writing “a Cosmopolitan love story” against the backdrop of the war.37

Bessie was angry that Hemingway had depicted the commissar Marty as “a fool, a madman, and . . . a murderer.”38 The attack on Marty would give comfort to “our universal enemy.” Bessie conceded that Hemingway may not have intended to libel the Spanish people or the Soviet Union. But the way he told the story had that effect. “Hemingway praises the individual heroism of individual Communists, . . . [but] impugns and slanders their leadership, their motives, and their attitudes.”39 Other critics like Milton Wolff, the Lincoln Battalion commander and Hemingway friend, complained that the book overlooked, or minimized, atrocities committed by the Nationalists that, he stressed, were a matter of policy. The Nationalists killed people systematically; the Reds did not.40 (Or at least not to the same extent. This was true if you overlooked the NKVD’s campaign against Trotskyites and other left deviationists.) Joris Ivens eventually joined in the criticism, but not the outrage. He would offer the mild judgment that by writing the novel Hemingway had “returned to his old [apolitical] point of view.”41

Ivens was wrong. The war had changed Hemingway. He had become passionately pro-Republican and antifascist. He was still that way. The only thing that had changed in 1939 was that he no longer had to censor himself in order to protect the Republic. He could now tell the whole truth as he saw it, something that some former Republicans like Regler were encouraging him to do.42 During the war, Regler had shared party secrets with Hemingway, but the writer did not use the material because the party was actively fighting for the Republic and the Republic still had a chance.43 Only after the war did he feel free to attack those who had undermined the cause. The communists had wasted time on things that did not matter: what was wrong with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, and by extension the other Internationals, was “too much ideology and not enough training, discipline, or materiel.”44 Too often they were uselessly sacrificed by incompetent commanders.

Regler concluded that countless readers learned things from Hemingway’s fiction that they refused to learn in real life. With the hunter’s hatred of the poacher, the writer had depicted “the spy-disease, that Russian syphilis, in all its shameful, murderously stupid workings.”45 Regler the humane commissar knew there was more than one way to impose revolutionary discipline. Like the hunter in his metaphor, he was not against killing. But he was against killing without a license, when it was against the law. Regler was reasonably sure that Hemingway felt the same way as he did. Less than two years later, the German would change his mind and question Hemingway’s judgment.