He looked very small, dead, Robert Jordan thought. He looked small and gray-headed and Robert Jordan thought, I wonder how he ever carried such big loads if that is the size he really was. Then he saw the shape of the calves and the thighs in the tight, gray herdsman’s breeches and the worn soles of the rope-soled shoes and he picked up Anselmo’s carbine and the two sacks, practically empty now and went over and picked up the rifle that lay beside Fernando. He kicked a jagged piece of steel off the surface of the road. Then he swung the two rifles over his shoulder, holding them by the muzzles, and started up the slope into the timber. He did not look back nor did he even look across the bridge at the road. They were still firing around the bend below but he cared nothing about that now.
He was coughing from the TNT fumes and he felt numb all through himself.
He put one of the rifles down by Pilar where she lay behind the tree. She looked and saw that made three rifles that she had again.
“You are too high up here,” he said. “There’s a truck up the road where you can’t see it. They thought it was planes. You better get farther down. I’m going down with Agustín to cover Pablo.”
“The old one?” she asked him, looking at his face.
“Dead.”
He coughed again, wrackingly, and spat on the ground.
“Thy bridge is blown, Inglés,” Pilar looked at him. “Don’t forget that.”
“I don’t forget anything,” he said. “You have a big voice,” he said to Pilar. “I have heard thee bellow. Shout up to the Maria and tell her that I am all right.”
“We lost two at the sawmill,” Pilar said, trying to make him understand.
“So I saw,” Robert Jordan said. “Did you do something stupid?”
“Go and obscenity thyself, Inglés,” Pilar said. “Fernando and Eladio were men, too.”
“Why don’t you go up with the horses?” Robert Jordan said. “I can cover here better than thee.”
“Thou art to cover Pablo.”
“The hell with Pablo. Let him cover himself with mierda.”
“Nay, Inglés. He came back. He has fought much below there. Thou hast not listened? He is fighting now. Against something bad. Do you not hear?”
“I’ll cover him. But obscenity all of you. Thou and Pablo both.”
“Inglés,” Pilar said. “Calm thyself. I have been with thee in this as no one could be. Pablo did thee a wrong but he returned.”
“If I had had the exploder the old man would not have been killed. I could have blown it from here.”
“If, if, if–” Pilar said.
The anger and the emptiness and the hate that had come with the let-down after the bridge, when he had looked up from where he had lain and crouching, seen Anselmo dead, were still all through him. In him, too, was despair from the sorrow that soldiers turn to hatred in order that they may continue to be soldiers. Now it was over he was lonely, detached and unelated and he hated every one he saw.
“If there had been no snow–” Pilar said. And then, not suddenly, as a physical release could have been (if the woman would have put her arm around him, say) but slowly and from his head he began to accept it and let the hate go out. Sure, the snow. That had done it. The snow. Done itto others. Once you saw it again as it was to others, once you got rid of your own self, the always ridding of self that you had to do in war. Where there could be no self. Where yourself is only to be lost. Then, from his losing of it, he heard Pilar say, “Sordo–”
“What?” he said.
“Sordo–”
“Yes,” Robert Jordan said. He grinned at her, a cracked, stiff, too-tightened-facial-tendoned grin. “Forget it. I was wrong. I am sorry, woman. Let us do this well and all together. And the bridge is blown, as thou sayest.”
“Yes. Thou must think of things in their place.”
“Then I go now to Agustín. Put thy gypsy much farther down so that he can see well up the road. Give those guns to Primitivo and take this máquina. Let me show thee.”