For Whom the Bell Tolls: Chapter 15 Summary & Analysis

Anselmo is crouching in the trunk of a large tree in the middle of the snowstorm, and he realizes that if he stays outside much longer, he will freeze to death, though he has been ordered to stay put until he is relieved. He watches a fascist car pass down the road and records it on the paper Robert Jordan gave him: it is the tenth car up for the day. He feels that he should return to the camp, but he also thinks that the Republicans have suffered “from a lack of discipline and from the disobeying of orders,” and he wants to be obedient.

Anselmo reflects that the fascists he has been observing are only “poor men,” like the Republicans are. He remembers the night when he raided Otero and killed a sentry with Pablo, back in the “great days” when Pablo “scourged the country like a tartar and no fascist post was safe at night.” Now, though, he is “as finished and as ended as a boar that has been altered.” Anselmo wishes that he was in his home and the war was over, but he realizes that he has no home now. Inside the fascist bunker, the soldiers are discussing the unusual snow, which is hampering their plans.

Anselmo reflects that after the war, “there will have to be some great penance done for the killing,” and though killing others is necessary, the “doing of it is very bad for a man.” Anselmo thinks that Robert Jordan is “both sensitive and kind,” but that anyone killing will become “brutalized.” Anselmo does not think about the bridge anymore but thinks instead about his loneliness: he feels so lonely that there is a “hollowness in him as of hunger.” He has no wife—she died before the movement—but what he has “that no man nor any God can take from” is that he has “worked well for the Republic,” which he believes the Spanish people will all benefit from.

Anselmo wishes that there was a “penance” for killing that he could start now, since when he is alone, he feels guilty. As he is reflecting on this, Robert Jordan comes up to him to relieve him of his post. Fernando, standing nearby, joins them, and they move back up the hills in the snow. Jordan is suddenly “very happy,” feeling a “sudden, rare happiness that can come to anyone with a command in a revolutionary arm”—the happiness of feeling that the soldiers in the flanks support each other. Jordan feels that the battle is going to be “awfully small” but “awfully good,” and he tells Anselmo that he is “awfully glad” to see him: he is pleased that Anselmo stayed in the storm, obeying his orders.