For Whom the Bell Tolls: Chapter 18 Summary & Analysis

Robert Jordan compares the war to a “merry-go-round,” though not the kind found in cities with children riding on cows with “gilded horns”: instead, it is a “wheel that goes up and around,” with “no prizes.” He reflects that the group has ended up back where they started: “There is only one turn; one large, elliptical, rising and falling turn and you are back where you have started.” While studying his drawings of the bridge, Maria looks over his shoulder; he writes out the operation orders, thinking that the “business of Pablo is something with which [he] should never have been saddled.” He does not want to get on the “wheel” again, since he has been on it twice before.

Pablo says that he has been working on “the problem of the retreat”; Jordan looks at his “drunken pig eyes” and asks him how it is going. He realizes that Pablo is not “getting on the wheel either.” The “drunkards and those who are truly mean or cruel ride until they die,” and he decides that he is off the wheel completely.

Two days ago, Jordan never knew that “Pilar, Pablo nor the rest of the world existed,” and he did not know about Maria, either; “it was certainly a much simpler world.” Before meeting the group, he expected to blow up the bridge, and he wanted to ask for time off after to go to Madrid, buy some books, and go to the Florida Hotel for a hot bath. After, he would go to Gaylord’s and eat with Karkov.

Gaylord’s is the hotel that the Russians took over in Madrid, where he met famous peasant and worker Spanish commanders. Many of them spoke Russian, since they fled the country after the 1934 revolution failed, and in Russia, they were sent to military academies to learn to fight for the Communist cause. Gaylord’s was where Robert Jordan learned “how it was all really done instead of how it was supposed to be done,” and it helped him to learn the truth about war.

Now that Maria has come into his life, Jordan thinks that when the bridge offensive is over, they will have to get two rooms in Madrid, and he will go to Gaylord’s during the day and come back for her. He wants to take her to see the Marx Brothers at the Opera. Jordan recalls that Kashkin was the first to take him to Gaylord’s, to meet Karkov, “the most intelligent man he had ever met,” with “more brains and more inner dignity and outer insolence and humor than any man that he had ever known.” Kashkin was only “tolerated” at Gaylord’s: Jordan thinks that there was “something wrong” with him that he was “working out” in Spain. Through Kashkin, though, he became friends with Karkov, his wife, and his mistress, and he thinks that he would like to introduce Maria to Karkov, too.

Jordan sees Pablo “engaged in his military studies” across the table from him, and he wonders what sort of guerilla leader he would have been in the American Civil War. Jordan’s grandfather always claimed that Ulysses S. Grant was a drunk, though he functioned “perfectly normally no matter how much he drank.” Jordan has not seen any military geniuses in this war, though there are Communists and disciplinarians. Gaylord’s was “the opposite” of the Communism espoused at Velazquez 63, the International Brigade headquarters in Madrid, or the headquarters of the Fifth Regiment, where it felt as if you are “taking part in a crusade”: “it gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely.”

Yet in the fighting, Jordan realizes, “there was no purity of feeling for those who survived the fighting and were not good at it.” In the sierra, men had been cowards and deserted; Jordan believes that it was necessary that the men were shot by fascists as they ran away. He remembers the fear “that dries your mouth and your throat,” the “dry-mouthed, fear-purged, purging ecstasy of battle.” Back then, though, in the early days of the war, there was no Gaylord’s.

At the start of the war, Karkov had three wounded Russians in the Palace Hotel whom he was trying to keep safe; if Madrid was abandoned, Karkov was supposed to poison them to “destroy all evidence of their identity.” Karkov said that he did not look forward to the act, though he showed Robert Jordan the poison he carried around always. After fighting in the Sierra in the early days of the war, Jordan begins to think that he corrupts “very easily”; still, most people in most professions do, except for doctors, priests, soldiers, and Nazis.

Jordan thinks about a British economist Karkov admired who had written about Spain. Once, he spotted the man during the afternoon that the Republicans attacked at Carabanchel, while he was trying to cart a dead man out of an armored car to appropriate it. The economist came up, offered Jordan a cigarette, and asked him to explain to him “something about the fighting.” Robert Jordan cursed at him, though Karkov later tells him that “he was enormous” at Toledo, instrumental in the success of the siege. Karkov believes that he only has the “face of a conspirator,” and that he is not as close to the Comintern (the Soviet Communists) as he pretends to be. Karkov calls him a “winter fool,” a “big man” who comes to a house in winter and shakes snow off of his clothes into the house.

Jordan tells Karkov that he doesn’t know whether he’ll be able to be a professor when he returns to the United States, since he will be suspected of being a “Red” (Communist), and Karkov suggests he come to the Soviet Union and continue his studies there. Karkov says that he wishes to write literature and that he has been studying the writings of the Spanish fascist Calvo Sotelo; he believes that it was “intelligent” that he was killed, and he says that he believes in political assassination. Karkov says that he has just come back from Valencia, and that unlike Madrid, where he feels “good and clean and with no possibility of anything but winning,” Valencia is governed by cowards. He also discusses the killing of the Communists known as the P.O.U.M. (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification), who made a plot to kill him at one point.

Karkov tells Jordan that he thinks he writes “absolutely true,” and that is why he wants to tell him “some things” about the war. Jordan decides that he will write a book when he is through with the war, “but only about the things he knew, truly, and about what he knew.” Still, he will have to be a “much better writer” than he is now to handle those things.