For Whom the Bell Tolls: Chapter 43 Summary & Analysis

Robert Jordan lies beneath the trunk of a pine tree on the hill above the road, and he reflects that he loves this hour of the day, just before the sunrise. He wonders if Andrés got through to Golz, then tells himself not to worry, thinking that there is a possibility that the attack will be successful. Still, he believes that he shouldn’t “expect victory,” not for several years, and that this attack is just a “holding attack.” “Today,” he thinks, “is only one day in all the days that will ever be.” A new sentry moves into the sentry box, and Jordan watches him through his binoculars, then decides to watch the road instead. He hopes that “rabbit” (Maria) “will get out of this all right.”

Jordan hears the first round of bombs, and he fires his gun toward the sentry box and hits the sentry. He hears Anselmo shoot his sentry, and then the noise of grenades and Pablo’s cavalry automatic rifle; he picks up his packs and runs toward the road and the bridge, where he meets Anselmo. Anselmo says that he killed his sentry, and Jordan climbs into the framework of the bridge to position the explosives. Jordan is shaking like a “goddamn woman,” and he tells himself to pull himself together. He finishes wiring the grenades around the bridge, and he and Anselmo finish up by positioning a coil of wire along the bridge.

Pilar’s band emerges: Primitivo and Rafael are supporting Fernando, who seems to have been shot through the groin. Jordan tells Anselmo to blow the bridge if tanks come, even if he is below the bridge. Anselmo sees Jordan running up the bridge away from him, and he holds his side of the wire in his hand. Fernando tells Primitivo to put him behind a stone and continue on without him. Primitivo tells Fernando that they will come back down for him and, before heading up to a higher position on the hill, leaves him with a rifle and cartridges.

Anselmo, watching for Robert Jordan on the other side of the bridge, does not feel afraid; he hated shooting the guard, which gave him the feeling of “striking” his own brother. There is no “lift or any excitement in his heart,” “nothing but a calmness,” though he feels “one with all of the battle and with the Republic.” Further up the hill where Primitivo is, Pilar emerges and asks whether Robert Jordan is “building a bridge or blowing one.” Anselmo calls up at her to be patient. They all hear firing down the road, where Pablo is holding the post he has overtaken.

Jordan, standing on the road and moving toward a gully on its lower side, hears a truck coming down the road, and he yells out to Anselmo to blow up the bridge: he sees the bridge rise up in the air “like a wave breaking,” and he dives face down in the pebbly gully of the road during the explosion. When the steel stops falling, he is still alive; Fernando, lying nearby, is still breathing, too. Anselmo, though, is lying face down on the road, and Jordan thinks that he looks “very small, dead.” He picks up Anselmo’s carbine and his sacks, as well as Fernando’s rifle, and tells Pilar, who is lying behind a tree, that he is going down with Agustin to cover Pablo.

Pilar says that they have lost two already, Fernando and Eladio, and Jordan asks her if she did “something stupid.” Jordan is angered, since he believes that if he had the exploder that Pablo destroyed, Anselmo wouldn’t have been killed; he could have blown the bridge from a safer distance. Slowly, though, “from his head,” he begins to “accept it and let the hate go out.” He apologizes to Pilar and tells Rafael to shoot at the truck coming toward them, then to try and hit the driver. Suddenly, they hear the sound of planes above.

Maria is still with the horses, but they are “no comfort to her.” From where she is in the forest, a small distance from the rest of the group, she cannot see the road or the bridge, and she pats the horses nervously, praying for “Roberto”: “Oh please have him be all right for all my heart and all of me is at the bridge.” Pilar calls out to Maria that Jordan is “all right.”

Jordan goes down the hillside through the pines to where Agustin is lying behind his automatic rifle, and they hear the firing of Pablo’s submachine gun nearby. Jordan has “the feeling of something that had started normally and had then brought great, outsized, giant repercussions.” He feels “numb with the surprise that he had not been killed at the bridge,” since he had “accepted being killed.” Pablo comes running around the bend in the road, firing at fascist soldiers, and climbs down into the gorge below the destroyed bridge.

A tank comes down the road and starts firing, and Jordan, Agustin, and Pilar run to meet Pablo: he tells them that all of his people are dead, though they now have plenty of horses. Agustin asks Pablo if he shot all of the men, and Jordan thinks to himself that Pablo is a “murderer” and a “dirty, rotten bastard.” The group walks to where Maria is holding the horses.

Greeting Maria, Robert Jordan realizes that “he had never thought that you could know that there was a woman if there was battle.” He tells Maria to mount a horse, and they all start to load their own horses: Pablo’s plan is to cross high enough on the slope to be out of the range of the tank, and to meet up “where it narrows above” in the hills. As they prepare to cross, bombs start to fall. Jordan attempts to ride past the bridge, and he sees a flash from the tank in the road. Suddenly, he is under his horse, trying to pull himself out from under the weight. His left leg is “flat under the horse,” bent sideways; he sees another flash from the tank, and his horse is hit. Primitivo and Agustin grab him under the armpits and drag him up the slope to a point of shelter.

Maria kneels over Jordan, who tells her that his left leg is broken. He tells Pablo that he should head for the Republic, not Gredos, and Pilar slits open his trouser; he looks at the “pointed, purple swelling” below his hip joint. Jordan tells Maria that they will not be going to Madrid, and she starts to cry. He says that wherever she goes, he will be there, since “as long as there is one of us there is both of us.” What he does now, he has to do alone: she has to go for them both, and he tells her that she must obey him. “There is no good-by, guapa, because we are not apart,” he says, and Pilar leads Maria away and onto a horse.

Agustin asks Jordan if he wants him to shoot him, but Jordan tells him to leave, and to look after Maria. He rides away, leaving Jordan alone: Jordan feels “empty and drained and exhausted from all of it,” but now, at last, “there was no problem.” He watches the activity at the bridge and on the road, and he reflects that Pilar will take care of Maria; he thinks that Pablo must have a “sound plan” for their escape. Jordan tells himself that he needs to “get fixed around some way” where he will be useful, and that “there are many worse things than this.” “Everyone has to do this, one day or another.”

Jordan has fought for what he believed in for a year, and though he thinks that “the world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and [he] hate[s] very much to leave it,” he also believes that he has had “a lot of luck.” He pulls his left leg with both hands and lies down flat, turning around slowly; his leg doesn’t hurt at all, since the nerve must have been smashed when his horse rolled on it. Jordan reaches for his submachine gun and loads it, wondering who “has it easier”—those with religion or those “just taking it straight.” “Dying,” he thinks, “is only bad when it takes a long time and hurts so much that it humiliates you.”

Jordan thinks that he would like to tell his grandfather about this battle, and he wishes that “they” (the fascists) would come now, since his leg is now beginning to hurt. He doesn’t “want to do that business” that his father did, but he thinks that if he passes out from his injury and is discovered, he will be interrogated, which would be dangerous. He tries to distract himself by thinking about Pablo, Pilar, and Maria escaping, but he feels that he “can’t wait any longer.” He believes that he has an internal hemorrhage.

Suddenly, though, Jordan sees the cavalry ride out of the timber and cross the road. “Completely integrated” now, he looks up at the sky; he then looks toward the road, where Lieutenant Berrendo is walking. Jordan lies behind the tree with his submachine gun on the crook of his left arm and waits until Berrendo reaches the first trees of the forest. His heart is beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.