Tuesday
When the colorful Malcolm Nance, former Navy officer and counterintelligence specialist, joined the international fighters that have journeyed to Ukraine to fight the Russians, I figured the time had finally come for me to read Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Hemingway famously reported on a similar international group of volunteer fighters–the international Lincoln Brigade—that traveled to Spain in the late 1930s to battle Franco’s fascists. While he didn’t fight, Hemingway described what was happening and also raised money and helped produce The Spanish Earth in support of the Republican cause.
For his part, Nance, at age 60, has stepped away from his career of sought-after commentator and book author to risk his life in another country fighting to hold on to its republic. “The more I saw of the war going on, the more I thought, I’m done talking, it’s time to take action,” Nance told MSNBC’s Joy Reid.
As I read the book, I am struck by how much more important Robert Jordan’s mission appears in light of Ukraine. Jordan, an American engineer, has been sent into the mountains to blow up a bridge. The timing must be right—after Republican troops have used it for their attack and before the fascists can use it in the expected counterattack. An early passage in the book lined up eerily with a remarkable battle at the Siverskyi Donets River, where the Ukrainians took out 73 Russian vehicles and somewhere between 250 and 1000 Russian soldiers as they tried to cross over on a pontoon bridge.
Reading the twitter thread of someone who identifies as “Maxim,” a Ukrainian EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) officer, is like reading Hemingway’s novel. To show you what I mean, I’m putting them side by side. First, some tweets from Maxim, as reported in the Military Times. The quotation marks indicate the tweets:
“I explored the area and suggested a location where Russians might attempt to mount a pontone bridge to get to the other side.”
“Artillery was ready. We have been able to confirm Russians mounted 7 parts of the bridge out of 8. Russians have even succeeded to move some troops and vehicles over the river. Combats started.”
About 20 minutes after a recon unit confirmed the Russian bridge was being mounted, “HEAVY ARTILLERY engaged against Russian forces, and then aviation chipped in as well. I was still in the area, and I have never seen / heard such heavy combat in my life.”
“Some Russian forces (~30-50 vehicles + infantry) were stuck on Ukrainian side of the river with no way back. They tried to run away using broken bridge. Then they tried to arrange a new bridge.”
Ukrainian aviation then started a heavy bombardment of the area, “and it destroyed all the remains of Russians there, and other bridge they tried to make.”
By May 10, the pontoon bridge was gone.
“Their strategic objective was to cross the river and then encircle Lysychansk. They miserably failed.”
And here’s Hemingway, although the passage I’ve chosen is not about the bridge Robert Jordan is supposed to destroy. Rather, it’s about an earlier explosion engineered by (ironically enough) a Russian operative. Jordan’s guide Anselmo describes what happens:
He shook his head remembering, then went on. “Never in my life have I seen such a thing as when the explosion was produced. The train was coming steadily. We saw it far away. And I had an excitement so great that I cannot tell it. We saw steam from it and then later came the noise of the whistle. Then it came chu-chu-chu-chu-chu-chu steadily larger and larger and then, at the moment of the explosion, the front wheels of the engine rose up and all of the earth seemed to rise in a great cloud of blackness and a roar and the engine rose high in the cloud of dirt and of the wooden ties rising in the air as in a dream and then it fell onto its side like a great wounded animal and there was an explosion of white steam before the clods of the other explosion had ceased to fall on us and the máquina [machine gun] commenced to speak ta-tat-tat-ta!” went the gypsy shaking his two clenched fists up and down in front of him, thumbs up, on an imaginary machine gun. “Ta! Ta! Tat! Tat! Tat! Ta!” he exulted. “Never in my life have I seen such a thing, with the troops running from the train and the máquina speaking into them and the men falling.
In what follows, it sounds like the Spanish fascists have some of the same reluctance to fight as Ukraine’s Russian invaders. If so many Russian generals have been killed, some theorize, it’s because morale issues have forced them to personally step forward, putting themselves within range of Ukrainian fire. In the Hemingway passage, Anselmo notes that the fascist commanding officer has to shoot a couple of his men to get them to advance. Unfortunately, he’s not as vulnerable to enemy fire as the Russian generals:
Later, after we had been down at the train to see what there was to take, an officer forced some troops back toward us at the point of a pistol. He kept waving the pistol and shouting at them and we were all shooting at him but no one hit him. Then some troops lay down and commenced firing and the officer walked up and down behind them with his pistol and still we could not hit him and the máquina could not fire on him because of the position of the train. This officer shot two men as they lay and still they would not get up and he was cursing them and finally they got up, one two and three at a time and came running toward us and the train. Then they lay flat again and fired. Then we left, with the máquina still speaking over us as we left. It was then I found the girl where she had run from the train to the rocks and she ran with us. It was those troops who hunted us until that night.”
If the two accounts sound so similar, it’s in part testimony to how well Hemingway listened to the fighters he interviewed.
One other note: My father, who was a soldier-interpreter in World War II, has a story about For Whom the Bell Tolls. He was a guard duty in Coventry, England on June 5, 1944 and, because all was quiet, he was reading Hemingway’s novel. He reports, however, looking up and suddenly seeing the entire sky filled with airplanes. It was the night before the D Day invasion, and bombers were setting off for France to pound German positions, thereby preparing the way for storming the Normandy beaches the following day.
Incidentally, as a member of the administrative forces, he would not himself land on the beaches until two weeks later.