Hemingway was born July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, and the second of six children. His father, Clarence Hemingway, was a physician and his mother was a devoutly religious woman with a talent for music. When he was young, Ernest acquired the nickname "champ," which he relished and felt it showed his rowdy, hard-nosed outdoor sense of adventure. He had garnered his father's passion for hunting and fishing in the north woods of Michigan, a period of his childhood which left important impressions later reflected in several of his short stories such as "Up in Michigan" and "Big Two Hearted River."

In high school, Ernest edited the school newspaper, excelled in football and boxing, and ran away from home twice. Upon his graduation, seventeen year old Hemingway headed to Kansas City to enlist in World War I, in outright defiance of his parents objections. However the army rejected Hemingway, despite his repea

Jordan awakes from his daydreams to Pilar shaking him. Quickly he returns to reality when he learns that Pablo has vanished, taking many of the explosives, and their means of escape, with him. He is terribly discouraged but assures Pilar that he can find another way to set of the explosives at the bridge. Jordan is furious with himself for forgetting that Pablo would only be friendly in order to betray him. He becomes furious with Spain and with both sides of the fight. He decides that they will be able to blow the bridge, but that they will die doing it, as Pablo and his horses were their only source of escape. Robert Jordan lay sleeping that night next to Maria: "He lay there holding her very lightly, feeling her breathe and feeling her heart beat, and keeping track of the time on his wrist watch."

Following the Spanish American War (1898), Spain lost the remainder of its once great empire. This defeat greatly increased dissatisfaction and the demands for change grew. People disagreed on the changes needed, however and Spanish politics became dominated by factions. In 1936 the Republic was in power in Spain. A rebellion led by Francisco Franco and the Second Republic began and they received tremendous amounts of support from the people of Spain. They were known as the rebels. Robert Jordan fights on the side of the Loyalists in this novel, as did many Americans and other foreign volunteers, known as the International Brigades. As well as support from the people, the Second Republic had support from Germany and Italy. In the end these forces proved too much to handle for the weary Loyalists, and the war was lost to the Second Republic.

"Pablo had them all beaten to death with flails and thrown from the top of the cliff into the river."

The novel opens with a flashback of a conversation between Robert Jordan and General Golz, A Russian officer who is directing the forthcoming attack. We learn that Jordan is carrying explosives and that his mission is to blow up a bridge. Golz is interested in the offensive mainly as a military maneuver and he needs Jordan to blow up a bridge to hinder rebel reinforcements. He knows that Jordan will have to enlist the help of an antifascist guerrilla unit in the mountains and he is cynical because he feels that the Spaniards will only interfere.

In Chapter four, there is a confrontation between Jordan and Pablo and in it, Pablo announces that he doesn't want to blow up the bridge. Pilar, Pablo's wife and one of the only others that Jordan feels he can trust, sides with Jordan. Subsequently, the rest of the band side with her, feeling that Pablo has "gone bad" (p. 56). Pablo is homesick, tired of the war and scared of getting killed, by his own men and at the battle of the bridge. Jordan wrestles with the idea of whether or not he should have killed Pablo in the confrontation but is reassured by Pilar that he was right not to.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) followed the failure of a military rebellion to overthrow Spain's democratically elected government. The war divided Spain both geographically and ideologically and it brought to power General Francisco Franco who ruled Spain from the end of the war until his death in 1975.

Ironically, this same cynicism is expressed when Jordan arrives at the guerrilla's hideout in the mountains. Pablo, the guerrilla leader, resents the fact that a foreigner has come to run the show for awhile. It puts Pablo in an inferior position where he is no longer the spokesman of the group. Irony is a major theme in this novel and is illustrated frequently in the thoughts and actions of its characters. Pablo is interested only in the

Some common words found in the essay are:
Jordan's Battle, Robert Jordan's, Robert Jordan, Golz Russian, Joaquin's Pablo's, Ernest Hemingway, Suddenly Pablo, Jordan Maria's, Jordan Subsequently, Clarence Hemingway, robert jordan, blow bridge, spanish civil war, civil war, spanish civil, bell tolls, world war, ernest hemingway, bridge jordan, die cause, pablo's band, top cliff river,
Approximate Word count = 2476
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)