Robert Jordan’s love of Spain is not an abstract emotion. He has a
deep feeling for its people, but he is still able to see their faults.
Throughout _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ he makes conscious estimates of
their national character. He says they are a truly thoughtful and
considerate people who are not merely formally polite as are the
French. But they are also treacherous:
Of course they turned on you. They turned on you often but they
always turned on everyone. They turned on themselves, too. If you
had three together, two would unite against one, and then the two
would start to betray each other. Not always, but often enough for
you to take enough cases and start to draw it as a conclusion.
These characteristics cut across party lines. The Rebel slaughter
which left Jordan’s Maria orphaned and violated had an equally brutal
counterpart in the Republican massacre supervised by the guerrilla
chief Pablo in which twenty Fascists were beaten between two lines of
men and then flung over a cliff. Jordan thinks that killing “is their
extra sacrament.” Loving them, he tries to understand them:
There is no finer and no worse people in the world. No kinder
people and no crueler.... Forgiveness is a Christian idea and Spain
has never been a Christian country. It has always had its own
special idol worship within the Church.... The people had grown
away from the Church because the Church was in the government and
the government had always been rotten. This was the only country
that the reformation never reached. They were paying for the
Inquisition now, all right.
Occasionally one finds a Spaniard who seems almost a moderate, like
Frankie Perez in _Adventures of a Young Man_, but the most persistent
impression is one of a people who have a history of misrule and
violence, and who tragically turn to these very weapons as the
instruments of release from their consequences.