Ernest Hemingway's brief but compelling story "The Old Man at the Bridge" takes place on the side of a pontoon bridge on the Ebro Delta during the Spanish Civil War. The narrator, a soldier exploring the area around the bridge for signs of the enemy, finds an exhausted old man sitting beside the bridge, too tired to go farther. He had been watching his animals in his home town of San Carlos but had been forced to flee without them.
The old man symbolizes all innocent refugees who have been displaced by the horrific realities of wars that they do not understand. Although the narrator makes it clear that the enemy is nearby and they are in danger there on the bridge, the old man understands nothing of this. He only knows that his animals, a cat, two goats, and four pairs of pigeons, have been left behind in the village, and he wonders what will happen to them. The fact that there is fighting nearby and the war has displaced countless people is incomprehensible to him. He is a simple man concerned with the everyday things with which his life has always been absorbed. He represents all such common folk, the main victims of war, who lose their homes and their livelihoods and their possessions when war breaks out around them.
The old man could be said to symbolize the devastating impact that war has upon ordinary civilians. The old man has no political sympathies; he's completely harmless. Yet he cannot hide from the bitter, bloody conflict that seems to follow him around wherever he goes. He's already had to leave his hometown behind and all the animals he'd been caring for. Now, with the imminent arrival of Fascist forces, he's forced to move on again, just one of many innocent civilians caught up in the midst of the Spanish Civil War.
The old man may have thought that, because he's never been a political animal, he could somehow remain above the fray, letting the two sides get on with fighting each other while he goes about his ordinary life, caring for his animals in San Carlos. But in this age of total war, such detachment is impossible. Whether they like it or not, everyone is involved in the war in some form or another, even those peaceable, harmless souls like the old man, who represent no threat to anyone.
Ernest Hemingway worked as a foreign correspondent in Europe for years before he became a successful freelance writer of stories, novels and nonfiction. Like many foreign correspondents who had to cram a lot of information into brief dispatches under emergency conditions, Hemingway looks for sights and incidents that would represent the bigger picture of what was going on. "The Old Man at the Bridge" is a very short story. It reads like a cabled dispatch from a war correspondent who was up close to the fighting, gathering his own impressions. Hemingway captures the feeling of being close to the war particularly well in one paragraph:
The old man can be seen as a symbol of defeated liberal democracy in Spain, perhaps even the defeat of the hopes for liberal democracy all over the world. He is wearing black dusty clothes and has a gray dusty face, suggesting what he has been through.. He is too tired to go any further. If he stays where he is sitting he would probably get summarily executed by the Fascist forces, who are taking draconian reprisals against Spanish civilians. But he doesn't have the strength to stand up and continue fleeing, and he doesn't seem to care. He has nowhere to go, no future.
He has lost everything that was of importance to him. That was how the Spanish Loyalists felt after being defeated by the reactionary forces of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, aided and abetted by Hitler and Mussolini.
Hemingway was sympathetic to the Loyalist cause. After Franco's victory Hemingway refused to return to Spain, a country he loved. He chronicled the Spanish Civil War in what is widely considered his best novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). The import of the title is that all of us had suffered a defeat along with the Spanish Loyalists. The title was derived from a poem by John Donne, a leading English Metaphysical poet:
No comments:
Post a Comment