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that he always knew that the side he was fighting for behaved as she described and that however much he hates this “that damned woman made me see it | that he always knew that the side he was fighting for behaved as she described and that however much he hates this “that damned woman made me see it | ||
as though I had been there”. | as though I had been there”. | ||
In a number of places in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' it is clear that the loyalists are executing non-fascists, perhaps most dramatically in the case of Don Guillermo, who is killed, as H. R. Stoneback points out, because of his loyalty to his wife whose religiosity was taken as proof she is a fascist. Robert Jordan wonders at times about the real commitment of his erstwhile enemies to the fascist cause, in particular that of a boy he has killed in battle. Here Jordan concludes that he simply has to kill whether it is wrong or not. | |||
Robert Jordan’s band of battlers for the Republic, not unlike many of the characters in Russian fiction of the 1920s, are shown at various levels of commitment to and belief in the cause. Pilar is no doubt the most avid devotee | |||
of the new red atheism, as we see when she declares that “before we had religion and other nonsense. Now for everyone there should be someone to whom one can speak frankly”. Yet even Pilar can waver in her faith in atheism as when she says, “There probably still is God after all, although we have abolished him”. For all of its many ironies, I do not see a great deal of humor in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', but this example is surely an exception. It is also a most effective way to capture the ambivalence the Spanish Reds experience as they try out their newfound atheism. | |||