I spent a chunk of Christmas Day re-reading For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is Ernest Hemingway‘s book set during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39.

It certainly ranks among his three best books, with A Sun Also Rises (Paris and the Lost Generation) and A Farewell to Arms (Though he won the Nobel prize for literature for The Old Man and the Sea.) “Bell” is certainly the most depressing.

Hemingway is often mocked, especially over the past generation or two. Too worried about demonstrating his manhood in battle, in boxing, in fishing. Fascinated with death. And, yes, with his infamous “the earth moved” phrase (which is in “Bell”), and many more.

And, of course, his writing style. Short and punchy, even when sentences last for a page. In those cases, he has strung together 15 or 20 short-and-punchy sentences with the word “and”.

However, you rarely have to go back and read a sentence again to catch its meaning.

His style is so familiar it invites parody, and for most of three decades an annual Bad Hemingway contest was held. Which mocked “Papa” but also demonstrates that writing truly bad Hemingway requires a pretty good writer.

(At the bottom of that link are further links to a batch of bad Hemingway.)

What is most impressive about Hemingway is his ability to write about events he never saw. And perhaps invented. Yet they read like eyewitness accounts and, perhaps, more like the truth than the truth.

An example of this? “Bell” has several. Here is one.

His description, in chapter 10, of the uprising of the peasants and radicals in a small Spanish town at “the beginning of the movement”. As told by Pilar, “the woman of Pablo”, during a break on a hike with the American dynamiter, Robert Jordan.

It begins with a declaration referring to the guardia civil.

Here we go.

“It was early in the morning when the civiles surrendered at the barracks.

“You had assaulted the barracks?” Robert Jordan asked.

“Pablo had surrounded it in the dark, cut the telephone wires, placed dynamite under one wall and called on the guardia civil to surrender. They would not. And at daylight he blew the wall open. There was fighting. Two civiles were killed. Four were wounded and four surrendered.

“We all lay on roofs and on the ground and at the edge of walls and of buildings in the early morning light and the dust cloud of the explosion had not yet settled, for it rose high in the air and there was no wind to carry it, and all of us were firing into the broken side of the building, loading and firing into the smoke, and from within there was still the flashing of rifles and then there was a shout from in the smoke not to fire more, and out came the four civiles with their hands up. A big part of the roof had fallen and the wall was gone and they came out to surrender.

“‘Are there more inside?’ Pablo shouted.

“‘There are wounded.’

“‘Guard there,’ Pablo said to four who had come up from where we were firing. ‘Stand there. Against the wall,’ he told the civiles. The civiles stood against the wall, dirty, dusty, smoke-grimed, with the four who were guarding them pointing guns at them and Pablo and the others went inside to finish the wounded.

“After they had done this and there was no longer any noise of the wounded, neither groaning, nor crying out, nor the noise of the shooting in the barracks, Pablo and the others came out and Pablo had his shotgun over his back and was carrying in his hand a Mauser pistol.

“‘Look, Pilar,’ he said. “This was in the hand of the officer who killed himself. Never have I fired a pistol. You,’ he said to one of the guards, ‘show me how it works, No, don’t show me. Tell me.’

“The four civiles had stood against the wall, sweating and saying nothing while the shooting had gone on inside the barracks. They were all tall men with the faces of guardias civiles, which is the same model of face as mine is. Except that their faces were covered with the small stubble of this their last morning of not yet being shaved and they stood there against the wall and said nothing.

“‘You, said Pablo to the one who stood nearest him. ‘Tell me how it works.’ …

“‘Pull it farther back and let it snap lightly forward,’ the civil said, and I have never heard such a tone of voice. It was grayer than a morning without sunrise.

“Pablo pulled and let go as the man had told him and the block snapped forward into place and the pistol was cocked with the hammer back. It is an ugly pistol, small in the round handle, large and flat in the barrel, and unwieldy. All this time the civiles had been watching him and they had said nothing.

“‘What are you going to do with us?’ one asked him.

“‘Shoot thee,’ Pablo said.

“‘When?’ the man asked in the same gray voice.

“‘Now,’ said Pablo.

“‘Where?’ asked the man.

“Here,’ said Pablo. ‘Here. Now. Here and now. Have you anything to say?’

“‘Nada,’ said the civil. ‘Nothing. But it is an ugly thing.’

“‘And you are an ugly thing,’ Pablo said. ‘You murderer of peasants. You who would shoot your own mother.’

“‘I have never killed anyone,’ the civil said. ‘And do not speak of my mother.’

“‘Show us how to die. You, who have always done the killing.’

“‘There is no necessity to insult us,’ another civil said. ‘And we know how to die.'”

And that is the most dignified of the long description of the taking of the town and the executions of all the fascists within it, civilians/oppressors of the proletariat.

None of us has seen 20 or 30 men executed in the span of a few hours, and certainly none of us has taken part in the killing of 20 or 30 men (unless someone from the Islamic State is reading), and Hemingway certainly had not, either.

But he tells it in a way that leaves the reader nodding, “Yes, this it how it would have been.” Even when we have stipulated that this one witness could not have such a detailed memory of events as are described.

Chapter 10.

So, merry Christmas. And glorious, if depressing, good Hemingway.