SO now everything had been done that there was to do that night. All orders had been given. Every one knew exactly what he was to do in the morning. Andrés had been gone three hours. Either it would come now with the coming of the daylight or it would not come. I believe that it will come, Robert Jordan told himself, walking back down from the upper post where he had gone to speak to Primitivo.
Golz makes the attack but he has not the power to cancel it. Permission to cancel it will have to come from Madrid. The chances are they won’t be able to wake anybody up there and if they do wake up they will be too sleepy to think. I should have gotten word to Golz sooner of the preparations they have made to meet the attack, but how could I send word about something until it happened? They did not move up that stuff until just at dark. They did not want to have any movement on the road spotted by planes. But what about all their planes? What about those fascist planes?
Surely our people must have been warned by them. But perhaps the fascists were faking for another offensive down through Guadalajara with them. There were supposed to be Italian troops concentrated in Soria, and at Siguenza again besides those operating in the North. They haven’t enough troops or material to run two major offensives at the same time though. That is impossible; so it must be just a bluff.
But we know how many troops the Italians have landed all last month and the month before at Cádiz. It is always possible they will try again at Guadalajara, not stupidly as before, but with three main fingers coming down to broaden it out and carry it along the railway to the west of the plateau. There was a way that they could do it all right. Hans had shown him. They made many mistakes the first time. The whole conception was unsound. They had not used any of the same troops in the Arganda offensive against the Madrid-Valencia road that they used at Guadalajara. Why had they not made those same drives simultaneously? Why? Why? When would we know why?
Yet we had stopped them both times with the very same troops. We never could have stopped them if they had pulled both drives at once. Don’t worry, he told himself. Look at the miracles that have happened before this. Either you will have to blow that bridge in the morning or you will not have to. But do not start deceiving yourself into thinking you won’t have to blow it. You will blow it one day or you will blow it another. Or if it is not this bridge it will be some other bridge. It is not you who decides what shall be done. You follow orders. Follow them and do not try to think beyond them.
The orders on this are very clear. Too very clear. But you must not worry nor must you be frightened. For if you allow yourself the luxury of normal fear that fear will infect those who must work with you.
But that heads business was quite a thing all the same, he told himself. And the old man running onto them on the hilltop alone. How would you have liked to run onto them like that? That impressed you, didn’t it? Yes, that impressed you, Jordan. You have been quite impressed more than once today. But you have behaved O.K. So far you have behaved all right.
You do very well for an instructor in Spanish at the University of Montana, he joked at himself. You do all right for that. But do not start to thinking that you are anything very special. You haven’t gotten very far in this business. Just remember Durán, who never had any military training and who was a composer and lad about town before the movement and is now a damned good general commanding a brigade. It was all as simple and easy to learn and understand to Durán as chess to a child chess prodigy. You had read on and studied the art of war ever since you were a boy and your grandfather had started you on the American Civil War. Except that Grandfather always called it the War of the Rebellion. But compared with Durán you were like a good sound chess player against a boy prodigy. Old Durán. It would be good to see Durán again. He would see him at Gaylord’s after this was over. Yes. After this was over. See how well he was behaving?
I’ll see him at Gaylord’s, he said to himself again, after this is over. Don’t kid yourself, he said. You do it all perfectly O.K. Cold. Without kidding yourself. You aren’t going to see Durán any more and it is of no importance. Don’t be that way either, he told himself. Don’t go in for any of those luxuries.
Nor for heroic resignation either. We do not want any citizens full of heroic resignation in these hills. Your grandfather fought four years in our Civil War and you are just finishing your first year in this war. You have a long time to go yet and you are very well fitted for the work. And now you have Maria, too. Why, you’ve got everything. You shouldn’t worry. What is a little brush between a guerilla band and a squadron of cavalry? That isn’t anything. What if they took the heads? Does that make any difference? None at all.
The Indians always took the scalps when Grandfather was at Fort Kearny after the war. Do you remember the cabinet in your father’s office with the arrowheads spread out on a shelf, and the eagle feathers of the war bonnets that hung on the wall, their plumes slanting, the smoked buckskin smell of the leggings and the shirts and the feel of the beaded moccasins? Do you remember the great stave of the buffalo bow that leaned in a corner of the cabinet and the two quivers of hunting and war arrows, and how the bundle of shafts felt when you closed your hand around them?