Ernest Hemingway - The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

Claude got a couple of tunics from the dead and made a pillow for him. Then he stroked his head and held his hand and felt his pulse. The boy was watching him all the time but he could not talk. The boy never looked away from him and Claude bent over and kissed him on the forehead.

“Carry that bicycle off the road,” I said to the copains .

“ Cette putain guerre ,” Claude said. “This dirty whore of a war.”

The boy did not know that it was me who had done it to him and so he had no special fear of me and I felt his pulse too and I knew why Claude had done what he had done. I should have kissed him myself if I was any good. It was just one of those things that you omit to do and that stay with you.

“I’d like to stay with him for a little while,” Claude said.

“Thank you very much,” I said. I went over to where we had the four bicycles behind the trees and the copains were standing there like crows.

“Take this one and that one and foute moi le camp .” I took off their brassards and put them in my pocket.

“But we fought. That’s worth two.”

“Fuck off,” I said. “Did you hear me? Fuck off.”

They went away disappointed.

A boy about fourteen came out from the estaminet and asked for the new bicycle.

“They took mine early this morning.”

“All right. Take it.”

“What about the other two?”

“Run along and keep off the road until the column gets up here.”

“But you are the column.”

“No,” I said. “Unfortunately we are not the column.”

The boy mounted the bicycle which was undamaged and rode down to the estaminet . I walked back under the hot summer sky to the farmyard to wait for the point. I didn’t know how I could feel any worse. But you can all right. I can promise you that.

“Will we go into the big town tonight?” Red asked me.

“Sure. They’re taking it now, coming in from the west. Can’t you hear it?”

“Sure. You could hear it since noon. Is it a good town?”

“You’ll see it as soon as the column gets up and we fit in and go down that road past the estaminet .” I showed him on the map. “You can see it in about a mile. See the curve before you drop down?”

“Are we going to fight any more?”

“Not today.”

“You got another shirt?”

“It’s worse than this.”

“It can’t be worse than this one. I’ll wash this one out. If you have to put it on wet it won’t hurt on a hot day like this. You feeling bad?”

“Yeah. Very.”

“What’s holding Claude up?”

“He’s staying with the kid I shot until he dies.”

“Was it a kid?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh shit,” Red said.

After a while Claude came back wheeling the two vélos . He handed me the boy’s Feldbuch .

“Let me wash your shirt good too, Claude. I got Onie’s and mine washed and they’re nearly dry.”

“Thanks very much. Red,” Claude said. “Is there any of the wine left?”

“We found some more and some sausage.”

“Good,” Claude said. He had the black ass bad too.

“We’re going in the big town after the column overruns us. You can see it only a little more than a mile from here,” Red told him.

“I’ve seen it before,” Claude said. “It’s a good town.”

“We aren’t going to fight any more today.”

“We’ll fight tomorrow.”

“Maybe we won’t have to.”

“Maybe.”

“Cheer up.”

“Shut up. I’m cheered up.”

“Good,” Red said. “Take this bottle and the sausage and I’ll wash the shirt in no time.”

“Thank you very much,” Claude said. We were splitting it even between us and neither of us liked our share.

“Landscape with Figures,” a story of the Spanish Civil War, was written around 1938, and was one of the short stories Hemingway suggested be included in a new collection he proposed in a letter to editor Maxwell Perkins on February 7, 1939.

IT WAS VERY STRANGE IN THAT HOUSE. The elevator, of course, no longer ran. The steel column it slid up and down on was bent and there were several marble stairs in the six flights which were broken so that you had to walk carefully on the edges as you climbed so that you would not fall through. There were doors which opened onto rooms where there were no longer any rooms and you could swing a perfectly sound-looking door open and step across the door sill into space: that floor and the next three floors below having been blasted out of the front of the apartment house by direct hits by high explosive shells. Yet the two top floors had four rooms on the front of the house which were intact and there was still running water in the back rooms on all of the floors. We called this house the Old Homestead.

The front line had, at the very worst moment, been directly below this apartment house along the upper edge of the little plateau that the boulevard circled and the trench and the weather-rotted sandbags were still there. They were so close you could throw a broken tile or a piece of mortar from the smashed apartment house down into them as you stood on one of the balconies. But now the line had been pushed down from the lip of the plateau, across the river and up into the pine-studded slope of the hill that rose behind the old royal hunting lodge that was called the Caso del Campo. It was there that the fighting was going on, now, and we used the Old Homestead both as an observation post and as an advantage point to film from.

In those days it was very dangerous and always cold and we were always hungry and we joked a great deal.

Each time a shell bursts in a building it makes a great cloud of brick and plaster dust and when this settles it coats the surface of a mirror so that it is as powdered as the windows which have been calcimined over in a new building. There was a tall unbroken mirror in one of the rooms of that house giving off the stairs as you climbed and on its dusty surface I printed, with my finger, in large letters DEATH TO JOHNNY and we then sent Johnny, the camera-man, into that room on some pretext. When he opened the door, during a shelling, and saw that ghostly announcement staring at him from the glass he went into a white, deadly, Dutch rage and it was quite a time before we were friends again.

Then the next day when we were loading the equipment into a car in front of the hotel I got into the car and cranked up the glass of the side window as it was bitterly cold. As the glass rose I saw, printed on it with large red letters in what must have been a borrowed lipstick, ED IS A LICE. We used the car for several days with that mysterious, to the Spaniards, slogan. They must have taken it for the initials or slogan of some Holland-American revolutionary organization perhaps resembling the F.A.I. or the C.N.T.

Then there was the day when the great British authority on let us forget just what came to town. He had a huge, German-type steel helmet which he wore on all expeditions in the direction of the front. This was an item of clothing which none of the rest of us affected. It was the general theory that since there were not many steel helmets these should be reserved for the shock troops and his wearing of this helmet formed in us an instant prejudice against the Great Authority.

We had met in the room of an American woman journalist who had a splendid electric heater. The Authority took an instant fancy to this very pleasant room and named it the Club. His proposal was that everyone should bring their own liquor there and be able to enjoy it in the warmth and pleasant atmosphere. As the American girl was exceedingly hardworking and had been trying, perhaps not too successfully, to keep her room from becoming in any sense the Club, this definite baptism and classification came as rather a blow to her.