28
PARTISAN REVIEW
men,'' or, most often, simply "the crazies." One character thinks of them
as "dangerous children; dirty, foul, undisciplined, kind, loving, silly and
ignorant but armed." (This character is not Karkov or Jordan but the
simple peasant lad, Andres, who might have disliked the Anarchists
b~t
would certainly not have disliked them in these drillmaster's terms-a
curious example of how Hemingway sometimes violates realism to voice
his own prejudices.) What worries Hemingway about the Anarchists is
that they were undisciplined and armed, which is a good short description
of the masses in process of making a revolution. His counter-prescription
is expressed in Jordan's evaluation of the Stalinist generals:
"They were Communists and they were disciplinarians. The discipline
that they would enforce would make good troops. Lister was murderoua
in discipline.... But he knew how to forge a division into a fighting unit."
I find it significant that the Communist Party seems to be undecided
as to just what line to take towards
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
While the
book has been roundly denounced in classic C.P. style in the
Daily
Worker,
it is being sold in the Party bookshops. And Alvah C. Bessie in the
New
Masses
writes more in sorrow than in anger, taking the line that Heming·
way, while still sincerely enlisted in the fight against "our common enemy"
(reaction), has been misled so that "at the moment he is found in bad
company." The Party has evidently not given up hope of welcoming back
the straying sheep into the fold at some future (and happier) date.
I
should say this is a shrewd political judgment.
"A TRIM
RECKONING
I"
•
"Greeks! We shall now prove whether we are worthy
of our ancestors and of the liberty which our fore-
fathers secured for us.... The time has come for all
Greeks to fight to the death for all they hold dear." Such was the Periclean
appeal made by Premier Metaxas on the day the Italians began to invade
Greece. The spectacle of the quasi-fascist dictator, Metaxas, calling on the
Greek masses to fight to the death for the liberties he himself extinguished
five years ago, this is the latest and not the last irony in the world struggle
between fascism and "democracy." As the war spreads like a fungus over
the globe--the last "world war
17
was a provincial backyard affair com–
pared to this one--from Danzig to Vyborg to Trondheim to Louvain to
Dunkirk to Dakar to Dong Dang to Sidi Barrani to Bahrein to Thailand
to Athens, the question becomes ever more urgent and ever more obscure:
what is a "democracy"?
A rough empirical definition seems to be: any country that comes
into opposition to the Axis powers. The American press stands ready to
confer a brevet rank in the army of Democracy on any leader-from
Baron Mannerheim to the Royalist general, De Gaulle--or any nation-
