It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it.
It was something that you had never known before but that you had experienced now and you gave such importance to it and the reasons for it that your own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty.
But the best thing was that there was something you could do about this feeling and this necessity too.
You could fight.
So you fought, he thought.
And in the fighting soon there was no purity of feeling for those who survived the fighting and were good at it.
Not after the first six months.
The defense of a position or of a city is a part of war in which you can feel that first sort of feeling.
The fighting in the Sierras had been that way.
They had fought there with the true comradeship of the revolution.
Up there when there had been the first necessity for the enforcement of discipline he had approved and understood it.
Under the shelling men had been cowards and had run.
He had seen them shot and left to swell beside the road, nobody bothering to do more than strip them of their cartridges and their valuables.
Taking their cartridges, their boots and their leather coats was right.
Taking the valuables was only realistic.
It only kept the anarchists from getting them.
It had seemed just and right and necessary that the men who ran were shot.
There was nothing wrong about it.
Their running was a selfishness.
The fascists had attacked and we had stopped them on that slope in the gray rocks, the scrub pines and the gorse of the Guadarrama hillsides.
We had held along the road under the bombing from the planes and the shelling when they brought their artillery up and those who were left at the end of that day had counterattacked and driven them back.
Later, when they had tried to come down on the left, sifting down between the rocks and through the trees, we had held out in the Sanitarium firing from the windows and the roof although they had passed it on both sides, and we lived through knowing what it was to be surrounded until the counterattack had cleared them back behind the road again.
In all that, in the fear that dries your mouth and your throat, in the smashed plaster dust and the sudden panic of a wall falling, collapsing in the flash and roar of a shellburst, clearing the gun, dragging those away who had been serving it, lying face downward and covered with rubble, your head behind the shield working on a stoppage, getting the broken case out, straightening the belt again, you now lying straight behind the shield, the gun searching the roadside again; you did the thing there was to do and knew that you were right.
You learned the dry-mouthed, fear-purged, purging ecstasy of battle and you fought that summer and that fall for all the poor in the world, against all tyranny, for all the things that you believed and for the new world you had been educated into.
You learned that fall, he thought, how to endure and how to ignore suffering in the long time of cold and wetness, of mud and of digging and fortifying.
And the feeling of the summer and the fall was buried deep under tiredness, sleepiness, and nervousness and discomfort.
But it was still there and all that you went through only served to validate it.
It was in those days, he thought, that you had a deep and sound and selfless pride--that would have made you a bloody bore at Gaylord's, he thought suddenly.
No, you would not have been so good at Gaylord's then, he thought.
You were too naive.
You were in a sort of state of grace.
But Gaylord's might not have been the way it was now at that time, either.
No, as a matter of fact, it was not that way, he told himself.
It was not that way at all.
There was not any Gaylord's then.
Karkov had told him about those days.
At that time what Russians there were had lived at the Palace Hotel.
Robert Jordan had known none of them then.
That was before the first _partizan_ groups had been formed; before he had met Kashkin or any of the others.
Kashkin had been in the north at Irun, at San Sebastian and in the abortive fighting toward Vitoria.
He had not arrived in Madrid until January and while Robert Jordan had fought at Carabanchel and at Usera in those three days when they stopped the right wing of the fascist attack on Madrid and drove the Moors and the _Tercio_ back from house to house to clear that battered suburb on the edge of the gray, sun-baked plateau and establish a line of defense along the heights that would protect that corner of the city, Karkov had been in Madrid.
Karkov was not cynical about those times either when he talked.
Those were the days they all shared when everything looked lost and each man retained now, better than any citation or decoration, the knowledge of just how he would act when everything looked lost.
The government had abandoned the city, taking all the motor cars from the ministry of war in their flight and old Miaja had to ride down to inspect his defensive positions on a bicycle.
Robert Jordan did not believe that one.
He could not see Miaja on a bicycle even in his most patriotic imagination, but Karkov said it was true. But then he had written it for Russian papers so he probably wanted to believe it was true after writing it.
But there was another story that Karkov had not written.
He had three wounded Russians in the Palace Hotel for whom he was responsible. They were two tank drivers and a flyer who were too bad to be moved, and since, at that time, it was of the greatest importance that there should be no evidence of any Russian intervention to justify an open intervention by the fascists, it was Karkov's responsibility that these wounded should not fall into the hands of the fascists in case the city should be abandoned.
In the event the city should be abandoned, Karkov was to poison them to destroy all evidence of their identity before leaving the Palace Hotel.
No one could prove from the bodies of three wounded men, one with three bullet wounds in his abdomen, one with his jaw shot away and his vocal cords exposed, one with his femur smashed to bits by a bullet and his hands and face so badly burned that his face was just an eyelashless, eyebrowless, hairless blister that they were Russians.