"That we should govern justly and that all should participate in the benefits according as they have striven for them.
And that those who have fought against us should be educated to see their error."
"We will have to shoot many," Agustin said.
"Many, many, many."
He thumped his closed right fist against the palm of his left hand.
"That we should shoot none.
Not even the leaders.
That they should be reformed by work."
"I know the work I'd put them at," Agustin said, and he picked up some snow and put it in his mouth.
"What, bad one?" Robert Jordan asked.
"Two trades of the utmost brilliance."
"They are?"
Agustin put some more snow in his mouth and looked across the clearing where the cavalry had ridden.
Then he spat the melted snow out. "_Vaya_.
What a breakfast," he said.
"Where is the filthy gypsy?"
"What trades?" Robert Jordan asked him.
"Speak, bad mouth."
"Jumping from planes without parachutes," Agustin said, and his eyes shone.
"That for those that we care for.
And being nailed to the tops of fence posts to be pushed over backwards for the others."
"That way of speaking is ignoble," Anselmo said.
"Thus we will never have a Republic."
"I would like to swim ten leagues in a strong soup made from the _cojones_ of all of them," Agustin said. "And when I saw those four there and thought that we might kill them I was like a mare in the corral waiting for the stallion."
"You know why we did not kill them, though?" Robert Jordan said quietly.
"Yes," Agustin said.
"Yes.
But the necessity was on me as it is on a mare in heat.
You cannot know what it is if you have not felt it."
"You sweated enough," Robert Jordan said.
"I thought it was fear."
"Fear, yes," Agustin said.
"Fear and the other.
And in this life there is no stronger thing than the other."
Yes, Robert Jordan thought.
We do it coldly but they do not, nor ever have.
It is their extra sacrament.
Their old one that they had before the new religion came from the far end of the Mediterranean, the one they have never abandoned but only suppressed and hidden to bring it out again in wars and inquisitions.
They are the people of the Auto de Fe; the act of faith.
Killing is something one must do, but ours are different from theirs.
And you, he thought, you have never been corrupted by it?
You never had it in the Sierra?
Nor at Usera?
Nor through all the time in Estremadura?
Nor at any time?
Que va, he told himself.
At every train.
Stop making dubious literature about the Berbers and the old Iberians and admit that you have liked to kill as all who are soldiers by choice have enjoyed it at some time whether they lie about it or not.
Anselmo does not like to because he is a hunter, not a soldier.
Don't idealize him, either.