"They went to steal horses last night.
The snow stopped and they tracked them up there."
"But we have to aid them," Primitivo said.
"We cannot leave them alone to this.
Those are our comrades."
Robert Jordan put his hand on the other man's shoulder.
"We can do nothing," he said.
"If we could I would do it."
"There is a way to reach there from above.
We can take that way with the horses and the two guns.
This one below and thine.
We can aid them thus."
"Listen--" Robert Jordan said.
"_That_ is what I listen to," Primitivo said.
The firing was rolling in overlapping waves.
Then they heard the noise of hand grenades heavy and sodden in the dry rolling of the automatic rifle fire.
"They are lost," Robert Jordan said.
"They were lost when the snow stopped.
If we go there we are lost, too.
It is impossible to divide what force we have."
There was a gray stubble of beard stippled over Primitivo's jaws, his lip and his neck.
The rest of his face was flat brown with a broken, flattened nose and deep-set gray eyes, and watching him Robert Jordan saw the stubble twitching at the corners of his mouth and over the cord of his throat.
"Listen to it," he said.
"It is a massacre."
"If they have surrounded the hollow it is that," Robert Jordan said.
"Some may have gotten out."
"Coming on them now we could take them from behind," Primitivo said.
"Let four of us go with the horses."
"And then what?
What happens after you take them from behind?"
"We join with Sordo."
"To die there?
Look at the sun.
The day is long."
The sky was high and cloudless and the sun was hot on their backs.
There were big bare patches now on the southern slope of the open glade below them and the snow was all dropped from the pine trees.
The boulders below them that had been wet as the snow melted were steaming faintly now in the hot sun.
"You have to stand it," Robert Jordan said. "_Hay que aguantarse_.
There are things like this in a war."
"But there is nothing we can do?
Truly?"
Primitivo looked at him and Robert Jordan knew he trusted him.
"Thou couldst not send me and another with the small machine gun?"
"It would be useless," Robert Jordan said.
He thought he saw something that he was looking for but it was a hawk that slid down into the wind and then rose above the line of the farthest pine woods.
"It would be useless if we all went," he said.
Just then the firing doubled in intensity and in it was the heavy bumping of the hand grenades.
"Oh, obscenity them," Primitivo said with an absolute devoutness of blasphemy, tears in his eyes and his cheeks twitching.
"Oh, God and the Virgin, obscenity them in the milk of their filth."
"Calm thyself," Robert Jordan said.