"You are too high up here," he said.
"There's a truck up the road where you can't see it.
They thought it was planes.
You better get farther down.
I'm going down with Agustin to cover Pablo."
"The old one?" she asked him, looking at his face.
"Dead."
He coughed again, wrackingly, and spat on the ground.
"Thy bridge is blown, _Ingles_," Pilar looked at him.
"Don't forget that."
"I don't forget anything," he said.
"You have a big voice," he said to Pilar.
"I have heard thee bellow.
Shout up to the Maria and tell her that I am all right."
"We lost two at the sawmill," Pilar said, trying to make him understand.
"So I saw," Robert Jordan said.
"Did you do something stupid?"
"Go and obscenity thyself, _Ingles_," Pilar said.
"Fernando and Eladio were men, too."
"Why don't you go up with the horses?" Robert Jordan said.
"I can cover here better than thee."
"Thou art to cover Pablo."
"The hell with Pablo.
Let him cover himself with _mierda_."
"Nay, _Ingles_. He came back.
He has fought much below there.
Thou hast not listened?
He is fighting now.
Against something bad.
Do you not hear?"
"I'll cover him.
But obscenity all of you.
Thou and Pablo both."
"_Ingles_," Pilar said.
"Calm thyself.
I have been with thee in this as no one could be.
Pablo did thee a wrong but he returned."
"If I had had the exploder the old man would not have been killed.
I could have blown it from here."
"If, if, if--" Pilar said.
The anger and the emptiness and the hate that had come with the let-down after the bridge, when he had looked up from where he had lain and crouching, seen Anselmo dead, were still all through him.
In him, too, was despair from the sorrow that soldiers turn to hatred in order that they may continue to be soldiers.
Now it was over he was lonely, detached and unelated and he hated every one he saw.
"If there had been no snow--" Pilar said.
And then, not suddenly, as a physical release could have been (if the woman would have put her arm around him, say) but slowly and from his head he began to accept it and let the hate go out.
Sure, the snow.
That had done it.
The snow.
Done itto others.
Once you saw it again as it was to others, once you got rid of your own self, the always ridding of self that you had to do in war.