For Whom the Bell Tolls
By
Ernest Hemingway
Courtesy:
Shahid Riaz
Islamabad - Pakistan
shahid.riaz@gmail.com
“For Whom the Bell Tolls” By Ernest Hemingway 2
No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of
the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a
Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans
death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to
know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
—John Donne
1
He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms,
and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped
gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road
winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the
pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the
summer sunlight.
“Is that the mill?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I do not remember it.”
“It was built since you were here. The old mill is farther down; much below the pass.”
He spread the photostated military map out on the forest floor and looked at it
carefully. The old man looked over his shoulder. He was a short and solid old man in a
black peasant’s smock and gray iron-stiff trousers and he wore rope-soled shoes. He
was breathing heavily from the climb and his hand rested on one of the two heavy packs
they had been carrying.
“Then you cannot see the bridge from here.”
“No,” the old man said. “This is the easy country of the pass where the stream flows
gently. Below, where the road turns out of sight in the trees, it drops suddenly and there
is a steep gorge—”
“I remember.”
“Across this gorge is the bridge.”
“And where are their posts?”
“There is a post at the mill that you see there.”
The young man, who was studying the country, took his glasses from the poc