When they heard the planes they all looked up and the planes were coming from Segovia very high in the sky, silvery in the high sky, their drumming rising over all the other sounds.

"Those!" Pilar said. "There has only lacked those!"

Robert Jordan put his arm on her shoulders as he watched them. "Nay, woman," he said. "Those do not come for us. Those have no time for us. Calm thyself."

"I hate them."

"Me too. But now I must go to Agustin."

He circled the hillside through the pines and all the time there was the throbbing, drumming of the planes and across the shattered bridge on the road below, around the bend of the road there was the intermittent hammering fire of a heavy machine gun.

Robert Jordan dropped down to where Agustin lay in the clump of scrub pines behind the automatic rifle and more planes were coming all the time.

"What passes below?" Agustin said. "What is Pablo doing? Doesn't he know the bridge is gone?"

"Maybe he can't leave."

"Then let us leave. The hell with him."

"He will come now if he is able," Robert Jordan said. "We should see him now."

"I have not heard him," Agustin said. "Not for five minutes. No. There! Listen! There he is. That's him."

There was a burst of the spot-spot-spotting fire of the cavalry submachine gun, then another, then another.

"That's the bastard," Robert Jordan said.

He watched still more planes coming over in the high cloudless blue sky and he watched Agustin's face as he looked up at them. Then he looked down at the shattered bridge and across to the stretch of road which still was clear. He coughed and spat and listened to the heavy machine gun hammer again below the bend. It sounded to be in the same place that it was before.

"And what's that?" Agustin asked. "What the unnameable is that?"

"It has been going since before I blew the bridge," Robert Jordan said. He looked down at the bridge now and he could see the stream through the torn gap where the center had fallen, hanging like a bent steel apron. He heard the first of the planes that had gone over now bombing up above at the pass and more were still coming. The noise of their motors filled all the high sky and looking up he saw their pursuit, minute and tiny, circling and wheeling high above them.

"I don't think they ever crossed the lines the other morning," Primitivo said. "They must have swung off to the west and then come back. They could not be making an attack if they had seen these."

"Most of these are new," Robert Jordan said.

He had the feeling of something that had started normally and had then brought great, outsized, giant repercussions. It was as though you had thrown a stone and the stone made a ripple and the ripple returned roaring and toppling as a tidal wave. Or as though you shouted and the echo came back in rolls and peals of thunder, and the thunder was deadly. Or as though you struck one man and he fell and as far as you could see other men rose up all armed and armored. He was glad he was not with Golz up at the pass.

Lying there, by Agustin, watching the planes going over, listening for firing behind him, watching the road below where he knew he would see something but not what it would be, he still felt numb with the surprise that he had not been killed at the bridge. He had accepted being killed so completely that all of this now seemed unreal. Shake out of that, he said to himself. Get rid of that. There is much, much, much to be done today. But it would not leave him and he felt, consciously, all of this becoming like a dream.

"You swallowed too much of that smoke," he told himself. But he knew it was not that. He could feel, solidly, how unreal it all was through the absolute reality and he looked down at the bridge and then back to the sentry lying on the road, to where Anselmo lay, to Fernando against the bank and back up the smooth, brown road to the stalled truck and still it was unreal.

"You better sell out your part of you quickly," he told himself. "You're like one of those cocks in the pit where nobody has seen the wound given and it doesn't show and he is already going cold with it."

"Nuts," he said to himself. "You are a little groggy is all, and you have a let-down after responsibility, is all. Take it easy."

Then Agustin grabbed his arm and pointed and he looked across the gorge and saw Pablo.

They saw Pablo come running around the corner of the bend in the road. At the sheer rock where the road went out of sight they saw him stop and lean against the rock and fire back up the road. Robert Jordan saw Pablo, short, heavy and stocky, his cap gone, leaning against the rock wall and firing the short cavalry automatic rifle and he could see the bright flicker of the cascading brass hulls as the sun caught them. They saw Pablo crouch and fire another burst. Then, without looking back, he came running, short, bowlegged, fast, his head bent down straight toward the bridge.

Robert Jordan had pushed Agustin over and he had the stock of the big automatic rifle against his shoulder and was sighting on the bend of the road. His own submachine gun lay by his left hand. It was not accurate enough for that range.

As Pablo came toward them Robert Jordan sighted on the bend but nothing came. Pablo had reached the bridge, looked over his shoulder once, glanced at the bridge, and then turned to his left and gone down into the gorge and out of sight. Robert Jordan was still watching the bend and nothing had come in sight. Agustin got up on one knee. He could see Pablo climbing down into the gorge like a goat. There had been no noise of firing below since they had first seen Pablo.

"You see anything up above? On the rocks above?" Robert Jordan asked.

"Nothing."

Robert Jordan watched the bend of the road. He knew the wall just below that was too steep for any one to climb but below it eased and some one might have circled up above.

If things had been unreal before, they were suddenly real enough now. It was as though a reflex lens camera had been suddenly brought into focus. It was then he saw the low-bodied, angled snout and squat green, gray and brown-splashed turret with the projecting machine gun come around the bend into the bright sun. He fired on it and he could hear the spang against the steel. The little whippet tank scuttled back behind the rock wall. Watching the corner, Robert Jordan saw the nose just reappear, then the edge of the turret showed and the turret swung so that the gun was pointing down the road.

"It seems like a mouse coming out of his hole," Agustin said. "Look, Ingles."

"He has little confidence," Robert Jordan said.

"This is the big insect Pablo has been fighting," Agustin said. "Hit him again, Ingles."

"Nay. I cannot hurt him. I don't want him to see where we are."

The tank commenced to fire down the road. The bullets hit the road surface and sung off and now they were pinging and clanging in the iron of the bridge. It was the same machine gun they had heard below.

"Cabron!" Agustin said. "Is that the famous tanks, Ingles?"

"That's a baby one."

"Cabron. If I had a baby bottle full of gasoline I would climb up there and set fire to him. What will he do, Ingles?"

"After a while he will have another look."

"And these are what men fear," Agustin said. "Look, Ingles! He's rekilling the sentries."

"Since he has no other target," Robert Jordan said. "Do not reproach him."

But he was thinking, Sure, make fun of him. But suppose it was you, way back here in your own country and they held you up with firing on the main road. Then a bridge was blown. Wouldn't you think it was mined ahead or that there was a trap? Sure you would. He's done all right. He's waiting for something else to come up. He's engaging the enemy. It's only us. But he can't tell that. Look at the little bastard.