Andrés
A guerrilla in Pablo's band who is sent through the lines with a message, and spends the last night of the novel trying to get anyone to take it.
To put the dispatch into General Golz's hands. Underneath that, and the book is candid about it, he is relieved to have been sent away from the bridge at all.
The book
At a glance
- Andrés Lopez — courier, and a fighter in Pablo's band
- Villaconejos, where he was known as the Bull Dog
- Eladio, who is in the same band
- Robert Jordan's dispatch to General Golz, and a safe-conduct pass
- His own side, at every stage
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeAndrés Lopez comes from a village called Villaconejos and fights, with his brother Eladio, in the guerrilla band that lives in a cave in the mountains north of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. He is competent and unremarkable until the last night of the book. Robert Jordan, the American sent to blow a bridge there in support of a Republican attack, has worked out that the enemy already knows the attack is coming, and writes a dispatch to the general commanding it saying so and asking for it to be called off. He gives the dispatch to Andrés.
What follows is one of the strangest stretches in the novel. A guerrilla tries to cross into his own side's lines in the dark, and is stopped, disbelieved and passed further up the chain at every post, while the hours run out.
How the book draws them
- The Bull Dog of VillaconejosAt his village fiesta every year, when the crowd rushed the bull for the killing, he would push through the others, take hold of the bull's ear in his teeth and hang on, hammering at its neck with his fist. They called him the bulldog of Villaconejos and joked that he ate cattle raw. He was ashamed of the ear part and proud of it at the same time, and he never missed a year.
- The reprieve of the rainThe best feeling he knows is waking on the morning of the bull-baiting to hear rain on the slate roof and in the puddles in the street, because rain meant it was off. When Jordan gives him the message and sends him away from the bridge, he recognises the feeling exactly, and is honest with himself about what it is.
- "We've killed more fascists than the typhus"Caught on the barbed wire in front of his own side's position, with a voice above arguing that the soundest way to handle the whole thing is to throw a bomb at him, he shouts his credentials into the dark: "I am no fascist but a guerrillero from the band of Pablo. We've killed more fascists than the typhus."
- Nobody has heard of PabloThe reply from the post is the joke the whole night turns on: "I have never heard of the band of Pablo. Neither of Peter nor of Paul nor of any of the other saints nor apostles. Nor of their bands." Then he is told to sling his rifle and come through the wire with his hands.
- Starting again at every postHe introduces himself the same way at each stop — "Andrés Lopez of Villaconejos. From the band of Pablo. With a message." — and is sent further back each time to someone more senior, in a car or on the back of a motorcycle, into rooms with maps and coloured pencils, while the sky begins to lighten.