In Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, he has used the topic of war to underline the immorality of death and murder.

We, as humans, have gone through multiple events of conflict, whether it be the battles of our ancestors, simply hunting, or war in the present ages. Due to this, we already have an instinct to fight if need be. But happens when our nature of conflict is intertwined with war. There are two ways influence can happen in war and humanity. The first being humanity affects war. This means that war would affect our mindset towards killing. An example of this would be a summary of one of the chapters in For Whom the Bell Tolls where the crowds in the story that Pilar was telling were trying to break in to a building to kill the prisoners (Hemingway 125). This shows that human natures instinct to kill overrides a ‘justifiable execution’.

The other way of influence happening between humanity an war is vice versa of the previous way, where war affects humanity. War post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, is the most common ways of a human’s mental state is affected by warfare and killing. In an article “How soldiers deal with the job of killing”, it states the dialogue of a colonel, saying that “‘The experience of killing is huge and powerful. If you go in with the right personal tools, you can come out stronger. If you go in with cracks, you’ll get shattered’” (Lt Col Kilner 26). But here’s the thing, even though you have trained to kill, kept on killing, or even have hunted animals before, won’t you crack eventually due to the mental toll of constant bloodshed? We have seen scenarios of this again in the novel due to the character analysis of Anselmo. He was a hunter and have killed animal and man before, but that doesn’t mean he’s prepared for it or it hasn’t affected him.

Moral and spiritual values are are also a part of war. Morality ties in with honor, sacrifice, dignity, trust, and old sayings like the Latin expression, “if you want peace, prepare for war” (Vegetius) and other sayings such as “death before dishonor” (unknown). Throughout the novel, the Republic seems to be also a part of moral values of war because that is like one of the things that people fight and die for. However, these values and sayings do not justify the necessity of death in order to win a war, such as the bombings of Hiroshima or the village slaughters of the Vietnam War. Spiritual and cultural values seem to play a role in war, depending on the culture. “Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20: 13) in Christian culture is an example of such spiritual and cultural values, meaning that it is a sin to kill, but it is debatable in human culture if that still applies in war.

Evans, Stephen, “How soldiers deal with the job killing”, BBC News, 11 June 2011, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-13687796,
Accessed February 3, 2022

Hemingway, Ernest, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Scribner, 1968