Собрание сочинений в пяти томах. Том 3. Пятая колонна. По ком звонит колокол. Рассказы. Очерки. Речи

"The army is still rotten with such as thee. With professionals such as thee. But it will not always be. We are caught between the ignorant and the cynical. But we will educate the one and eliminate the other."
"'Purge' is the word you want," the officer said, still not looking up. "Here it reports the purging of more of thy famous Russians. They are purging more than the epsom salts in this epoch."
"By any name," Gomez said passionately. "By any name so that such as thee are liquidated."
"Liquidated," the officer said insolently as though speaking to himself. "Another new word that has little of Castilian in it."
"Shot, then," Gomez said. "That is Castilian. Canst understand it?"

No one was alive on the hilltop except the boy Joaquin, who was unconscious under the dead body of Ignacio. Joaquin was bleeding from the nose and from the ears. He had known nothing and had no feeling since he had suddenly been in the very heart of the thunder and the breath had been wrenched from his body when the one bomb struck so close and Lieutenant Berrendo made the sign of the cross and then shot him in the back of the head, as quickly and as gently, if such an abrupt movement can be gentle, as Sordo had shot the wounded horse.

Whether one has fear of it or not, one's death is difficult to accept. Sordo had accepted it but there was no sweetness in its acceptance even at fifty-two, with three wounds and him surrounded on a hill.
He joked about it to himself but he looked at the sky and at the far mountains and he swallowed the wine and he did not want it. If one must die, he thought, and clearly one must, I can die. But I hate it.
Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.

"How were you going to do it?" Robert Jordan had asked him and had added, "You know it isn't so simple just suddenly to poison people." And Karkov had said, "Oh, yes, it is when you carry it always for your own use." Then he had opened his cigarette case and showed Robert Jordan what he carried in one side of it.
"But the first thing anybody would do if they took you prisoner would be to take your cigarette case," Robert Jordan had objected. "They would have your hands up."
"But I have a little more here," Karkov had grinned and showed the lapel of his jacket. "You simply put the lapel in your mouth like this and bite it and swallow."
"That's much better," Robert Jordan had said. "Tell me, does it smell like bitter almonds the way it always does in detective stories?"
"I don't know," Karkov said delightedly. "I have never smelled it. Should we break a little tube and smell it?"
"Better keep it."
"Yes," Karkov said and put the cigarette case away.