The Big Parade
BY ERIC DAVIDS
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We arrived at Gare de Lyon in the early afternoon and traversed the city to where we would be staying for the next three weeks. Apartments were warm in July, so the streets were full of energy. Cafe tables spilled onto the sidewalks.
You can tell you’re in Paris by the orientation of chairs on the cafe terraces. Everyone sat side-by-side, facing outwards, peering at us over their Aperol Spritzes as we hauled our bags across the city in the hot afternoon sun. “As ancient as this place is, it’s easier to navigate than Atlanta,” one crapulent tourist called out to us.
Hmmm...I’ve never been to Atlanta. I wasn’t sure how to respond.
For me, this trip felt like more of a return than an arrival. I had spent my first year as a Marine officer in Europe. During that period each day was filled with new excitement and practical optimism. Our idealism posed no risk. And my friends and I carried the quiet confidence that comes from knowing we were on our way to the front (or at least to Quantico). Until then, each day was meant to be enjoyed.
Returning to Paris a decade on, I was more interested in looking inwards than gazing at passersby and admonishing them with surprising analogies. What had I learned over my time in the service? Where did my quiet confidence emanate from now?
For the next three weeks I meandered across Paris. Each morning I ran along the Canal Saint Martin, stopping to do pull-ups in a small outdoor gym before enjoying a pain au chocolat. I spent hours in bookstores, preferring the narrow corridors of The Abbey Bookshop to the more crowded rooms of Shakespeare and Company. Walking home in the afternoon, I would drop by Marché des Enfants Rouges for a plate of pasta and a glass of vin blanc, reading a few chapters of whatever book I picked up that day. Dumas, Vernes, and lots of Hemingway.
(The bookshop’s owner raised an eyebrow when I placed The Garden of Eden on the checkout counter, sharing, with a smile, “You’ll see why this one was published posthumously. Enjoy!”)
On one of those days at The Abbey Bookshop, I spent a couple hours sifting through various Hemingway biographies. One question, in particular, lingered in my mind, which a fellow Marine had posed to me on a frigid chairlift years ago: Why did Robert Jordan go to Spain?
I felt the question had regained significance amidst the evolving global landscape. On the other side of the European continent, Russia continued to wage a war of aggression against Ukraine. Similar to the Spanish Civil War, the US was reluctant to provide direct military support. Partisans and international volunteers helped hold the line. A friend of mine had been among them before losing his life in late April 2022, when his unit came under fire. And like the Spanish Civil War fought nearly 100 years ago, the ramifications of the conflict in Ukraine will resonate widely for decades to come.
Following the well-worn path of writers who draw inspiration from Paris, I embarked on my own journey of words and ideas. What started as an exploration of asking why individuals like my friend choose to go into what Robert Graves describes as “No mere discord of flags / But an infection of the common sky / That sagged ominously upon the earth” shifted to the broader question of asking how to build a life once that’s behind.
Paris, 2023
We sat close on a chairlift moving up the southeast face of a high peak in the Rockies. It was a clear, bright day but the weather was unpleasant. A cold wind whipped up snow on the serrated ridge we headed towards and pushed delicate white sheets into the valley below. The sheets of snow hovered for a moment off to our left, glistening in the sunlight, and then disappeared.
I was wondering why the lift hadn’t been closed yet due to the high winds, and why my friend had wanted to venture up here in these conditions. We had left the fetid warming hut in a hurry, and my fingers were still numb from our last run.
As we ascended, we talked about our favorite characters in books.
“For me, it’s Robert Jordan,” I said, my voice muffled by a wool gaiter and contending with the whirring vibration of the cable overhead.
Robert Jordan, Hemingway’s protagonist in For Whom the Bell Tolls, is a Spanish teacher from Montana. He learns to handle explosives while building roads in the forest service in the summer.
When the Spanish Civil War breaks out, Robert Jordan travels to Spain to support the Republican side. The novel, set over a seventy-hour period in May 1937, describes an operation he leads to blow a bridge in the hills northwest of Madrid.
“Why did Robert Jordan go to Spain?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” I said in response to his question.
We had reached the crest of the ridge. Bar up.
“We can talk about it on the next one!” My friend shouted over the din of the upper terminal’s bullwheel.
We disembarked the lift and maneuvered left, into the thin wind. I quickly turned my skis down the mountain and cut two hard turns on the crusty slope, seeking cover from the raw cold while my friend strapped in. Even last night’s fresh snow couldn’t survive these conditions. My friend stooped low to tighten his straps, then hopped forward while twisting his body ninety degrees to turn his board downhill, and with a thumbs up we were off.
Why Did Robert Jordan Go to Spain?
The Spanish Civil War began in 1936 in the wake of a failed coup attempt. The war pitted the Nationalists (the Fascists, the instigators of the coup) against the Republicans (Leftist groups, those who supported the democratically elected government).
General Francisco Franco rose to power as the leader of the Nationalists. He had prominent dark eyebrows and a toothbrush mustache reminiscent of Hitler’s.
Although originally ambivalent to the coup attempt, Franco was ruthless in its aftermath. When he assumed command of the Spanish Army of Africa, he executed 200 senior officers loyal to the Republic, including his cousin, to quell any risk of mutiny within the ranks. During the war, he implored his ally Benito Mussolini to send bombing runs from a Mallorca-based squadron, which ultimately dropped fifty tons of incendiaries on Catalan civilian settlements in Barcelona.
“The bombers were high now, in fast ugly arrowheads beating the sky apart with the noise of their motors. "They are shaped like sharks," Robert Jordan thought. "The wide-finned, sharp-nosed sharks of the Gulf Stream. But these, wide-finned and silver, roaring, the light mist of their propellers in the sun, these do not move like sharks. They move like no thing there has ever been. They move like mechanized doom."
The US was wary of direct intervention. Leading up to and during the war, Congress passed three Neutrality Acts that sought to keep the US out of conflicts abroad. The country was focused on recovering from a protracted economic crisis and circumspect of the period’s fraught alliance landscape.
We meet Robert Jordan lying flat on his chest on a pine-needled forest floor with a military map laid out in front of him, his chin resting on his folded arms. From his position on the mountainside, he observes key terrain in the valley––a road, a mill, a stream.
The young, experienced dynamiter is described as tall and thin, with blond hair and a wind-and-sun-burned face, wearing peasant’s trousers and sandals. His back is sweaty from the pack he’s been carrying.
It is Very Healthy in the Open Air
Amidst the maelstrom of violence and horror of the Spanish Civil War, there is immense beauty in Hemingway’s description of the terrain and in the simplicity of the operation. When a General asks Robert Jordan whether he likes partisan activities he replies, “Very much. It is very healthy in the open air.”
“The night was clear and his head felt as clear and cold as the air. He smelled the odor of the pine boughs under him, the piney smell of the crushed needles and the sharper odor of the resinous sap from the cut limbs.”
We also begin to get a look at who Robert Jordan is as a soldier. Foundationally, he is an expert in his trade, having blown bridges of all sizes and conditions. And his thoughts reveal genuine fearlessness. At least at the beginning of the story, he appears to have nothing to lose.
We come to understand him as someone who thinks for himself, makes associations and connections that surprise and, at times, confound him, “What nonsense, he thought. What rot you get to thinking by yourself. That is really nonsense. And maybe it isn’t nonsense too. Well, we will see.”
What makes Robert Jordan a truly exceptional soldier is his ability to compartmentalize. While he initially critiques the efficacy of the mission, he is all-in when he agrees to participate. He contemplates the morality of the successful assassination that accompanies a demolition (“Do big words make it more defensible?”) and recognizes the humanity of the other side (“It is only orders that come between us”). And yet, he carries out those orders.
“He had only one thing to do and that was what he should think about and he must think it out clearly and take everything as it came along, and not worry. To worry was as bad as to be afraid. It simply made things more difficult.”
I first read For Whom the Bell Tolls while I was in Marine officer training.
I, too, appreciated the open air. I enjoyed having weight on my back and, in Hemingway’s words, “sweating heavily with thigh muscles twitching from the steepness of the climb.”
As I learned to shoot the machine gun, feet splayed behind me, peering through a scope at a dark, human-shaped silhouette target, the drone of the gun brought to mind Hemingway’s description of a máquina “speaking” into a line of enemy troops and the men falling, “Ta-tat-tat-at!” Would I, too, be able to compartmentalize my thoughts?
So why did Robert Jordan go to Spain?
I have two theories. The first is rather simple. The “obvious” one.
Robert Jordan had traveled in Spain extensively before the war and had come to love the land and the people. In the wake of fascism-fueled atrocities and violence in this country he loves, his cause becomes anti-fascism. For men like Robert Jordan, the cause supersedes the individual. He chooses to use his skill set, which he honed in the forest service in Montana, to support the cause, at any cost.
His comprehension of this cost transforms throughout the story; over the seventy hours during which the action takes place, he experiences beauty that he had not previously encountered or understood. His commitment to the cause, however, remains steadfast.
“If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”
I served alongside men and women like this. At least, I believe this is what drives them. As I reflect on my own choices, many have been rooted in a desire to be like this, too.
The second theory hinges on the idea that Robert Jordan’s position mirrors Hemingway’s. In 1936, Earnest Hemingway was bored. He was dealing with petty squabbles related to his publication of To Have and Have Not and his marriage with Pauline was falling apart. He shared with a friend, “I’ve got this nice boat and house in Key West –– but they’re both really Pauline’s. I could stay on here forever, but it’s a soft life.” He wondered if “the big parade” was starting again in Spain.
It was, and the drumbeat of war would reverberate for the next decade.
Hemingway’s experience in Spain clearly helped him break through a period of journalistic stagnation. At one point he reflected to F. Scott Fitzgerald that war is the best subject of all because it maximizes material and speeds up the action to bring together all sorts of stuff you normally would have to wait a lifetime to get.
“And what are you going to do afterwards,” [Robert Jordan] muses to himself at one point. “I am going back and earn my living teaching Spanish as before, and I am going to write a book. I’ll bet, he said. I’ll bet that will be easy.”
My peer group from Annapolis and Quantico joined the ranks after the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The generation of Marine officers before us produced great warrior poets––Phil Klay, Elliot Ackerman, Nate Fick, to name a few––whose work we devoured.
When I sit down to write, however, the sorts of stuff I can credibly and meaningfully describe are stories about skiing. Or about watching my favorite baseball team, the Rockies, of which I’ve spared you here.
Hemingway wrote about these subjects too in the interwar years (the Cards, not the Rockies). When the “big parade” started again, though, he was eager to go. What he found in the interim had not satisfied.
A Parade to March In
Earlier in 2023, I visited my grandparents. They live in San Carlos, California, a leafy suburb between Palo Alto and San Francisco. Years ago, my grandfather served as mayor.
The weekend of my visit coincided with the Hometown Days Parade. It’s a participatory parade, with more people in the procession than on the sidewalks lining Main Street.
We were in the heart of it, driving his 1970’s era pea-green Volkswagen Bus and representing the San Carlos Community Foundation. We lined up behind the middle school band’s tuba section and in front of Miss California runner-up, who stood waving on the backseat of a white, open-top Jeep.
“Mayor Tom!” people yelled from the sidewalk.
One forty-something-year-old man, wearing dark sunglasses and holding a latte, shook his head as we passed, murmuring, “Cool.” I marched in a lot of parades in Annapolis, but had never been called “Cool” in any of them.
When he moved to San Carlos half a century ago, my grandfather gathered a group of friends together to discuss ways they might improve the “Quality of Life” in the town. Over the years, he, my grandmother and their growing collection of friends opened a library, planted flowers, and organized a walking group.
Every morning, my grandfather picks up trash on Main Street. And then a few times a week he goes to the trailhead in the hills west of town and picks up dog poop.
Today there is the palpable sense of community in the town, which is a bit surprising given it’s situated in the heart of Silicon Valley. People are connected to one another by the little things my grandparents have devoted their lives to.
As we walked down Main Street after the parade, next to a set of white flower boxes my grandfather built and fixed atop an orange polycade traffic barrier, disguising the safety measure, a man greeted us. At some point, perhaps when he realized I had served in the Marines, the conversation turned to how neither he nor my grandfather had served in Vietnam.
Walking away, I could tell my grandfather was a little agitated. I wondered to myself, “Did he wish he had served in that ill-begotten war?” But I soon realized his agitation wasn’t related to Vietnam at all. For the life of him, he just couldn’t remember ever having met the guy. That’s what happens when you’re old and famous in a small town, when you’ve left a place better than you’ve found it.
The Big Parade
The practical optimism and excitement I felt during my year in Europe prior to reporting to Quantico emanated from an idea ––perpetuated by senior officers, the media, the “institution” –– that military service, and more broadly the act of engaging in armed conflict on behalf of a noble cause, was the pinnacle of living a purposeful life. Speaking to graduating midshipmen in 1963, President Kennedy said, "Any man who may be asked in this century what he did to make his life worthwhile, I think can respond with a good deal of pride and satisfaction: 'I served in the United States Navy.'"
This “pride and satisfaction” isn’t the whim of an 18-year old, but a strategic bedrock of a powerful nation. Lord Moran, Winston Churchill’s doctor who spent time in the trenches in WWI, writes, “Is the citizen full of pride and hot loyalty when he joins the army? Does it give him prestige among his fellow countrymen to be seen in uniform? The answers to those questions may determine victory. If we must answer no, we are sending a citizen army limping into battle.”
Returning home, particularly for the generation of servicemen and women who held the line but didn’t end up going to the front, we face a pivotal question of how to re-think this myopic view of what makes a purposeful life.
Perhaps it begins with an appreciation that the highest martial values we strived to exhibit – committing to a cause larger than oneself, taking care of the people around you, and persevering through obstacles – are not confined to the military subculture, but are essential to rejuvenating the fabric of our communities in the face of our common challenges and new anxieties.
For me, it also begins with a new parade to march in, even if just for a day, in a green volkswagen with my grandpa.
Returning Home
Eric Davids served as an Intelligence Officer in the Marines. Since leaving Active Duty, he's focused on developing and deploying solutions to the climate crisis. He lives in Denver, Colorado.
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