On the American Dead in Spain

by Ernest Hemingway

The dead sleep cold in Spain tonight. Snow blows through the olive groves,

silting against the tree roots. Snow drifts over the mounds with the small

headboards. (When there was time for headboards.) The olive trees are thin in

the cold wind because their lower branches were once cut to cover tanks, and

the dead sleep cold in the small hills above the Jarama River. It was cold that

February when they died and since then the dead have not noticed the changes

of the seasons.

It is two years now since the Lincoln Battalion held for four and a half months

along the heights of the Jarama, and the first American dead have been a part of

the earth for a long time now.

The dead sleep cold in Spain tonight and will sleep cold all this winter as the

earth sleeps with them. But in the spring the rain will come to make the earth

kind again. The wind will blow soft over the hills from the south. The black

trees will come to life with small green leaves, and there will be blossoms on

the apple trees along the Jarama River. This spring the dead will feel the earth

beginning to live again.

For our dead are a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can

never die. Each winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive

again. Our dead will live with it forever.

Just as the earth can never die, neither will those who have ever been free

return to slavery. The peasants who work the earth where our dead lie know

what these dead died for. There was time during the war for them to learn

these things, and there is forever for them to remember them in.

Our dead live in the hearts and minds of the Spanish peasants, of the Spanish

workers, of all the good simple honest people who believed in and fought for

the Spanish Republic. And as long as all our dead live in the Spanish earth, and

they will live as long as the earth lives, no system of tyranny ever will prevail

in Spain.

The fascists may spread over the land, blasting their way with weight of metal

brought from other countries. They may advance aided by traitors and by

cowards. They may destroy cities and villages and try to hold the people in

slavery. But you cannot hold any people in slavery.

The Spanish people will rise again as they have always risen before against

tyranny.

The dead do not need to rise. They are a part of the earth now and the earth can

never be conquered. For the earth endureth forever. It will outlive all systems

of tyranny.

Those who have entered it honorably, and no men ever entered earth more

honorably than those who died in Spain, already have achieved immortality.

A previously unreleased tape of Hemingway reading his famous eulogy

to the American dead has now been published:

Cary Nelson, ed., Remembering Spain: Hemingway’s

Civil War Eulogy and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 1994).

To borrow this tape via Inter-Library Loan, contact: ALBA, Brandeis University,

Box LII, Waltham, MA 02254. Fax: (617) 736-4675.