The story shows how war destroys and upends lives without having to shed blood. It opens with a picture of the dusty men, women, and children, along with their mule-drawn carts, displaced from their homes by the Spanish Civil war, crossing a bridge as refugees:
There was a pontoon bridge across the river and carts, trucks, and men, women and children were crossing it. The mule- drawn carts staggered up the steep bank from the bridge with soldiers helping push against the spokes of the wheels. The trucks ground up and away heading out of it all and the peasants plodded along in the ankle deep dust.
Being forced to flee from one's home, maybe never to return, or to return to ruins, is a way war can bring destruction into the lives of ordinary people.
The old man's worries about the fate of his vulnerable animals also shows the damage wrought by war. The man's cats may run away and his birds fly away from the cage he has left open, but to what fate? How will they survive? The old man must carry with him anxiety and pain about the well-being of the animals that he has been forced to leave behind in a dangerous war zone, saying:
A cat can look out for itself, but I cannot think what will become of the others.
The story shows how war reaches into and harms the lives of people and animals that are not a part of the fighting and have no idea what the carnage is about.
In Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man at the Bridge,” there is only a single moment of happiness, and even that is infused with violence and destruction. When the soldier asks the old man where he came from, the old man answers:
“From San Carlos,” he said, and smiled.
That was his native town and so it gave him pleasure to mention it and he smiled.
The irony, of course, is that this old man “with very dusty clothes” has been driven from San Carlos by the artillery. His concern is no longer for himself but instead for the collection of animals he was forced to leave behind during his evacuation. Although the old man is, by his own description, “without politics,” they are still upon him, and the violence they wreak is visible through both the language employed by the short story as well as the man's foreshadowed death.
“The Old Man at the Bridge” is an incredibly short story, and the dialogue that makes it up can be described as compressed. The bloodshed that exists just at the margins of the story has reduced the interaction between the old man and the soldier to something transactional. The two speak in the briefest of sentences, and it is rare for any spoken sentence to be more than six or seven words.
Ultimately, the soldier recognizes that the old man’s fate is more or less sealed. While bloodshed remains outside of the page itself, the final passage makes clear that the soldier believes that the old man’s death is impending:
There was nothing to do about him. It was Easter Sunday and the Fascists were advancing toward the Ebro. It was a gray overcast day with a low ceiling so their planes were not up. That and the fact that cats know how to look after themselves was all the good luck that old man would ever have.
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