As a man observes the movement of vehicles and civilians fleeing across the pontoon bridge from an anticipated enemy attack, he notices an old man sitting alone at the edge of the structure. After a conversation with the old man, he determines that he has just walked the twelve kilometres from his home village of San Carlos, but his immense tiredness has forced him to stop at the bridge. The old man’s duty is to take care of all the animals left behind in the village. It is obvious that the old man takes this responsibility very seriously, as he worries more about the animals that were under his care than for his own safety and tells this to the young man. Sadly, he explains, he was forced to leave the animals behind. The narrator suggests that the old man cross the bridge to the next crossroads, where he can catch a truck that will take him close to Barcelona, but the man explains that "I know no one in that direction." Although the correspondent cares about the old man, he looses hope when the and old man is unable to proceed, and decides that "there was nothing to do about him." The enemy would cross the bridge soon, and death appears to be close by for the old man.
This story demonstrates how people are often affected by things they can’t control such as the oncoming of War. It implicitly suggests that perhaps the ‘New World’ that was transforming America at that time in history, affected individuals and their desires to carry out their obligations, even though this story was not written about America. Hemingway himself was in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and actually had an encounter with an older gentleman at a bridge whereupon a similar conversation happened, and he used this as the basis for this short story. This story is based upon an Easter Sunday stopover at the Ebro river during Hemingway’s coverage of the Spanish Civil War in 1938 and uses an old man as a symbol of defeated liberal democracy not just in Spain, but all over the world.
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