This from early in chapter 42. Where Andres the guerrilla is trying desperately to get a message from Robert Jordan to Golz about calling off the attack. Mostly because of the language. But also as a technical matter, to note how he stitches global and individual perspective into same scene.
Now they went fast, swooping along the road that mounted steadily toward the mountain. All forward traffic had been stalled at the control and there were only the descending trucks passing, passing, and passing on their left as the motorcycle climbed fast and steadily now until it began to overtake the mounting traffic which had gone on ahead before the disaster at the control.
Still without lights they passed four more armored cars, then a long line of trucks loaded with troops. The troops were silent in the dark and at first Andres only felt their presence rising above him, bulking above the truck bodies through the dust as they passed. Then another staff came behind them blasting with its klaxon and flicking its lights off and on, and each time the lights shone Andres saw the troops, steel-helmeted, their rifles vertical, their machine guns pointed up against the dark sky, etched sharp against the night that they dropped into when the light flicked off. Once as he passed close to a troop truck and the lights flashed he saw their faces fixed and sad in the sudden light. In their steel helmets, riding in the trucks in the dark toward something that they only knew was an attack, their faces were drawn with each man’s own problem in the dark and the light revealed them as they would not have looked in day, from shame to show it to each other, until the bombardment and the attack would commence, and no man would think about his face.
Andres now passing them truck after truck , Gomez still keeping successfully ahead of the following staff car, did not think any of this about their faces. He only thought, “What an army. What equipment. What a mechanization. Vaya genre! Look at such people. Here we have the army of the Republic. Look at them. Camion after camion. All uniformed alike. All with casques of steel on their heads. Look at the aquinas rising from the trucks against the coming of planes. Look at the army that has been builded!”
Science & Story 