"But with or without God, I think it is a sin to kill.
To take the life of another is to me very grave. I will do it when necessary but I am not of the race of Pablo."
Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls

Soldier Being Struck by Bullet
SPANISH LOYALIST AT THE INSTANT OF DEATH
by Robert Capra, 1936

      "You have killed?" Robert Jordan asked in the intimacy of the dark of their day together.

      "Yes. Several times. But not with pleasure. To me it is a sin to kill a man. Even Fascists whom we must kill. No. I am against the killing of men."

      "Yet you have killed."

      "Yes. And will again. But if I live later, I will try to live in such a way, doing no harm to any one, that it will be forgiven."

      "By whom?"

      "Who knows? Since we do not have God here any more, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know."

      "You have not God anymore?"

      "No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my own eyes. Let them have God."

      "They claim Him."

      "Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself."

      "Then it is thyself who will forgive thee for killing."

      "I believe so," Anselmo said. "Since you put it clearly in that way I believe that must be it. But with or without God, I think it is a sin to kill. To take the life of another is to me very grave. I will do it when necessary but I am not of the race of Pablo."

      "To win we must kill our enemies. That has always been true."

      "Clearly. In war we must kill. But I have very rare ideas," Anselmo said.

      They were walking now close together in the dark and he spoke softly, sometimes turning his head as he climbed. "I would not kill even a Bishop. I would not kill a proprietor of any kind. I would make them work in the fields and as we work in the mountains with the timber, all of the rest of their lives. So they would see what man is born to. They should sleep where we sleep. That they should eat as we eat. But above all that they should work. Thus they would learn."

      "And they would survive to enslave thee again."

      "To kill them teaches nothing," Anselmo said, "You cannot exterminate them because from their seed comes more with greater hatred. Prison is nothing. Prison only makes hatred. That all our enemies should learn."