How does the author portray the true destruction of war without a drop of blood?

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...

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.