The civil war in Spain provoked deeper political thinking and involvement for Hemingway, and his political engagement shaped his writing about that war. Hemingway returned to his journalistic roots in the war reportage he wrote on the conflict, and experimented with dramatic form in his only play, The Fifth Column. In For Whom the Bell Tolls he absorbs, adapts, and rejects a romanticized view of the Spanish Civil War that had been developed and promulgated by European and American writers sympathetic (as Hemingway was) to the Spanish Republican cause, stripping from the realities of internecine conflict any potentially consoling significance of political commitment. The Second World War also drew Hemingway as a war correspondent (initially reluctant, he became an enthusiastic witness to, and even participant in, combat in France and Germany). On the basis of his wartime experience, he explored themes of forgiveness and grace in Across the River and into the Trees, a flawed novel whose purgatorial narrative is nevertheless an interesting experiment in fictional form.