Compulsory military service

Compulsory military service is presented both as state power imposed on an individual and as a weapon that a powerful man can bend toward private vengeance. For Daniel Sempere, a notice requiring him to serve in two months makes freedom suddenly measurable; for Julián Carax, conscription becomes part of Don Ricardo Aldaya’s plot to get him out of Barcelona and expose him to a supposedly accidental death.

The notice to Daniel

A concise military letter informs Daniel that, in two months, he is to serve what it calls the sacred duty of defending the Motherland and the West. The grand, self-congratulatory rhetoric clashes with Daniel’s response: he already knows what the letter says, but opens it anyway, as if lingering over the bad news might deepen his misery. He reduces the deadline to eight weeks and then to 5,184,000 seconds of freedom, making the approaching obligation feel like time running out rather than an abstract national duty.

The notice also tightens Daniel’s personal anxieties. He hopes that Fermín will find a comic way to make him laugh about the summons, and wonders whether Don Federico could build him a clock with brakes. But the thought he cannot joke away is how he will avoid losing Bea forever. Military service thus arrives not as an isolated administrative inconvenience but as a threat to the future Daniel wants to preserve.

Conscription as a weapon

The novel also reveals a darker use of military service in Julián’s story. After learning that Julián and Penélope are lovers, Don Ricardo arranges, in collaboration with the hatter, to have Julián removed from Barcelona and sent into the army. Aldaya has given orders that Julián should meet an “accidental” death there. Conscription is no longer merely a general obligation: in Aldaya’s hands, it becomes a way to make a planned killing look like chance.

That scheme belongs to a wider attempt to control the consequences of the lovers’ relationship. Don Ricardo has Penélope confined, bars almost everyone from seeing her, and seeks to send Julián away; the separate acts of coercion are bound together by his determination to control both young people. Julián escapes the fate Aldaya intended for him, but the intended military “accident” shows how readily an official institution can be made to serve private power.

Significance

These two episodes place the same institution in sharply different lights. Daniel receives a formal summons framed in patriotic language and experiences it as a countdown that may separate him from Bea. Julián’s conscription is arranged by an influential antagonist as a concealed death sentence. The contrast exposes the distance between the public language of duty and the private uses of force: compulsory service can impose a real cost on the person called up, while those with power may manipulate that obligation to pursue their own ends.