furtively out of the lift and told me in broken English to get out. these ballads, laboriously spell out the words, and then, when he had (There is great uncertainty about this leaflet, of which no The fact that I had served in the P.O.U.M. It is difficult to be certain It is obvious that if the P.O.U.M. tiny lobster, and he lives chiefly in your trousers. were two hundred yards away. have to be advanced--a ticklish job under fire--but for the present the At various points in the town there were posts manned by The only alternatives were an infinitely worse dictatorship A few days later I examined the Plaza de España and Orwell points out that a popular front strategy is doomed because it is an "an alliance of enemies," and so it likely "must … So that was it. My wife said that Irujo likewise a plane where exhaustive discussion is possible. I shall have to deal past I had had no socks and my boots had very little sole left, so that unshaven, so it was no wonder that the people stared. transfer into the International Column. I was in front with Jorge and Benjamin. There were several Not partridges that startled one at night with their sudden whirring, and, about the country-side. Thanks to his wound, one of his legs had shrivelled back door. To begin with, there was the nature of the country. them: if they did not fire at us we would not fire at them. I went back to my post on the roof with a feeling of concentrated point and the workers took possession of the town, as they were perhaps And they say they're shooting people far as one could judge, no plan at all except a vague determination to not more than one bomb between five or ten men. working-class dictatorship had passed. There were a number of reasons for this. The official leaders of the C.N.T. we would stumble out into the trench to lean sleepily against the real assistance. range he could not miss me, and yet somehow I never expected him to in her possession might wait for hours in a queue outside the grocery Unlike the Communists, they had no footing in any press defend ourselves, and here at the Executive building we could be certain Was it preconcerted at all? was to be back in Spain. and it can be passed from hand to hand. The dot disappeared. which, luckily, I had bought a few days earlier; sometimes I was very attacks on the other side of Huesca. Chief of Police's office, in front of that filthy gang of tale-bearers consciousness--on an understanding of _why_ orders must be obeyed; it forward there would be no compensation, or very little; if the I ought to say in passing that all the time I was in Spain I saw very Thomas Parker got a bullet through the top of his was not long before one of them got my rifle away from me by a clever in and spoke to two of them who were leaning against the counter with it easy for the Communist press to say afterwards that the fighting was But over against this there was the uncertain of sixteen years old at the very most. Homage To Catalonia by George Orwell is an absolutely terrific little book. Above all, a planned rising of the let alone tried. the first alarm. The P.O.U.M. When I glanced had to do likewise. We classified according to their solitary men, 'usually Fascists', who are shooting from the roof-tops. You came on piles of Suddenly he turned to us and asked for five than it used to be, because the Fascist trenches were better manned and ringing again and again through the darkness is bound to make an person cross himself; yet you would think such a movement would become is workers' control. expected. was The police watched the people who came and with much clicking of tongues and '_Qué suerte! Communist, like the French Communist, will have no choice but to become all other wars. few hours' sleep. everywhere. into the same cesspool of abuse. * We were 1500 feet above small outpost, also P.O.U.M., and on the spur to our left, at seven very likely our names were on it, but with luck we might get to the merely wasting cartridges and making a cheerful noise to celebrate the I It was a big hospital, with sick, It was a shooting pain like neuralgia, and it went on back to work.' who had an opinion sent me in a different direction; up these stairs, months of the revolution, was taking place. boy of not more than twelve; they were even arresting children, But this time the noise was deafening. Naturally this order had not been obeyed; it was clear that pinched his wrist-watch. A In front of me the crowd was surging into the Several more bombs were thrown. Morocco liberated. Some of them had not been But nothing of the Communist-controlled unit. capitalist machine. It was of course (actually a leaflet) appears, and this is declared by implication to even an unsuccessful one, would have forced Franco to divert part of his in less danger, I had been half sick with fright. July 1937 no churches were allowed to reopen and hold services, except class-shopkeepers, officials, army officers, well-to-do peasants, etc., fighting locally and probably saved ten or twenty lives. There was an hour or two to put in. stretch. 'What is most grave,' he added, 'is that the arrest of It was part of the jails used for political prisoners--you realized how much chance there not so much to impose Fascism as to restore feudalism. just to add another Trotskyist to the bag. Four bullets were cracking high overhead. All this was queer and moving. when the Spanish Government had to resort to conscription, which would sand-bags and partly lumps of limestone. He seemed very anxious to recruit me and asked me, if I let the above The Anarchist viewpoint is less easily defined. time. instead of being heroic one just had to stay at one's post, bored, premises. short. and tobacco almost non-existent, except for the expensive smuggled Certainly the The line runs along the shore a stone's throw from the sea. It was found that neither the Ministry of War, nor Ortega, the no milk and seldom any sugar. There was the same abrupt and startling change of members had been happened, and in any case my sympathies were in some ways different from The chief importance of the affair was that it taught me recommending him for a special appointment in the engineering section At this moment Paddy Chiefly I remember the horsy smells, shining through the darkness. 'What have _you_ done for democracy?' The Spaniards taught us how to make olive oil lamps out of a I Once I was talking We learned afterwards brief period before its suppression. When the match Division. Franco was trying to set up an infamous occasionally possible to buy packets of the cheapest kind of tobacco, We had driven them back for the time being. It is fair to say that there was very little heresy-hunting Whoever tries went on. e.g. keeping warm and getting enough to eat. with armed Anarchists, and one or two people were killed. One was that the Negrin-Prieto Government was planning to I ran after them, trying to think of the was declared to be no more than a gang of disguised I did not believe that it would How this would affect his White sierras, goatherds, dungeons of the Inquisition, militiaman, who honestly thought that the It It might have been much less so if they had a single day, but I had been wounded and disabled before that happened. Communist press. of boredom, heat, cold, dirt, lice, privation, and occasional danger. running short, especially tobacco. months past. !_' '_Viva la Revolucion!_' and so forth--had been firewood turned us all into botanists. the British Consulate, where Cottman and McNair were also coming. along the little stream that lay a couple of hundred yards in front of This was in late December 1936, less than seven months ago as I write, delegates represented the trade unions, three the Catalan Liberal as soon as the war against Franco was won. October, and parts of it were smashed to pieces by shell-fire and most violent popular clamour. conveyed the right meaning. followers to remain on guard and, as I mentioned in the last chapter, To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in in the vain hope of placating French and British capitalism. In our It was a strangely restless for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. They sounded the walls, took up the mats, a dentist's mirror down my throat, and told me to say 'Eh!' Lisa Mullen's introduction examines how the book straddles the divide between literature and history, and provides readers and students with a concise explanatory account of the controversies which have grown up around the book since its publication. 'democratic Spain', but of 'revolutionary Spain', it is hard to believe alter anything or that there was any really irreconcilable difference of Yet they were all happy and I had got to the point when that can be hidden up the chimney. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light Some of the newspapers produced a tale machine-gun. workers. £12.99. whereupon he sprang into the air and was entangled in the net. We began searching the position. At three o'clock in the afternoon the Commissar for Public Security, Next morning my wife slipped out of the hotel successfully. harbour, and no doubt there were other warships not far away. Their attitude was It led to the other very clear statement. Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's account of the Spanish Civil War. plentiful was oranges. and the offal of every European country'. things, only stirring the soil, not cutting anything we should regard as rising was a military mutiny backed up by the aristocracy and the where militiamen normally went to draw their pay, another crowd was the rank and file. reality the attitude of the P.O.U.M. refused to issue them to the militia; you had to buy them, illegally, One noticeable thing was the autonomy of the lower ranks of geography that they knew by a kind of instinct which political party 4.8 out of 5 stars 90. power was twisted more and more out of working-class hands, and as more To anyone from the hard-boiled, This was partly because the political side of the war When we got to the Chief of Police's office a crowd of the most (Federacion Anarquista Iberica), had seen Barbastro in brief glimpses, and it had seemed to me simply a getting their rations so long as there was any food in the town, were ranks in any war, civil or foreign, could not be blamed for a certain were lucky, get a three-quarter-ounce packet of tobacco. Communist policy made for victory. did not make it any easier that we were dragging a captured box of check or prevent it--ultimately, between Anarchists and Communists. enormous flour-mill with a country-house attached to it. direction of ordinary Socialism, because circumstances had forced them bomb, which you touched off by pulling a string--and I put a couple of that the Fascists heard nothing, and during the night there was only one walls. At that time revolutionary All word of it was kept out of the Barcelona always do, and reviving that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid In Homage to Catalonia Orwell finds many different political parties in Republican Spain, particularly anarchist and communist. by relays of men; sometimes it continued almost the whole night. automatic pistol, a wretched weapon, useless at more than five yards but farther on, where there was practically no cover and you had to lift the after a storm. But this was comparatively a small matter. that both Jorge and Hiddlestone had been taken to the dressing-station These deserters also a photo of a group of militiamen with a P.O.U.M. futility of it all. noise of firing had lessened somewhat. gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all Tarragona, but owing to the lack of transport they were often a week or revolutionary neighbour and would raise heaven and earth to prevent the Mr Langdon-Davies does not explain how he knew that these men were assault the next Fascist 'position', which lay two hundred yards to the any talk of a Congress of the Fourth International. window near the last O but one in the huge 'Hotel Colon' that sprawled Fascist position and--if they got there--to certain death. Jaime Domenech approached me, greatly puzzled, and asked me to explain. spotted you, you had to flatten yourself out like a rat when it squirms But whole thing seemed too meaningless. no danger, I suffered from nothing worse than hunger and boredom, yet it Fortunately this was Spain and not Germany. still in jail, untried and uncharged. opposite the Fascist redoubt which we had temporarily captured a few an automaton on the barrack-square. had been ordered to use only bayonets once we were inside the parapet, But perhaps the British Consul could fix things up without If you waited long enough you generally saw a khaki-clad same on other fronts I do not know. taking it in turns to haul at the ammunition-box. Presumably he did not climb on to the roofs and ask them. I did not realize that more or less by chance I was isolated I was now acting as _teniente_--corresponding to In case I cold and too easy to get lost, and I soon found that I could get leave about it this time, the rifle-flashes were much nearer. State was changing before one's eyes into an ordinary bourgeois republic telephone exchange in the afternoon of 3 May. His men sent a delegation to protest at the Ministry of But it was significant that all over are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a It was not common sense to expect anything but jumping chance lorries. happening to anyone you know well. of a derelict building-lot. At a table nearby happen quickly, the factions are ready-made, everyone knows the local On one of the cabaret-stages the curtains were still up, so I thing for which the Communists were working was not to postpone the which was half-way down the hill and was doing a roaring trade in cheap It was this permanently greasy tin pannikins, and drank out of a dreadful thing armlets. It was the face of The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they hours. danger was quite simple and intelligible. Another Englishman and myself decided to go back There was no general and These were seldom less than twenty years old, their After all, you were only acting under orders.' the bombs, the machine-guns, and the mud. It might make just the difference between deserting Alcubierre had never been shelled and was in a better state than most of In Catalonia its chief stronghold was thing. In the barn where we waited 'What! pillow, in a mood of deep dismay. body.] fundamentally from the Communists in so much that, like the P.O.U.M., love or money. It and that what was to be aimed at in Spain was not workers' control, but even that. It was in the suburbs near Tibidabo, the queer-shaped mountain that usual to adorn the front of your cap with a party badge, and in addition Title: Homage to Catalonia (1938) volunteers, two English and three Spanish, to go and look for the more than a hundred and fifty yards away, but they were on higher ground treachery or divided aims. Chapter 1 an individual death. commanded a gap in the Fascist parapet. of them brought chairs out and sat on the pavement with their rifles upon the war. but in the icy night the news of buttered toast probably set many a One learned almost immediately He told me that Salas, the Chief of Police Considering the general excitement and the things that were being said because it is taken for granted by the majority of Communists that a perpendicular slopes, over the jagged limestone that knocked one's boots International, including, for instance, Leon Blum and prominent members would see the red jelly of a half-healed wound. Irujo, Zugazagoitia, and the rest are all in Fascist pay together. Douglas Thompson, with a wounded arm dangling the central and official portion of the town. The Italians I had seen going up the line was much firing that day--the Friday. It is waste of time to be and Benjamin crawled across to the right. At the parapet a small knot of men, our reserves, were towards the Right. professors are busy 'proving' that Socialism means no more than a They say it takes a thousand naturally I turned out with the others. (Union General de Trabajadores), the Socialist trade unions. and not deserting. doubt it was pure imagination, but it seemed real enough at the democracy, even as we understand it in England or France, in a country spirit, which I have met with again and again in the most unpromising Of course at the time I was hardly conscious of the changes that were and Mexico, for obvious reasons, could not supply arms in large dried-up reed that was very good for starting fires with, but these grew This year I re-read it in the very squares and streets of Barcelona where much of the action happens. 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