How does Orwell – as an outsider – navigate the ideas and realities of war in Spain? Does his perspective provide any unique insights into the character of the Spanish Civil War? And finally why, according to Orwell, does fascism triumph?

pdf file of the book and prompt is attached 

Homage to Catalonia
by George Orwell
Styled by LimpidSoft

http://www.limpidsoft.com

Contents
Chapter 1 5
Chapter 2 12
Chapter 3 17
Chapter 4 26
Chapter 5 31
Chapter 6 46
Chapter 7 54
Chapter 8 63
Chapter 9 67
Chapter 10 74
Chapter 11 91
Chapter 12 108
Chapter 13 117
Chapter 14 128
2

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CONTENTS
Answer not a fool according to his folly,
lest thou be like unto him.
Answer a fool according to his folly,
lest he be wise in his own conceit.
–Proverbs XXVI. 5-6
4

Chapter 1
In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian
militiaman standing in front of the officers’ table.
He was a tough-looking youth of twenty-five or six, with reddish-yellow hair and
powerful shoulders. His peaked leather cap was pulled fiercely over one eye. He
was standing in profile to me, his chin on his breast, gazing with a puzzled frown
at a map which one of the officers had open on the table. Something in his face
deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw
away his life for a friend–the kind of face you would expect in an Anarchist, though
as likely as not he was a Communist. There were both candour and ferocity in it;
also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors.
Obviously he could not make head or tail of the map; obviously he regarded map-
reading as a stupendous intellectual feat. I hardly know why, but I have seldom seen
anyone–any man, I mean–to whom I have taken such an immediate liking. While
they were talking round the table some remark brought it out that I was a foreigner.
The Italian raised his head and said quickly:
’Italiano?’
I answered in my bad Spanish: ’No, Inglés. Y tú?’
’Italiano.’
As we went out he stepped across the room and gripped my hand very hard.
Queer, the affection you can feel for a stranger! It was as though his spirit and mine
had momentarily succeeded in bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meet-
ing in utter intimacy. I hoped he liked me as well as I liked him. But I also knew that
to retain my first impression of him I must not see him again; and needless to say I
never did see him again. One was always making contacts of that kind in Spain.
I mention this Italian militiaman because he has stuck vividly in my memory. With
his shabby uniform and fierce pathetic face he typifies for me the special atmosphere
of that time. He is bound up with all my memories of that period of the war–the
red flags in Barcelona, the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers creeping to the front,
the grey war-stricken towns farther up the line, the muddy, ice-cold trenches in the
mountains.
This was in late December 1936, less than seven months ago as I write, and yet
it is a period that has already receded into enormous distance. Later events have
5

CHAPTER 1
obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or 1905, for
that matter. I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles,
but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that
atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in
virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who
had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January
that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England
the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first
time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.
Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was
draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall
was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolution-
ary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches
here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Ev-
ery shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the
bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters
and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and
even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ’Señor’
or ’Don’ or even ’Usted’; everyone called everyone else ’Comrade’ and ’Thou’, and
said ’Salud!’ instead of ’Buenos días’. Tipping was forbidden by law since the time
of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel
manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all
been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport
were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming
from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements
look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town
where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bel-
lowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of
the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town
in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small num-
ber of women and foreigners there were no ’well-dressed’ people at all. Practically
everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the
militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not
understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a
state of affairs worth fighting for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared,
that this was really a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled,
been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers’ side; I did not realize that great
numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves
as proletarians for the time being.
Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The
town had a gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings were in poor repair, the streets
at night were dimly lit for fear of air-raids, the shops were mostly shabby and half-
empty. Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there was a shortage of
coal, sugar, and petrol, and a really serious shortage of bread. Even at this period
the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards long. Yet so far as one could judge
the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price
of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people,
6

CHAPTER 1
and no beggars except the gipsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution
and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and
freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs
in the capitalist machine. In the barbers’ shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers
were mostly Anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves. In
the streets were coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes.
To anyone from the hard-boiled, sneering civilization of the English-speaking races
there was something rather pathetic in the literalness with which these idealistic
Spaniards took the hackneyed phrases of revolution. At that time revolutionary bal-
lads of the naivest kind, all about proletarian brotherhood and the wickedness of
Mussolini, were being sold on the streets for a few centimes each. I have often seen
an illiterate militiaman buy one of these ballads, laboriously spell out the words, and
then, when he had got the hang of it, begin singing it to an appropriate tune.
All this time I was at the Lenin Barracks, ostensibly in training for the front. When
I joined the militia I had been told that I should be sent to the front the next day,
but in fact I had to wait while a fresh centuria was got ready. The workers’ militias,
hurriedly raised by the trade unions at the beginning of the war, had not yet been
organized on an ordinary army basis. The units of command were the ’section’, of
about thirty men, the centuria, of about a hundred men, and the ’column’, which in
practice meant any large number of men. The Lenin Barracks was a block of splendid
stone buildings with a riding-school and enormous cobbled courtyards; it had been a
cavalry barracks and had been captured during the July fighting. My centuria slept in
one of the stables, under the stone mangers where the names of the cavalry chargers
were still inscribed. All the horses had been seized and sent to the front, but the
whole place still smelt of horse-piss and rotten oats. I was at the barracks about a
week. Chiefly I remember the horsy smells, the quavering bugle-calls (all our buglers
were amateurs–I first learned the Spanish bugle-calls by listening to them outside
the Fascist lines), the tramp-tramp of hobnailed boots in the barrack yard, the long
morning parades in the wintry sunshine, the wild games of football, fifty a side, in
the gravelled riding-school. There were perhaps a thousand men at the barracks,
and a score or so of women, apart from the militiamen’s wives who did the cooking.
There were still women serving in the militias, though not very many. In the early
battles they had fought side by side with the men as a matter of course. It is a thing
that seems natural in time of revolution. Ideas were changing already, however. The
militiamen had to be kept out of the riding-school while the women were drilling
there because they laughed at the women and put them off. A few months earlier no
one would have seen anything comic in a woman handling a gun.
The whole barracks was in the state of filth and chaos to which the militia reduced
every building they occupied and which seems to be one of the by-products of rev-
olution. In every corner you came upon piles of smashed furniture, broken saddles,
brass cavalry-helmets, empty sabre-scabbards, and decaying food. There was fright-
ful wastage of food, especially bread. From my barrack-room alone a basketful of
bread was thrown away at every meal–a disgraceful thing when the civilian pop-
ulation was short of it. We ate at long trestle-tables out of permanently greasy tin
pannikins, and drank out of a dreadful thing called a porrón. A porrón is a sort of
glass bottle with a pointed spout from which a thin jet of wine spurts out whenever
you tip it up; you can thus drink from a distance, without touching it with your lips,
7

CHAPTER 1
and it can be passed from hand to hand. I went on strike and demanded a drinking-
cup as soon as I saw a porrón in use. To my eye the things were altogether too like
bed-bottles, especially when they were filled with white wine.
By degrees they were issuing the recruits with uniforms, and because this was
Spain everything was issued piecemeal, so that it was never quite certain who had re-
ceived what, and various of the things we most needed, such as belts and cartridge-
boxes, were not issued till the last moment, when the train was actually waiting to
take us to the front. I have spoken of the militia ’uniform’, which probably gives a
wrong impression. It was not exactly a uniform. Perhaps a ’multiform’ would be
the proper name for it. Everyone’s clothes followed the same general plan, but they
were never quite the same in any two cases. Practically everyone in the army wore
corduroy knee-breeches, but there the uniformity ended. Some wore puttees, oth-
ers corduroy gaiters, others leather leggings or high boots. Everyone wore a zipper
jacket, but some of the jackets were of leather, others of wool and of every conceiv-
able colour. The kinds of cap were about as numerous as their wearers. It was usual
to adorn the front of your cap with a party badge, and in addition nearly every man
wore a red or red and black handkerchief round his throat. A militia column at that
time was an extraordinary-looking rabble. But the clothes had to be issued as this or
that factory rushed them out, and they were not bad clothes considering the circum-
stances. The shirts and socks were wretched cotton things, however, quite useless
against cold. I hate to think of what the militiamen must have gone through in the
earlier months before anything was organized. I remember coming upon a news-
paper of only about two months earlier in which one of the P.O.U.M. leaders, after
a visit to the front, said that he would try to see to it that ’every militiaman had a
blanket’. A phrase to make you shudder if you have ever slept in a trench.
On my second day at the barracks there began what was comically called ’instruc-
tion’. At the beginning there were frightful scenes of chaos. The recruits were mostly
boys of sixteen or seventeen from the back streets of Barcelona, full of revolutionary
ardour but completely ignorant of the meaning of war. It was impossible even to
get them to stand in line. Discipline did not exist; if a man disliked an order he
would step out of the ranks and argue fiercely with the officer. The lieutenant who
instructed us was a stout, fresh-faced, pleasant young man who had previously been
a Regular Army officer, and still looked like one, with his smart carriage and spick-
and-span uniform. Curiously enough he was a sincere and ardent Socialist. Even
more than the men themselves he insisted upon complete social equality between all
ranks. I remember his pained surprise when an ignorant recruit addressed him as
’Señor’. ’What! Señor? Who is that calling me Señor? Are we not all comrades?’ I
doubt whether it made his job any easier. Meanwhile the raw recruits were getting
no military training that could be of the slightest use to them. I had been told that
foreigners were not obliged to attend ’instruction’ (the Spaniards, I noticed, had a
pathetic belief that all foreigners knew more of military matters than themselves),
but naturally I turned out with the others. I was very anxious to learn how to use a
machine-gun; it was a weapon I had never had a chance to handle. To my dismay
I found that we were taught nothing about the use of weapons. The so-called in-
struction was simply parade-ground drill of the most antiquated, stupid kind; right
turn, left turn, about turn, marching at attention in column of threes and all the rest
of that useless nonsense which I had learned when I was fifteen years old. It was an
8

CHAPTER 1
extraordinary form for the training of a guerilla army to take. Obviously if you have
only a few days in which to train a soldier, you must teach him the things he will
most need; how to take cover, how to advance across open ground, how to mount
guards and build a parapet–above all, how to use his weapons. Yet this mob of eager
children, who were going to be thrown into the front line in a few days’ time, were
not even taught how to fire a rifle or pull the pin out of a bomb. At the time I did not
grasp that this was because there were no weapons to be had. In the P.O.U.M. militia
the shortage of rifles was so desperate that fresh troops reaching the front always
had to take their rifles from the troops they relieved in the line. In the whole of the
Lenin Barracks there were, I believe, no rifles except those used by the sentries.
After a few days, though still a complete rabble by any ordinary standard, we were
considered fit to be seen in public, and in the mornings we were marched out to the
public gardens on the hill beyond the Plaza de España. This was the common drill-
ground of all the party militias, besides the Carabineros and the first contingents
of the newly formed Popular Army. Up in the public gardens it was a strange and
heartening sight. Down every path and alley-way, amid the formal flower-beds,
squads and companies of men marched stiffly to and fro, throwing out their chests
and trying desperately to look like soldiers. All of them were unarmed and none
completely in uniform, though on most of them the militia uniform was breaking out
in patches here and there. The procedure was always very much the same. For three
hours we strutted to and fro (the Spanish marching step is very short and rapid),
then we halted, broke the ranks, and flocked thirstily to a little grocer’s shop which
was half-way down the hill and was doing a roaring trade in cheap wine. Everyone
was very friendly to me. As an Englishman I was something of a curiosity, and the
Carabinero officers made much of me and stood me drinks. Meanwhile, whenever
I could get our lieutenant into a corner, I was clamouring to be instructed in the use
of a machine-gun. I used to drag my Hugo’s dictionary out of my pocket and start
on him in my villainous Spanish:
’Yo sé manejar fusil. No sé manejar ametralladora. Quiero apprender ametralladora.
Quándo vamos apprender ametralladora?’
The answer was always a harassed smile and a promise that there should be
machine-gun instruction mañana. Needless to say mañana never came. Several days
passed and the recruits learned to march in step and spring to attention almost
smartly, but if they knew which end of a rifle the bullet came out of, that was all
they knew. One day an armed Carabinero strolled up to us when we were halting
and allowed us to examine his rifle. It turned out that in the whole of my section no
one except myself even knew how to load the rifle, much less how to take aim.
All this time I was having the usual struggles with the Spanish language. Apart
from myself there was only one Englishman at the barracks, and nobody even among
the officers spoke a word of French. Things were not made easier for me by the fact
that when my companions spoke to one another they generally spoke in Catalan.
The only way I could get along was to carry everywhere a small dictionary which I
whipped out of my pocket in moments of crisis. But I would sooner be a foreigner
in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain! Within a
day or two there was a score of militiamen who called me by my Christian name,
showed me the ropes, and overwhelmed me with hospitality. I am not writing a
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CHAPTER 1
book of propaganda and I do not want to idealize the P.O.U.M. militia. The whole
militia-system had serious faults, and the men themselves were a mixed lot, for by
this time voluntary recruitment was falling off and many of the best men were al-
ready at the front or dead. There was always among us a certain percentage who
were completely useless. Boys of fifteen were being brought up for enlistment by
their parents, quite openly for the sake of the ten pesetas a day which was the mili-
tiaman’s wage; also for the sake of the bread which the militia received in plenty
and could smuggle home to their parents. But I defy anyone to be thrown as I was
among the Spanish working class–I ought perhaps to say the Catalan working class,
for apart from a few Aragónese and Andalusians I mixed only with Catalans–and
not be struck by their essential decency; above all, their straightforwardness and
generosity. A Spaniard’s generosity, in the ordinary sense of the word, is at times
almost embarrassing. If you ask him for a cigarette he will force the whole packet
upon you. And beyond this there is generosity in a deeper sense, a real largeness
of spirit, which I have met with again and again in the most unpromising circum-
stances. Some of the journalists and other foreigners who travelled in Spain during
the war have declared that in secret the Spaniards were bitterly jealous of foreign
aid. All I can say is that I never observed anything of the kind. I remember that a
few days before I left the barracks a group of men returned on leave from the front.
They were talking excitedly about their experiences and were full of enthusiasm for
some French troops who had been next to them at Huesca. The French were very
brave, they said; adding enthusiastically: ’Más valientes que nosotros’–’Braver than
we are!’ Of course I demurred, whereupon they explained that the French knew
more of the art of war–were more expert with bombs, machine-guns, and so forth.
Yet the remark was significant. An Englishman would cut his hand off sooner than
say a thing like that.
Every foreigner who served in the militia spent his first few weeks in learning to
love the Spaniards and in being exasperated by certain of their characteristics. In the
front line my own exasperation sometimes reached the pitch of fury. The Spaniards
are good at many things, but not at making war. All foreigners alike are appalled by
their inefficiency, above all their maddening unpunctuality. The one Spanish word
that no foreigner can avoid learning is mañana–’tomorrow’ (literally, ’the morning’).
Whenever it is conceivably possible, the business of today is put off until mañana.
This is so notorious that even the Spaniards themselves make jokes about it. In Spain
nothing, from a meal to a battle, ever happens at the appointed time. As a general
rule things happen too late, but just occasionally–just so that you shan’t even be able
to depend on their happening late–they happen too early. A train which is due to
leave at eight will normally leave at any time between nine and ten, but perhaps
once a week, thanks to some private whim of the engine-driver, it leaves at half past
seven. Such things can be a little trying. In theory I rather admire the Spaniards for
not sharing our Northern time-neurosis; but unfortunately I share it myself.
After endless rumours, mañanas, and delays we were suddenly ordered to the front
at two hours’ notice, when much of our equipment was still unissued. There were
terrible tumults in the quartermaster’s store; in the end numbers of men had to leave
without their full equipment. The barracks had promptly filled with women who
seemed to have sprung up from the ground and were helping their men-folk to roll
their blankets and pack their kit-bags. It was rather humiliating that I had to be
10

CHAPTER 1
shown how to put on my new leather cartridge-boxes by a Spanish girl, the wife
of Williams, the other English militiaman. She was a gentle, dark-eyed, intensely
feminine creature who looked as though her life-work was to rock a cradle, but who
as a matter of fact had fought bravely in the street-battles of July. At this time she
was carrying a baby which was born just ten months after the outbreak of war and
had perhaps been begotten behind a barricade.
The train was due to leave at eight, and it was about ten past eight when the ha-
rassed, sweating officers managed to marshal us in the barrack square. I remember
very vividly the torchlit scene–the uproar and excitement, the red flags flapping in
the torchlight, the massed ranks of militiamen with their knapsacks on their backs
and their rolled blankets worn bandolier-wise across the shoulder; and the shout-
ing and the clatter of boots and tin pannikins, and then a tremendous and finally
successful hissing for silence; and then some political commissar standing beneath
a huge rolling red banner and making us a speech in Catalan. Finally they marched
us to the station, taking the longest route, three or four miles, so as to show us to
the whole town. In the Ramblas they halted us while a borrowed band played some
revolutionary tune or other. Once again the conquering-hero stuff–shouting and en-
thusiasm, red flags and red and black flags everywhere, friendly crowds thronging
the pavement to have a look at us, women waving from the windows. How natural
it all seemed then; how remote and improbable now! The train was packed so tight
with men that there was barely room even on the floor, let alone on the seats. At the
last moment Williams’s wife came rushing down the platform and gave us a bottle
of wine and a foot of that bright red sausage which tastes of soap and gives you di-
arrhoea. The train crawled out of Catalonia and on to the plateau of Aragón at the
normal wartime speed of something under twenty kilometres an hour.
11

Chapter 2
Barbastro, though a long way from the front line, looked bleak and chipped. Swarms
of militiamen in shabby uniforms wandered up and down the streets, trying to keep
warm. On a ruinous wall I came upon a poster dating from the previous year and
announcing that ’six handsome bulls’ would be killed in the arena on such and such a
date. How forlorn its faded colours looked! Where were the handsome bulls and the
handsome bull-fighters now? It appeared that even in Barcelona there were hardly
any bullfights nowadays; for some reason all the best matadors were Fascists.
They sent my company by lorry to Sietamo, then westward to Alcubierre, which
was just behind the line fronting Zaragoza. Sietamo had been fought over three times
before the Anarchists finally took it in October, and parts of it were smashed to pieces
by shell-fire and most of the houses pockmarked by rifle-bullets. We were 1500 feet
above sea-level now. It was beastly cold, with dense mists that came swirling up
from nowhere. Between Sietamo and Alcubierre the lorry-driver lost his way (this
was one of the regular features of the war) and we were wandering for hours in the
mist. It was late at night when we reached Alcubierre. Somebody shepherded us
through morasses of mud into a mule-stable where we dug ourselves down into the
chaff and promptly fell asleep. Chaff is not bad to sleep in when it is clean, not so
good as hay but better than straw. It was only in the morning light that I discovered
that the chaff was full of breadcrusts, torn newspapers, bones, dead rats, and jagged
milk tins.
We were near the front line now, near enough to smell the characteristic smell of
war–in my experience a smell of excrement and decaying food. Alcubierre had never
been shelled and was in a better state than most of the villages immediately behind
the line. Yet I believe that even in peacetime you could not travel in that part of Spain
without being struck by the peculiar squalid misery of the Aragónese villages. They
are built like fortresses, a mass of mean little houses of mud and stone huddling
round the church, and even in spring you see hardly a flower anywhere; the houses
have no gardens, only back-yards where ragged fowls skate over the beds of mule-
dung. It was vile weather, with alternate mist and rain. The narrow earth roads had
been churned into a sea of mud, in places two feet deep, through which the lorries
struggled with racing wheels and the peasants led their clumsy carts which were
pulled by strings of mules, sometimes as many as six in a string, always pulling
tandem. The constant come-and-go of troops had reduced the village to a state of
unspeakable filth. It did not possess and never had possessed such a thing as a
12

CHAPTER 2
lavatory or a drain of any kind, and there was not a square yard anywhere where
you could tread without watching your step. The church had long been used as a
latrine; so had all the fields for a quarter of a mile round. I never think of my first
two months at war without thinking of wintry stubble fields whose edges are crusted
with dung.
Two days passed and no rifles were issued to us. When you had been to the Comite
de Guerra and inspected the row of holes in the wall-holes made by rifle-volleys, var-
ious Fascists having been executed there–you had seen all the sights that Alcubierre
contained. Up in the front line things were obviously quiet; very few wounded
were coming in. The chief excitement was the arrival of Fascist deserters, who were
brought under guard from the front line. Many of the troops opposite us on this part
of the line were not Fascists at all, merely wretched conscripts who had been doing
their military service at the time when war broke out and were only too anxious to
escape. Occasionally small batches of them took the risk of slipping across to our
lines. No doubt more would have done so if their relatives had not been in Fascist
territory. These deserters were the first ’real’ Fascists I had ever seen. It struck me
that they were indistinguishable from ourselves, except that they wore khaki over-
alls. They were always ravenously hungry when they arrived–natural enough after
a day or two of dodging about in no man’s land, but it was always triumphantly
pointed to as a proof that the Fascist troops were starving. I watched one of them
being fed in a peasant’s house. It was somehow rather a pitiful sight. A tall boy of
twenty, deeply windburnt, with his clothes in rags, crouched over the fire shovel-
ling a pannikinful of stew into himself at desperate speed; and all the while his eyes
flitted nervously round the ring of militiamen who stood watching him. I think he
still half-believed that we were bloodthirsty ’Reds’ and were going to shoot him as
soon as he had finished his meal; the armed man who guarded him kept stroking
his shoulder and making reassuring noises. On one memorable day fifteen desert-
ers arrived in a single batch. They were led through the village in triumph with a
man riding in front of them on a white horse. I managed to take a rather blurry
photograph which was stolen from me later.
On our third morning in Alcubierre the rifles arrived. A sergeant with a coarse
dark-yellow face was handing them out in the mule-stable. I got a shock of dismay
when I saw the thing they gave me. It was a German Mauser dated 1896–more
than forty years old! It was rusty, the bolt was stiff, the wooden barrel-guard was
split; one glance down the muzzle showed that it was corroded and past praying
for. Most of the rifles were equally bad, some of them even worse, and no attempt
was made to give the best weapons to the men who knew how to use them. The best
rifle of the lot, only ten years old, was given to a half-witted little beast of fifteen,
known to everyone as the maricón (Nancy-boy). The sergeant gave us five minutes’
’instruction’, which consisted in explaining how you loaded a rifle and how you took
the bolt to pieces. Many of the militiamen had never had a gun in their hands before,
and very few, I imagine, knew what the sights were for. Cartridges were handed out,
fifty to a man, and then the ranks were formed and we strapped our kits on our backs
and set out for the front line, about three miles away.
The centuria, eighty men and several dogs, wound raggedly up the road. Every
militia column had at least one dog attached to it as a mascot. One wretched brute
that marched with us had had P.O.U.M. branded on it in huge letters and slunk
13

CHAPTER 2
along as though conscious that there was something wrong with its appearance.
At the head of the column, beside the red flag, Georges Kopp, the stout Belgian
commandante, was riding a black horse; a little way ahead a youth from the brigand-
like militia cavalry pranced to and fro, galloping up every piece of rising ground
and posing himself in picturesque attitudes at the summit. The splendid horses of
the Spanish cavalry had been captured in large numbers during the revolution and
handed over to the militia, who, of course, were busy riding them to death.
The road wound between yellow infertile fields, untouched since last year’s har-
vest. Ahead of us was the low sierra that lies between Alcubierre and Zaragoza.
We were getting near the front line now, near the bombs, the machine-guns, and the
mud. In secret I was frightened. I knew the line was quiet at present, but unlike
most of the men about me I was old enough to remember the Great War, though not
old enough to have fought in it. War, to me, meant roaring projectiles and skipping
shards of steel; above all it meant mud, lice, hunger, and cold. It is curious, but I
dreaded the cold much more than I dreaded the enemy. The thought of it had been
haunting me all the time I was in Barcelona; I had even lain awake at nights think-
ing of the cold in the trenches, the stand-to’s in the grisly dawns, the long hours on
sentry-go with a frosted rifle, the icy mud that would slop over my boot-tops. I ad-
mit, too, that I felt a kind of horror as I looked at the people I was marching among.
You cannot possibly conceive what a rabble we looked. We straggled along with far
less cohesion than a flock of sheep; before we had gone two miles the rear of the
column was out of sight. And quite half of the so-called men were children–but I
mean literally children, of sixteen years old at the very most. Yet they were all happy
and excited at the prospect of getting to the front at last. As we neared the line the
boys round the red flag in front began to utter shouts of ’Visca P.O.U.M.!’ ’Fascistas–
maricones!’ and so forth–shouts which were meant to be war-like and menacing, but
which, from those childish throats, sounded as pathetic as the cries of kittens. It
seemed dreadful that the defenders of the Republic should be this mob of ragged
children carrying worn-out rifles which they did not know how to use. I remember
wondering what would happen if a Fascist aeroplane passed our way whether the
airman would even bother to dive down and give us a burst from his machine-gun.
Surely even from the air he could see that we were not real soldiers?
As the road struck into the sierra we branched off to the right and climbed a nar-
row mule-track that wound round the mountain-side. The hills in that part of Spain
are of a queer formation, horseshoe-shaped with flattish tops and very steep sides
running down into immense ravines. On the higher slopes nothing grows except
stunted shrubs and heath, with the white bones of the limestone sticking out ev-
erywhere. The front line here was not a continuous line of trenches, which would
have been impossible in such mountainous country; it was simply a chain of forti-
fied posts, always known as ’positions’, perched on each hill-top. In the distance you
could see our ’position’ at the crown of the horseshoe; a ragged barricade of sand-
bags, a red flag fluttering, the smoke of dug-out fires. A little nearer, and you could
smell a sickening sweetish stink that lived in my nostrils for weeks afterwards. Into
the cleft immediately behind the position all the refuse of months had been tipped–a
deep festering bed of breadcrusts, excrement, and rusty tins.
The company we were relieving were getting their kits together. They had been
three months in the line; their uniforms were caked with mud, their boots falling to
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CHAPTER 2
pieces, their faces mostly bearded. The captain commanding the position, Levinski
by name, but known to everyone as Benjamin, and by birth a Polish Jew, but speak-
ing French as his native language, crawled out of his dug-out and greeted us. He was
a short youth of about twenty-five, with stiff black hair and a pale eager face which
at this period of the war was always very dirty. A few stray bullets were cracking
high overhead. The position was a semi-circular enclosure about fifty yards across,
with a parapet that was partly sand-bags and partly lumps of limestone. There were
thirty or forty dug-outs running into the ground like rat-holes. Williams, myself,
and Williams’s Spanish brother-in-law made a swift dive for the nearest unoccupied
dug-out that looked habitable. Somewhere in front an occasional rifle banged, mak-
ing queer rolling echoes among the stony hills. We had just dumped our kits and
were crawling out of the dug-out when there was another bang and one of the chil-
dren of our company rushed back from the parapet with his face pouring blood. He
had fired his rifle and had somehow managed to blow out the bolt; his scalp was
torn to ribbons by the splinters of the burst cartridge-case. It was our first casualty,
and, characteristically, self-inflicted.
In the afternoon we did our first guard and Benjamin showed us round the po-
sition. In front of the parapet there ran a system of narrow trenches hewn out of
the rock, with extremely primitive loopholes made of piles of limestone. There were
twelve sentries, placed at various points in the trench and behind the inner para-
pet. In front of the trench was the barbed wire, and then the hillside slid down into
a seemingly bottomless ravine; opposite were naked hills, in places mere cliffs of
rock, all grey and wintry, with no life anywhere, not even a bird. I peered cautiously
through a loophole, trying to find the Fascist trench.
’Where are the enemy?’
Benjamin waved his hand expansively. ’Over zere.’ (Benjamin spoke English–
terrible English.)
’But where?’
According to my ideas of trench warfare the Fascists would be fifty or a hundred
yards away. I could see nothing–seemingly their trenches were very well concealed.
Then with a shock of dismay I saw where Benjamin was pointing; on the opposite
hill-top, beyond the ravine, seven hundred metres away at the very least, the tiny
outline of a parapet and a red-and-yellow flag–the Fascist position. I was indescrib-
ably disappointed. We were nowhere near them! At that range our rifles were com-
pletely useless. But at this moment there was a shout of excitement. Two Fascists,
greyish figurines in the distance, were scrambling up the naked hill-side opposite.
Benjamin grabbed the nearest man’s rifle, took aim, and pulled the trigger. Click! A
dud cartridge; I thought it a bad omen.
The new sentries were no sooner in the trench than they began firing a terrific
fusillade at nothing in particular. I could see the Fascists, tiny as ants, dodging to and
fro behind their parapet, and sometimes a black dot which was a head would pause
for a moment, impudently exposed. It was obviously no use firing. But presently
the sentry on my left, leaving his post in the typical Spanish fashion, sidled up to me
and began urging me to fire. I tried to explain that at that range and with these rifles
you could not hit a man except by accident. But he was only a child, and he kept
15

CHAPTER 2
motioning with his rifle towards one of the dots, grinning as eagerly as a dog that
expects a pebble to be thrown. Finally I put my sights up to seven hundred and let
fly. The dot disappeared. I hope it went near enough to make him jump. It was the
first time in my life that I had fired a gun at a human being.
Now that I had seen the front I was profoundly disgusted. They called this war!
And we were hardly even in touch with the enemy! I made no attempt to keep my
head below the level of the trench. A little while later, however, a bullet shot past my
ear with a vicious crack and banged into the parados behind. Alas! I ducked. All my
life I had sworn that I would not duck the first time a bullet passed over me; but the
movement appears to be instinctive, and almost everybody does it at least once.
16

Chapter 3
In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and
the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with
the enemy a bad last. Except at night, when a surprise-attack was always conceiv-
able, nobody bothered about the enemy. They were simply remote black insects
whom one occasionally saw hopping to and fro. The real preoccupation of both
armies was trying to keep warm.
I ought to say in passing that all the time I was in Spain I saw very little fighting. I
was on the Aragón front from January to May, and between January and late March
little or nothing happened on that front, except at Teruel. In March there was heavy
fighting round Huesca, but I personally played only a minor part in it. Later, in
June, there was the disastrous attack on Huesca in which several thousand men were
killed in a single day, but I had been wounded and disabled before that happened.
The things that one normally thinks of as the horrors of war seldom happened to
me. No aeroplane ever dropped a bomb anywhere near me, I do not think a shell
ever exploded within fifty yards of me, and I was only in hand-to-hand fighting once
(once is once too often, I may say). Of course I was often under heavy machine-gun
fire, but usually at longish ranges. Even at Huesca you were generally safe enough
if you took reasonable precautions.
Up here, in the hills round Zaragoza, it was simply the mingled boredom and
discomfort of stationary warfare. A life as uneventful as a city clerk’s, and almost as
regular. Sentry-go, patrols, digging; digging, patrols, sentry-go. On every hill-top,
Fascist or Loyalist, a knot of ragged, dirty men shivering round their flag and trying
to keep warm. And all day and night the meaningless bullets wandering across the
empty valleys and only by some rare improbable chance getting home on a human
body.
Often I used to gaze round the wintry landscape and marvel at the futility of it all.
The inconclusiveness of such a kind of war! Earlier, about October, there had been
savage fighting for all these hills; then, because the lack of men and arms, especially
artillery, made any large-scale operation impossible, each army had dug itself in and
settled down on the hill-tops it had won. Over to our right there was a small outpost,
also P.O.U.M., and on the spur to our left, at seven o’clock of us, a P.S.U.C. position
faced a taller spur with several small Fascist posts dotted on its peaks. The so-called
line zigzagged to and fro in a pattern that would have been quite unintelligible if
every position had not flown a flag. The P.O.U.M. and P.S.U.C. flags were red, those
17

CHAPTER 3
of the Anarchists red and black; the Fascists generally flew the monarchist flag (red-
yellow-red), but occasionally they flew the flag of the Republic (red-yellow-purple).1
The scenery was stupendous, if you could forget that every mountain-top was occu-
pied by troops and was therefore littered with tin cans and crusted with dung. To
the right of us the sierra bent south-eastwards and made way for the wide, veined
valley that stretched across to Huesca. In the middle of the plain a few tiny cubes
sprawled like a throw of dice; this was the town of Robres, which was in Loyalist
possession. Often in the mornings the valley was hidden under seas of cloud, out
of which the hills rose flat and blue, giving the landscape a strange resemblance to a
photographic negative. Beyond Huesca there were more hills of the same formation
as our own, streaked with a pattern of snow which altered day by day. In the far
distance the monstrous peaks of the Pyrenees, where the snow never melts, seemed
to float upon nothing. Even down in the plain everything looked dead and bare.
The hills opposite us were grey and wrinkled like the skins of elephants. Almost
always the sky was empty of birds. I do not think I have ever seen a country where
there were so few birds. The only birds one saw at any time were a kind of magpie,
and the coveys of partridges that startled one at night with their sudden whirring,
and, very rarely, the flights of eagles that drifted slowly over, generally followed by
rifle-shots which they did not deign to notice.
At night and in misty weather, patrols were sent out in the valley between our-
selves and the Fascists. The job was not popular, it was too cold and too easy to get
lost, and I soon found that I could get leave to go out on patrol as often as I wished.
In the huge jagged ravines there were no paths or tracks of any kind; you could only
find your way about by making successive journeys and noting fresh landmarks
each time. As the bullet flies the nearest Fascist post was seven hundred metres from
our own, but it was a mile and a half by the only practicable route. It was rather
fun wandering about the dark valleys with the stray bullets flying high overhead
like redshanks whistling. Better than night-time were the heavy mists, which often
lasted all day and which had a habit of clinging round the hill-tops and leaving the
valleys clear. When you were anywhere near the Fascist lines you had to creep at
a snail’s pace; it was very difficult to move quietly on those hill-sides, among the
crackling shrubs and tinkling limestones. It was only at the third or fourth attempt
that I managed to find my way to the Fascist lines. The mist was very thick, and I
crept up to the barbed wire to listen. I could hear the Fascists talking and singing
inside. Then to my alarm I heard several of them coming down the hill towards me.
I cowered behind a bush that suddenly seemed very small, and tried to cock my rifle
without noise. However, they branched off and did not come within sight of me. Be-
hind the bush where I was hiding I came upon various relics of the earlier fighting–a
pile of empty cartridge-cases, a leather cap with a bullet-hole in it, and a red flag, ob-
viously one of our own. I took it back to the position, where it was unsentimentally
torn up for cleaning-rags.
I had been made a corporal, or cabo, as it was called, as soon as we reached the
front, and was in command of a guard of twelve men. It was no sinecure, especially
1An errata note found in Orwell’s papers after his death: “Am not now completely certain that
I ever saw Fascists flying the republican flag, though I think they sometimes flew it with a small
imposed swastika.”
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CHAPTER 3
at first. The centuria was an untrained mob composed mostly of boys in their teens.
Here and there in the militia you came across children as young as eleven or twelve,
usually refugees from Fascist territory who had been enlisted as militiamen as the
easiest way of providing for them. As a rule they were employed on light work in
the rear, but sometimes they managed to worm their way to the front line, where
they were a public menace. I remember one little brute throwing a hand-grenade
into the dug-out fire ’for a joke’. At Monte Pocero I do not think there was anyone
younger than fifteen, but the average age must have been well under twenty. Boys of
this age ought never to be used in the front line, because they cannot stand the lack
of sleep which is inseparable from trench warfare. At the beginning it was almost
impossible to keep our position properly guarded at night. The wretched children
of my section could only be roused by dragging them out of their dug-outs feet
foremost, and as soon as your back was turned they left their posts and slipped into
shelter; or they would even, in spite of the frightful cold, lean up against the wall of
the trench and fall fast asleep. Luckily the enemy were very unenterprising. There
were nights when it seemed to me that our position could be stormed by twenty Boy
Scouts armed with airguns, or twenty Girl Guides armed with battledores, for that
matter.
At this time and until much later the Catalan militias were still on the same basis
as they had been at the beginning of the war. In the early days of Franco’s revolt the
militias had been hurriedly raised by the various trade unions and political parties;
each was essentially a political organization, owing allegiance to its party as much
as to the central Government. When the Popular Army, which was a ’non-political’
army organized on more or less ordinary lines, was raised at the beginning of 1937,
the party militias were theoretically incorporated in it. But for a long time the only
changes that occurred were on paper; the new Popular Army troops did not reach
the Aragón front in any numbers till June, and until that time the militia-system
remained unchanged. The essential point of the system was social equality between
officers and men. Everyone from general to private drew the same pay, ate the same
food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of complete equality. If you
wanted to slap the general commanding the division on the back and ask him for a
cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it curious. In theory at any rate each
militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy. It was understood that orders had to
be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as
comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and N.C.O.s
but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; no titles, no badges, no heel-
clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of
temporary working model of the classless society. Of course there was no perfect
equality, but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or than I would
have thought conceivable in time of war.
But I admit that at first sight the state of affairs at the front horrified me. How
on earth could the war be won by an army of this type? It was what everyone was
saying at the time, and though it was true it was also unreasonable. For in the cir-
cumstances the militias could not have been much better than they were. A modern
mechanized army does not spring up out of the ground, and if the Government had
waited until it had trained troops at its disposal, Franco would never have been re-
sisted. Later it became the fashion to decry the militias, and therefore to pretend
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CHAPTER 3
that the faults which were due to lack of training and weapons were the result of
the equalitarian system. Actually, a newly raised draft of militia was an undisci-
plined mob not because the officers called the private ’Comrade’ but because raw
troops are always an undisciplined mob. In practice the democratic ’revolutionary’
type of discipline is more reliable than might be expected. In a workers’ army dis-
cipline is theoretically voluntary. It is based on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline
of a bourgeois conscript army is based ultimately on fear. (The Popular Army that
replaced the militias was midway between the two types.) In the militias the bul-
lying and abuse that go on in an ordinary army would never have been tolerated
for a moment. The normal military punishments existed, but they were only in-
voked for very serious offences. When a man refused to obey an order you did not
immediately get him punished; you first appealed to him in the name of comrade-
ship. Cynical people with no experience of handling men will say instantly that this
would never ’work’, but as a matter of fact it does ’work’ in the long run. The disci-
pline of even the worst drafts of militia visibly improved as time went on. In January
the job of keeping a dozen raw recruits up to the mark almost turned my hair grey.
In May for a short while I was acting-lieutenant in command of about thirty men,
English and Spanish. We had all been under fire for months, and I never had the
slightest difficulty in getting an order obeyed or in getting men to volunteer for a
dangerous job. ’Revolutionary’ discipline depends on political consciousness–on an
understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but it also
takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square. The journalists
who sneered at the militia-system seldom remembered that the militias had to hold
the line while the Popular Army was training in the rear. And it is a tribute to the
strength of ’revolutionary’ discipline that the militias stayed in the field at all. For
until about June 1937 there was nothing to keep them there, except class loyalty. In-
dividual deserters could be shot–were shot, occasionally–but if a thousand men had
decided to walk out of the line together there was no force to stop them. A conscript
army in the same circumstances–with its battle-police removed–would have melted
away. Yet the militias held the line, though God knows they won very few victo-
ries, and even individual desertions were not common. In four or five months in
the P.O.U.M. militia I only heard of four men deserting, and two of those were fairly
certainly spies who had enlisted to obtain information. At the beginning the appar-
ent chaos, the general lack of training, the fact that you often had to argue for five
minutes before you could get an order obeyed, appalled and infuriated me. I had
British Army ideas, and certainly the Spanish militias were very unlike the British
Army. But considering the circumstances they were better troops than one had any
right to expect.
Meanwhile, firewood–always firewood. Throughout that period there is probably
no entry in my diary that does not mention firewood, or rather the lack of it. We
were between two and three thousand feet above sea-level, it was mid winter and
the cold was unspeakable. The temperature was not exceptionally low, on many
nights it did not even freeze, and the wintry sun often shone for an hour in the
middle of the day; but even if it was not really cold, I assure you that it seemed
so. Sometimes there were shrieking winds that tore your cap off and twisted your
hair in all directions, sometimes there were mists that poured into the trench like a
liquid and seemed to penetrate your bones; frequently it rained, and even a quarter
20

CHAPTER 3
of an hour’s rain was enough to make conditions intolerable. The thin skin of earth
over the limestone turned promptly into a slippery grease, and as you were always
walking on a slope it was impossible to keep your footing. On dark nights I have
often fallen half a dozen times in twenty yards; and this was dangerous, because
it meant that the lock of one’s rifle became jammed with mud. For days together
clothes, boots, blankets, and rifles were more or less coated with mud. I had brought
as many thick clothes as I could carry, but many of the men were terribly underclad.
For the whole garrison, about a hundred men, there were only twelve great-coats,
which had to be handed from sentry to sentry, and most of the men had only one
blanket. One icy night I made a list in my diary of the clothes I was wearing. It is
of some interest as showing the amount of clothes the human body can carry. I was
wearing a thick vest and pants, a flannel shirt, two pull-overs, a woollen jacket, a
pigskin jacket, corduroy breeches, puttees, thick socks, boots, a stout trench-coat, a
muffler, lined leather gloves, and a woollen cap. Nevertheless I was shivering like a
jelly. But I admit I am unusually sensitive to cold.
Firewood was the one thing that really mattered. The point about the firewood
was that there was practically no firewood to be had. Our miserable mountain had
not even at its best much vegetation, and for months it had been ranged over by
freezing militiamen, with the result that everything thicker than one’s finger had
long since been burnt. When we were not eating, sleeping, on guard, or on fatigue-
duty we were in the valley behind the position, scrounging for fuel. All my memo-
ries of that time are memories of scrambling up and down the almost perpendicular
slopes, over the jagged limestone that knocked one’s boots to pieces, pouncing ea-
gerly on tiny twigs of wood. Three people searching for a couple of hours could col-
lect enough fuel to keep the dug-out fire alight for about an hour. The eagerness of
our search for firewood turned us all into botanists. We classified according to their
burning qualities every plant that grew on the mountainside; the various heaths and
grasses that were good to start a fire with but burnt out in a few minutes, the wild
rosemary and the tiny whin bushes that would burn when the fire was well alight,
the stunted oak tree, smaller than a gooseberry bush, that was practically unburn-
able. There was a kind of dried-up reed that was very good for starting fires with,
but these grew only on the hill-top to the left of the position, and you had to go un-
der fire to get them. If the Fascist machine-gunners saw you they gave you a drum
of ammunition all to yourself. Generally their aim was high and the bullets sang
overhead like birds, but sometime they crackled and chipped the limestone uncom-
fortably close, whereupon you flung yourself on your face. You went on gathering
reeds, however; nothing mattered in comparison with firewood.
Beside the cold the other discomforts seemed petty. Of course all of us were per-
manently dirty. Our water, like our food, came on mule-back from Alcubierre, and
each man’s share worked out at about a quart a day. It was beastly water, hardly
more transparent than milk. Theoretically it was for drinking only, but I always stole
a pannikinful for washing in the mornings. I used to wash one day and shave the
next; there was never enough water for both. The position stank abominably, and
outside the little enclosure of the barricade there was excrement everywhere. Some
of the militiamen habitually defecated in the trench, a disgusting thing when one
had to walk round it in the darkness. But the dirt never worried me. Dirt is a thing
people make too much fuss about. It is astonishing how quickly you get used to do-
21

CHAPTER 3
ing without a handkerchief and to eating out of the tin pannikin in which you also
wash. Nor was sleeping in one’s clothes any hardship after a day or two. It was of
course impossible to take one’s clothes and especially one’s boots off at night; one
had to be ready to turn out instantly in case of an attack. In eighty nights I only took
my clothes off three times, though I did occasionally manage to get them off in the
daytime. It was too cold for lice as yet, but rats and mice abounded. It is often said
that you don’t find rats and mice in the same place, but you do when there is enough
food for them.
In other ways we were not badly off. The food was good enough and there was
plenty of wine. Cigarettes were still being issued at the rate of a packet a day,
matches were issued every other day, and there was even an issue of candles. They
were very thin candles, like those on a Christmas cake, and were popularly supposed
to have been looted from churches. Every dug-out was issued daily with three inches
of candle, which would bum for about twenty minutes. At that time it was still pos-
sible to buy candles, and I had brought several pounds of them with me. Later on the
famine of matches and candles made life a misery. You do not realize the importance
of these things until you lack them. In a night-alarm, for instance, when everyone in
the dug-out is scrambling for his rifle and treading on everybody else’s face, being
able to strike a light may make the difference between life and death. Every mili-
tiaman possessed a tinder-lighter and several yards of yellow wick. Next to his rifle
it was his most important possession. The tinder-lighters had the great advantage
that they could be struck in a wind, but they would only smoulder, so that they were
no use for lighting a fire. When the match famine was at its worst our only way of
producing a flame was to pull the bullet out of a cartridge and touch the cordite off
with a tinder-lighter.
It was an extraordinary life that we were living–an extraordinary way to be at war,
if you could call it war. The whole militia chafed against the inaction and clamoured
constantly to know why we were not allowed to attack. But it was perfectly obvi-
ous that there would be no battle for a long while yet, unless the enemy started it.
Georges Kopp, on his periodical tours of inspection, was quite frank with us. ’This
is not a war,’ he used to say, ’it is a comic opera with an occasional death.’ As a mat-
ter of fact the stagnation on the Aragón front had political causes of which I knew
nothing at that time; but the purely military difficulties–quite apart from the lack of
reserves of men–were obvious to anybody.
To begin with, there was the nature of the country. The front line, ours and the
Fascists’, lay in positions of immense natural strength, which as a rule could only
be approached from one side. Provided a few trenches have been dug, such places
cannot be taken by infantry, except in overwhelming numbers. In our own position
or most of those round us a dozen men with two machine-guns could have held off
a battalion. Perched on the hill-tops as we were, we should have made lovely marks
for artillery; but there was no artillery. Sometimes I used to gaze round the landscape
and long–oh, how passionately!–for a couple of batteries of guns. One could have
destroyed the enemy positions one after another as easily as smashing nuts with a
hammer. But on our side the guns simply did not exist. The Fascists did occasionally
manage to bring a gun or two from Zaragoza and fire a very few shells, so few that
they never even found the range and the shells plunged harmlessly into the empty
ravines. Against machine-guns and without artillery there are only three things you
22

CHAPTER 3
can do: dig yourself in at a safe distance–four hundred yards, say–advance across
the open and be massacred, or make small-scale night-attacks that will not alter the
general situation. Practically the alternatives are stagnation or suicide.
And beyond this there was the complete lack of war materials of every description.
It needs an effort to realize how badly the militias were armed at this time. Any
public school O.T.C. in England is far more like a modern army than we were. The
badness of our weapons was so astonishing that it is worth recording in detail.
For this sector of the front the entire artillery consisted of four trench-mortars with
fifteen rounds for each gun. Of course they were far too precious to be fired and the
mortars were kept in Alcubierre. There were machine-guns at the rate of approxi-
mately one to fifty men; they were oldish guns, but fairly accurate up to three or four
hundred yards. Beyond this we had only rifles, and the majority of the rifles were
scrap-iron. There were three types of rifle in use. The first was the long Mauser.
These were seldom less than twenty years old, their sights were about as much use
as a broken speedometer, and in most of them the rifling was hopelessly corroded;
about one rifle in ten was not bad, however. Then there was the short Mauser, or
mousqueton, really a cavalry weapon. These were more popular than the others be-
cause they were lighter to carry and less nuisance in a trench, also because they were
comparatively new and looked efficient. Actually they were almost useless. They
were made out of reassembled parts, no bolt belonged to its rifle, and three-quarters
of them could be counted on to jam after five shots. There were also a few Winchester
rifles. These were nice to shoot with, but they were wildly inaccurate, and as their
cartridges had no clips they could only be fired one shot at a time. Ammunition was
so scarce that each man entering the line was only issued with fifty rounds, and most
of it was exceedingly bad. The Spanish-made cartridges were all refills and would
jam even the best rifles. The Mexican cartridges were better and were therefore re-
served for the machine-guns. Best of all was the German-made ammunition, but as
this came only from prisoners and deserters there was not much of it. I always kept
a clip of German or Mexican ammunition in my pocket for use in an emergency. But
in practice when the emergency came I seldom fired my rifle; I was too frightened
of the beastly thing jamming and too anxious to reserve at any rate one round that
would go off.
We had no tin hats, no bayonets, hardly any revolvers or pistols, and not more
than one bomb between five or ten men. The bomb in use at this time was a frightful
object known as the ’F.A.I. bomb’, it having been produced by the Anarchists in the
early days of the war. It was on the principle of a Mills bomb, but the lever was
held down not by a pin but a piece of tape. You broke the tape and then got rid
of the bomb with the utmost possible speed. It was said of these bombs that they
were ’impartial’; they killed the man they were thrown at and the man who threw
them. There were several other types, even more primitive but probably a little less
dangerous–to the thrower, I mean. It was not till late March that I saw a bomb worth
throwing.
And apart from weapons there was a shortage of all the minor necessities of war.
We had no maps or charts, for instance. Spain has never been fully surveyed, and the
only detailed maps of this area were the old military ones, which were almost all in
the possession of the Fascists. We had no range-finders, no telescopes, no periscopes,
23

CHAPTER 3
no field-glasses except for a few privately-owned pairs, no flares or Very lights, no
wire-cutters, no armourers’ tools, hardly even any cleaning materials. The Spaniards
seemed never to have heard of a pull-through and looked on in surprise when I con-
structed one. When you wanted your rifle cleaned you took it to the sergeant, who
possessed a long brass ramrod which was invariably bent and therefore scratched
the rifling. There was not even any gun oil. You greased your rifle with olive oil,
when you could get hold of it; at different times I have greased mine with vaseline,
with cold cream, and even with bacon-fat. Moreover, there were no lanterns or elec-
tric torches–at this time there was not, I believe, such a thing as an electric torch
throughout the whole of our sector of the front, and you could not buy one nearer
than Barcelona, and only with difficulty even there.
As time went on, and the desultory rifle-fire rattled among the hills, I began to
wonder with increasing scepticism whether anything would ever happen to bring
a bit of life, or rather a bit of death, into this cock-eyed war. It was pneumonia
that we were fighting against, not against men. When the trenches are more than
five hundred yards apart no one gets hit except by accident. Of course there were
casualties, but the majority of them were self-inflicted. If I remember rightly, the first
five men I saw wounded in Spain were all wounded by our own weapons–I don’t
mean intentionally, but owing to accident or carelessness. Our worn-out rifles were
a danger in themselves. Some of them had a nasty trick of going off if the butt was
tapped on the ground; I saw a man shoot himself through the hand owing to this.
And in the darkness the raw recruits were always firing at one another. One evening
when it was barely even dusk a sentry let fly at me from a distance of twenty yards;
but he missed me by a yard–goodness knows how many times the Spanish standard
of marksmanship has saved my life. Another time I had gone out on patrol in the
mist and had carefully warned the guard commander beforehand. But in coming
back I stumbled against a bush, the startled sentry called out that the Fascists were
coming, and I had the pleasure of hearing the guard commander order everyone to
open rapid fire in my direction. Of course I lay down and the bullets went harmlessly
over me. Nothing will convince a Spaniard, at least a young Spaniard, that fire-arms
are dangerous. Once, rather later than this, I was photographing some machine-
gunners with their gun, which was pointed directly towards me.
’Don’t fire,’ I said half-jokingly as I focused the camera.
’Oh no, we won’t fire.’
The next moment there was a frightful roar and a stream of bullets tore past my
face so close that my cheek was stung by grains of cordite. It was unintentional, but
the machine-gunners considered it a great joke. Yet only a few days earlier they had
seen a mule-driver accidentally shot by a political delegate who was playing the fool
with an automatic pistol and had put five bullets in the mule-driver’s lungs.
The difficult passwords which the army was using at this time were a minor source
of danger. They were those tiresome double passwords in which one word has to
be answered by another. Usually they were of an elevating and revolutionary na-
ture, such as Cultura–progreso, or Seremos–invencibles, and it was often impossible to
get illiterate sentries to remember these highfalutin’ words. One night, I remem-
ber, the password was Cataluña–heroica, and a moonfaced peasant lad named Jaime
Domenech approached me, greatly puzzled, and asked me to explain.
24

CHAPTER 3
’Heroica–what does hroica mean?’
I told him that it meant the same as valiente. A little while later he was stumbling
up the trench in the darkness, and the sentry challenged him:
’Alto! Cataluña!’
’Valiente!’ yelled Jaime, certain that he was saying the right thing.
Bang!
However, the sentry missed him. In this war everyone always did miss everyone
else, when it was humanly possible.
25

Chapter 4
When I had been about three weeks in the line a contingent of twenty or thirty men,
sent out from England by the I.L.P., arrived at Alcubierre, and in order to keep the
English on this front together Williams and I were sent to join them. Our new posi-
tion was at Monte Oscuro, several miles farther west and within sight of Zaragoza.
The position was perched on a sort of razor-back of limestone with dug-outs
driven horizontally into the cliff like sand-martins’nests. They went into the ground
for prodigious distances, and inside they were pitch dark and so low that you could
not even kneel in them, let alone stand. On the peaks to the left of us there were
two more P.O.U.M. positions, one of them an object of fascination to every man in
the line, because there were three militiawomen there who did the cooking. These
women were not exactly beautiful, but it was found necessary to put the position
out of bounds to men of other companies. Five hundred yards to our right there
was a P.S.U.C. post at the bend of the Alcubierre road. It was just here that the
road changed hands. At night you could watch the lamps of our supply-lorries
winding out from Alcubierre and, simultaneously, those of the Fascists coming from
Zaragoza. You could see Zaragoza itself, a thin string of lights like the lighted port-
holes of a ship, twelve miles south-westward. The Government troops had gazed at
it from that distance since August 1936, and they are gazing at it still.
There were about thirty of ourselves, including one Spaniard (Ramon, Williams’s
brother-in-law), and there were a dozen Spanish machine-gunners. Apart from the
one or two inevitable nuisances–for, as everyone knows, war attracts riff-raff–the
English were an exceptionally good crowd, both physically and mentally. Perhaps
the best of the bunch was Bob Smillie–the grandson of the famous miners’ leader–
who afterwards died such an evil and meaningless death in Valencia. It says a lot for
the Spanish character that the English and the Spaniards always got on well together,
in spite of the language difficulty. All Spaniards, we discovered, knew two English
expressions. One was ’O.K., baby’, the other was a word used by the Barcelona
whores in their dealings with English sailors, and I am afraid the compositors would
not print it.
Once again there was nothing happening all along the line: only the random crack
of bullets and, very rarely, the crash of a Fascist mortar that sent everyone running
to the top trench to see which hill the shells were bursting on. The enemy was some-
what closer to us here, perhaps three or four hundred yards away. Their nearest
26

CHAPTER 4
position was exactly opposite ours, with a machine-gun nest whose loopholes con-
stantly tempted one to waste cartridges. The Fascists seldom bothered with rifle-
shots, but sent bursts of accurate machine-gun fire at anyone who exposed himself.
Nevertheless it was ten days or more before we had our first casualty. The troops
opposite us were Spaniards, but according to the deserters there were a few German
N.C.O.S. among them. At some time in the past there had also been Moors there–
poor devils, how they must have felt the cold!–for out in no man’s land there was
a dead Moor who was one of the sights of the locality. A mile or two to the left of
us the line ceased to be continuous and there was a tract of country, lower-lying and
thickly wooded, which belonged neither to the Fascists nor ourselves. Both we and
they used to make daylight patrols there. It was not bad fun in a Boy Scoutish way,
though I never saw a Fascist patrol nearer than several hundred yards. By a lot of
crawling on your belly you could work your way partly through the Fascist lines
and could even see the farm-house flying the monarchist flag, which was the local
Fascist headquarters. Occasionally we gave it a rifle-volley and then slipped into
cover before the machine-guns could locate us. I hope we broke a few windows, but
it was a good eight hundred metres away, and with our rifles you could not make
sure of hitting even a house at that range.
The weather was mostly clear and cold; sometimes sunny at midday, but always
cold. Here and there in the soil of the hill-sides you found the green beaks of wild
crocuses or irises poking through; evidently spring was coming, but coming very
slowly. The nights were colder than ever. Coming off guard in the small hours we
used to rake together what was left of the cook-house fire and then stand in the
red-hot embers. It was bad for your boots, but it was very good for your feet. But
there were mornings when the sight of the dawn among the mountain-tops made it
almost worth while to be out of bed at godless hours. I hate mountains, even from a
spectacular point of view. But sometimes the dawn breaking behind the hill-tops in
our rear, the first narrow streaks of gold, like swords slitting the darkness, and then
the growing light and the seas of carmine cloud stretching away into inconceivable
distances, were worth watching even when you had been up all night, when your
legs were numb from the knees down, and you were sullenly reflecting that there
was no hope of food for another three hours. I saw the dawn oftener during this
campaign than during the rest of my life put together–or during the part that is to
come, I hope.
We were short-handed here, which meant longer guards and more fatigues. I
was beginning to suffer a little from the lack of sleep which is inevitable even in
the quietest kind of war. Apart from guard-duties and patrols there were constant
night-alarms and stand-to’s, and in any case you can’t sleep properly in a beastly
hole in the ground with your feet aching with the cold. In my first three or four
months in the line I do not suppose I had more than a dozen periods of twenty-four
hours that were completely without sleep; on the other hand I certainly did not have
a dozen nights of full sleep. Twenty or thirty hours’ sleep in a week was quite a
normal amount. The effects of this were not so bad as might be expected; one grew
very stupid, and the job of climbing up and down the hills grew harder instead of
easier, but one felt well and one was constantly hungry–heavens, how hungry! All
food seemed good, even the eternal haricot beans which everyone in Spain finally
learned to hate the sight of. Our water, what there was of it, came from miles away,
27

CHAPTER 4
on the backs of mules or little persecuted donkeys. For some reason the Aragón
peasants treated their mules well but their donkeys abominably. If a donkey refused
to go it was quite usual to kick him in the testicles. The issue of candles had ceased,
and matches were running short. The Spaniards taught us how to make olive oil
lamps out of a condensed milk tin, a cartridge-clip, and a bit of rag. When you had
any olive oil, which was not often, these things would burn with a smoky flicker,
about a quarter candle power, just enough to find your rifle by.
There seemed no hope of any real fighting. When we left Monte Pocero I had
counted my cartridges and found that in nearly three weeks I had fired just three
shots at the enemy. They say it takes a thousand bullets to kill a man, and at this rate
it would be twenty years before I killed my first Fascist. At Monte Oscuro the lines
were closer and one fired oftener, but I am reasonably certain that I never hit anyone.
As a matter of fact, on this front and at this period of the war the real weapon was
not the rifle but the megaphone. Being unable to kill your enemy you shouted at him
instead. This method of warfare is so extraordinary that it needs explaining.
Wherever the lines were within hailing distance of one another there was always
a good deal of shouting from trench to trench. From ourselves: ’Fascistas–maricones!’
From the Fascists: ’Viva España! Viva Franco!’–or, when they knew that there were
English opposite them: ’Go home, you English! We don’t want foreigners here!’ On
the Government side, in the party militias, the shouting of propaganda to undermine
the enemy morale had been developed into a regular technique. In every suitable po-
sition men, usually machine-gunners, were told off for shouting-duty and provided
with megaphones. Generally they shouted a set-piece, full of revolutionary senti-
ments which explained to the Fascist soldiers that they were merely the hirelings
of international capitalism, that they were fighting against their own class, etc., etc.,
and urged them to come over to our side. This was repeated over and over by relays
of men; sometimes it continued almost the whole night. There is very little doubt
that it had its effect; everyone agreed that the trickle of Fascist deserters was partly
caused by it. If one comes to think of it, when some poor devil of a sentry–very likely
a Socialist or Anarchist trade union member who has been conscripted against his
will–is freezing at his post, the slogan ’Don’t fight against your own class!’ ringing
again and again through the darkness is bound to make an impression on him. It
might make just the difference between deserting and not deserting. Of course such
a proceeding does not fit in with the English conception of war. I admit I was amazed
and scandalized when I first saw it done. The idea of trying to convert your enemy
instead of shooting him! I now think that from any point of view it was a legitimate
manoeuvre. In ordinary trench warfare, when there is no artillery, it is extremely dif-
ficult to inflict casualties on the enemy without receiving an equal number yourself.
If you can immobilize a certain number of men by making them desert, so much
the better; deserters are actually more useful to you than corpses, because they can
give information. But at the beginning it dismayed all of us; it made us fed that the
Spaniards were not taking this war of theirs sufficiently seriously. The man who did
the shouting at the P.S.U.C. post down on our right was an artist at the job. Some-
times, instead of shouting revolutionary slogans he simply told the Fascists how
much better we were fed than they were. His account of the Government rations
was apt to be a little imaginative. ’Buttered toast!’–you could hear his voice echoing
across the lonely valley–’We’re just sitting down to buttered toast over here! Lovely
28

CHAPTER 4
slices of buttered toast!’ I do not doubt that, like the rest of us, he had not seen butter
for weeks or months past, but in the icy night the news of buttered toast probably
set many a Fascist mouth watering. It even made mine water, though I knew he was
lying.
One day in February we saw a Fascist aeroplane approaching. As usual, a
machine-gun was dragged into the open and its barrel cocked up, and everyone
lay on his back to get a good aim. Our isolated positions were not worth bomb-
ing, and as a rule the few Fascist aeroplanes that passed our way circled round to
avoid machine-gun fire. This time the aeroplane came straight over, too high up to
be worth shooting at, and out of it came tumbling not bombs but white glittering
things that turned over and over in the air. A few fluttered down into the position.
They were copies of a Fascist newspaper, the Heraldo de Aragón, announcing the fall
of Málaga.
That night the Fascists made a sort of abortive attack. I was just getting down
into kip, half dead with sleep, when there was a heavy stream of bullets overhead
and someone shouted into the dug-out: ’They’re attacking!’ I grabbed my rifle and
slithered up to my post, which was at the top of the position, beside the machine-
gun. There was utter darkness and diabolical noise. The fire of, I think five machine-
guns was pouring upon us, and there was a series of heavy crashes caused by the
Fascists flinging bombs over their own parapet in the most idiotic manner. It was
intensely dark. Down in the valley to the left of us I could see the greenish flash of
rifles where a small party of Fascists, probably a patrol, were chipping in. The bullets
were flying round us in the darkness, crack-zip-crack. A few shells came whistling
over, but they fell nowhere near us and (as usual in this war) most of them failed to
explode. I had a bad moment when yet another machine-gun opened fire from the
hill-top in our rear–actually a gun that had been brought up to support us, but at
the time it looked as though we were surrounded. Presently our own machine-gun
jammed, as it always did jam with those vile cartridges, and the ramrod was lost in
the impenetrable darkness. Apparently there was nothing that one could do except
stand still and be shot at. The Spanish machine-gunners disdained to take cover, in
fact exposed themselves deliberately, so I had to do likewise. Petty though it was, the
whole experience was very interesting. It was the first time that I had been properly
speaking under fire, and to my humiliation I found that I was horribly frightened.
You always, I notice, feel the same when you are under heavy fire–not so much
afraid of being hit as afraid because you don’t know where you will be hit. You are
wondering all the while just where the bullet will nip you, and it gives your whole
body a most unpleasant sensitiveness.
After an hour or two the firing slowed down and died away. Meanwhile we had
had only one casualty. The Fascists had advanced a couple of machine-guns into
no man’s land, but they had kept a safe distance and made no attempt to storm our
parapet. They were in fact not attacking, merely wasting cartridges and making a
cheerful noise to celebrate the fall of Málaga. The chief importance of the affair was
that it taught me to read the war news in the papers with a more disbelieving eye.
A day or two later the newspapers and the radio published reports of a tremendous
attack with cavalry and tanks (up a perpendicular hill-side!) which had been beaten
off by the heroic English.
29

CHAPTER 4
When the Fascists told us that Málaga had fallen we set it down as a lie, but next
day there were more convincing rumours, and it must have been a day or two later
that it was admitted officially. By degrees the whole disgraceful story leaked out–
how the town had been evacuated without firing a shot, and how the fury of the
Italians had fallen not upon the troops, who were gone, but upon the wretched civil-
ian population, some of whom were pursued and machine-gunned for a hundred
miles. The news sent a sort of chill all along the line, for, whatever the truth may
have been, every man in the militia believed that the loss of Málaga was due to
treachery. It was the first talk I had heard of treachery or divided aims. It set up
in my mind the first vague doubts about this war in which, hitherto, the rights and
wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple.
In mid February we left Monte Oscuro and were sent, together with all the
P.O.U.M. troops in this sector, to make a part of the army besieging Huesca. It was a
fifty-mile lorry journey across the wintry plain, where the clipped vines were not yet
budding and the blades of the winter barley were just poking through the lumpy soil.
Four kilometres from our new trenches Huesca glittered small and clear like a city
of dolls’ houses. Months earlier, when Sietamo was taken, the general commanding
the Government troops had said gaily: ’Tomorrow we’ll have coffee in Huesca.’ It
turned out that he was mistaken. There had been bloody attacks, but the town did
not fall, and ’Tomorrow we’ll have coffee in Huesca’ had become a standing joke
throughout the army. If I ever go back to Spain I shall make a point of having a cup
of coffee in Huesca.
30

Chapter 5
On the eastern side of Huesca, until late March, nothing happened–almost literally
nothing. We were twelve hundred metres from the enemy. When the Fascists were
driven back into Huesca the Republican Army troops who held this part of the line
had not been over-zealous in their advance, so that the line formed a kind of pocket.
Later it would have to be advanced–a ticklish job under fire–but for the present the
enemy might as well have been nonexistent; our sole preoccupation was keeping
warm and getting enough to eat. As a matter of fact there were things in this period
that interested me greatly, and I will describe some of them later. But I shall be
keeping nearer to the order of events if I try here to give some account of the internal
political situation on the Government side.
At the beginning I had ignored the political side of the war, and it was only about
this time that it began to force itself upon my attention. If you are not interested in
the horrors of party politics, please skip; I am trying to keep the political parts of
this narrative in separate chapters for precisely that purpose. But at the same time
it would be quite impossible to write about the Spanish war from a purely military
angle. It was above all things a political war. No event in it, at any rate during the
first year, is intelligible unless one has some grasp of the inter-party struggle that
was going on behind the Government lines.
When I came to Spain, and for some time afterwards, I was not only uninterested
in the political situation but unaware of it. I knew there was a war on, but I had
no notion what kind of a war. If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I
should have answered: ’To fight against Fascism,’ and if you had asked me what
I was fighting for, I should have answered: ’Common decency.’ I had accepted the
News Chronicle-New Statesman version of the war as the defence of civilization against
a maniacal outbreak by an army of Colonel Blimps in the pay of Hitler. The revolu-
tionary atmosphere of Barcelona had attracted me deeply, but I had made no attempt
to understand it. As for the kaleidoscope of political parties and trade unions, with
their tiresome names–P.S.U.C., P.O.U.M., F.A.I., C.N.T., U.G.T., J.C.I., J.S.U., A.I.T.–
they merely exasperated me. It looked at first sight as though Spain were suffering
from a plague of initials. I knew that I was serving in something called the P.O.U.M.
(I had only joined the P.O.U.M. militia rather than any other because I happened to
arrive in Barcelona with I.L.P. papers), but I did not realize that there were serious
differences between the political parties. At Monte Pocero, when they pointed to the
position on our left and said: ’Those are the Socialists’ (meaning the P.S.U.C.), I was
31

CHAPTER 5
puzzled and said: ’Aren’t we all Socialists?’ I thought it idiotic that people fighting
for their lives should have separate parties; my attitude always was, ’Why can’t we
drop all this political nonsense and get on with the war?’ This of course was the
correct ’anti-Fascist’ attitude which had been carefully disseminated by the English
newspapers, largely in order to prevent people from grasping the real nature of the
struggle. But in Spain, especially in Catalonia, it was an attitude that no one could or
did keep up indefinitely. Everyone, however unwillingly, took sides sooner or later.
For even if one cared nothing for the political parties and their conflicting ’lines’, it
was too obvious that one’s own destiny was involved. As a militiaman one was a
soldier against Franco, but one was also a pawn in an enormous struggle that was
being fought out between two political theories. When I scrounged for firewood
on the mountainside and wondered whether this was really a war or whether the
News Chronicle had made it up, when I dodged the Communist machine-guns in
the Barcelona riots, when I finally fled from Spain with the police one jump behind
me–all these things happened to me in that particular way because I was serving in
the P.O.U.M. militia and not in the P.S.U.C. So great is the difference between two
sets of initials!
To understand the alignment on the Government side one has got to remember
how the war started. When the fighting broke out on 18 July it is probable that every
anti-Fascist in Europe felt a thrill of hope. For here at last, apparently, was democracy
standing up to Fascism. For years past the so-called democratic countries had been
surrendering to Fascism at every step. The Japanese had been allowed to do as they
liked in Manchuria. Hitler had walked into power and proceeded to massacre politi-
cal opponents of all shades. Mussolini had bombed the Abyssinians while fifty-three
nations (I think it was fifty-three) made pious noises ’off’. But when Franco tried to
overthrow a mildly Left-wing Government the Spanish people, against all expecta-
tion, had risen against him. It seemed–possibly it was–the turning of the tide.
But there were several points that escaped general notice. To begin with, Franco
was not strictly comparable with Hitler or Mussolini. His rising was a military
mutiny backed up by the aristocracy and the Church, and in the main, especially
at the beginning, it was an attempt not so much to impose Fascism as to restore feu-
dalism. This meant that Franco had against him not only the working class but also
various sections of the liberal bourgeoisie–the very people who are the supporters
of Fascism when it appears in a more modern form. More important than this was
the fact that the Spanish working class did not, as we might conceivably do in Eng-
land, resist Franco in the name of ’democracy’ and the status quo; their resistance
was accompanied by–one might almost say it consisted of–a definite revolutionary
outbreak. Land was seized by the peasants; many factories and most of the transport
were seized by the trade unions; churches were wrecked and the priests driven out
or killed. The Daily Mail, amid the cheers of the Catholic clergy, was able to represent
Franco as a patriot delivering his country from hordes of fiendish ’Reds’.
For the first few months of the war Franco’s real opponent was not so much the
Government as the trade unions. As soon as the rising broke out the organized
town workers replied by calling a general strike and then by demanding–and, after a
struggle, getting–arms from the public arsenals. If they had not acted spontaneously
and more or less independently it is quite conceivable that Franco would never have
been resisted. There can, of course, be no certainty about this, but there is at least
32

CHAPTER 5
reason for thinking it. The Government had made little or no attempt to forestall the
rising, which had been foreseen for a long time past, and when the trouble started its
attitude was weak and hesitant, so much so, indeed, that Spain had three premiers
in a single day.2 Moreover, the one step that could save the immediate situation, the
arming of the workers, was only taken unwillingly and in response to violent pop-
ular clamour. However, the arms were distributed, and in the big towns of eastern
Spain the Fascists were defeated by a huge effort, mainly of the working class, aided
by some of the armed forces (Assault Guards, etc.) who had remained loyal. It was
the kind of effort that could probably only be made by people who were fighting
with a revolutionary intention–i.e. believed that they were fighting for something
better than the status quo. In the various centres of revolt it is thought that three
thousand people died in the streets in a single day. Men and women armed only
with sticks of dynamite rushed across the open squares and stormed stone buildings
held by trained soldiers with machine-guns. Machine-gun nests that the Fascists
had placed at strategic spots were smashed by rushing taxis at them at sixty miles an
hour. Even if one had heard nothing of the seizure of the land by the peasants, the
setting up of local Soviets, etc., it would be hard to believe that the Anarchists and
Socialists who were the backbone of the resistance were doing this kind of thing for
the preservation of capitalist democracy, which especially in the Anarchist view was
no more than a centralized swindling machine.
Meanwhile the workers had weapons in their hands, and at this stage they re-
frained from giving them up.(Even a year later it was computed that the Anarcho-
Syndicalists in Catalonia possessed 30,000 rifles.) The estates of the big pro-Fascist
landlords were in many places seized by the peasants. Along with the collectiviza-
tion of industry and transport there was an attempt to set up the rough beginnings of
a workers’ government by means of local committees, workers’ patrols to replace the
old pro-capitalist police forces, workers’ militias based on the trade unions, and so
forth. Of course the process was not uniform, and it went further in Catalonia than
elsewhere. There were areas where the institutions of local government remained al-
most untouched, and others where they existed side by side with revolutionary com-
mittees. In a few places independent Anarchist communes were set up, and some of
them remained in being till about a year later, when they were forcibly suppressed
by the Government. In Catalonia, for the first few months, most of the actual power
was in the hands of the Anarcho-syndicalists, who controlled most of the key indus-
tries. The thing that had happened in Spain was, in fact, not merely a civil war, but
the beginning of a revolution. It is this fact that the anti-Fascist press outside Spain
has made it its special business to obscure. The issue has been narrowed down to
’Fascism versus democracy’ and the revolutionary aspect concealed as much as pos-
sible. In England, where the Press is more centralized and the public more easily
deceived than elsewhere, only two versions of the Spanish war have had any pub-
licity to speak of: the Right-wing version of Christian patriots versus Bolsheviks
dripping with blood, and the Left-wing version of gentlemanly republicans quelling
a military revolt. The central issue has been successfully covered up.
There were several reasons for this. To begin with, appalling lies about atrocities
were being circulated by the pro-Fascist press, and well-meaning propagandists un-
2Quiroga, Barrios, and Giral. The first two refused to distribute arms to the trade unions.
33

CHAPTER 5
doubtedly thought that they were aiding the Spanish Government by denying that
Spain had ’gone Red’. But the main reason was this: that, except for the small rev-
olutionary groups which exist in all countries, the whole world was determined,
upon preventing revolution in Spain. In particular the Communist Party, with So-
viet Russia behind it, had thrown its whole weight against the revolution. It was the
Communist thesis that revolution at this stage would be fatal and that what was to
be aimed at in Spain was not workers’ control, but bourgeois democracy. It hardly
needs pointing out why ’liberal’ capitalist opinion took the same line. Foreign capital
was heavily invested in Spain. The Barcelona Traction Company, for instance, rep-
resented ten millions of British capital; and meanwhile the trade unions had seized
all the transport in Catalonia. If the revolution went forward there would be no
compensation, or very little; if the capitalist republic prevailed, foreign investments
would be safe. And since the revolution had got to be crushed, it greatly simplified
things to pretend that no revolution had happened. In this way the real significance
of every event could be covered up; every shift of power from the trade unions to
the central Government could be represented as a necessary step in military reor-
ganization. The situation produced was curious in the extreme. Outside Spain few
people grasped that there was a revolution; inside Spain nobody doubted it. Even
the P.S.U.C. newspapers. Communist-controlled and more or less committed to an
antirevolutionary policy, talked about ’our glorious revolution’. And meanwhile the
Communist press in foreign countries was shouting that there was no sign of revolu-
tion anywhere; the seizure of factories, setting up of workers’ committees, etc., had
not happened–or, alternatively, had happened, but ’had no political significance’.
According to the Daily Worker (6 August 1936) those who said that the Spanish peo-
ple were fighting for social revolution, or for anything other than bourgeois democ-
racy, were’ downright lying scoundrels’. On the other hand, Juan Lopez, a member
of the Valencia Government, declared in February 1937 that ’the Spanish people are
shedding their blood, not for the democratic Republic and its paper Constitution, but
for…a revolution’. So it would appear that the downright lying scoundrels included
members of the Government for which we were bidden to fight. Some of the for-
eign anti-Fascist papers even descended to the pitiful lie of pretending that churches
were only attacked when they were used as Fascist fortresses. Actually churches
were pillaged everywhere and as a matter of course, because it was perfectly well
understood that the Spanish Church was part of the capitalist racket. In six months
in Spain I only saw two undamaged churches, and until about July 1937 no churches
were allowed to reopen and hold services, except for one or two Protestant churches
in Madrid.
But, after all, it was only the beginning of a revolution, not the complete thing.
Even when the workers, certainly in Catalonia and possibly elsewhere, had the
power to do so, they did not overthrow or completely replace the Government. Ob-
viously they could not do so when Franco was hammering at the gate and sections of
the middle class were on their side. The country was in a transitional state that was
capable either of developing in the direction of Socialism or of reverting to an ordi-
nary capitalist republic. The peasants had most of the land, and they were likely to
keep it, unless Franco won; all large industries had been collectivized, but whether
they remained collectivized, or whether capitalism was reintroduced, would depend
finally upon which group gained control. At the beginning both the Central Govern-
34

CHAPTER 5
ment and the Generalite de Cataluña (the semi-autonomous Catalan Government)
could definitely be said to represent the working class. The Government was headed
by Caballero, a Left-wing Socialist, and contained ministers representing the U.G.T.
(Socialist trade unions) and the C.N.T. (Syndicalist unions controlled by the Anar-
chists). The Catalan Generalite was for a while virtually superseded by an anti-
Fascist Defence Committee3 consisting mainly of delegates from the trade unions.
Later the Defence Committee was dissolved and the Generalite was reconstituted so
as to represent the unions and the various Left-wing parties. But every subsequent
reshuffling of the Government was a move towards the Right. First the P.O.U.M.
was expelled from the Generalite; six months later Caballero was replaced by the
Right-wing Socialist Negrin; shortly afterwards the C.N.T. was eliminated from the
Government; then the U.G.T.; then the C.N.T. was turned out of the Generalite; fi-
nally, a year after the outbreak of war and revolution, there remained a Government
composed entirely of Right-wing Socialists, Liberals, and Communists.
The general swing to the Right dates from about October-November 1936, when
the U.S.S.R. began to supply arms to the Government and power began to pass from
the Anarchists to the Communists. Except Russia and Mexico no country had had
the decency to come to the rescue of the Government, and Mexico, for obvious rea-
sons, could not supply arms in large quantities. Consequently the Russians were in
a position to dictate terms. There is very little doubt that these terms were, in sub-
stance, ’Prevent revolution or you get no weapons’, and that the first move against
the revolutionary elements, the expulsion of the P.O.U.M. from the Catalan Gener-
alite, was done under orders from the U.S.S.R. It has been denied that any direct
pressure was exerted by the Russian Government, but the point is not of great im-
portance, for the Communist parties of all countries can be taken as carrying out
Russian policy, and it is not denied that the Communist Party was the chief mover
first against the P.O.U.M., later against the Anarchists and against Caballero’s section
of the Socialists, and, in general, against a revolutionary policy. Once the U.S.S.R.
had intervened the triumph of the Communist Party was assured.
To begin with, gratitude to Russia for the arms and the fact that the Communist
Party, especially since the arrival of the International Brigades, looked capable of
winning the war, immensely raised the Communist prestige. Secondly, the Russian
arms were supplied via the Communist Party and the parties allied to them, who
saw to it that as few as possible got to their political opponents.4 Thirdly, by pro-
claiming a non-revolutionary policy the Communists were able to gather in all those
whom the extremists had scared. It was easy, for instance, to rally the wealthier peas-
ants against the collectivization policy of the Anarchists. There was an enormous
growth in the membership of the party, and the influx was largely from the middle
class-shopkeepers, officials, army officers, well-to-do peasants, etc., etc. The war was
essentially a triangular struggle. The fight against Franco had to continue, but the
simultaneous aim of the Government was to recover such power as remained in the
3Comité Central de Milicias Antifascistas. Delegates were chosen in proportion to the member-
ship of their organizations. Nine delegates represented the trade unions, three the Catalan Liberal
parties, and two the various Marxist parties (P.O.U.M., Communists, and others).
4This is why there were so few Russian arms on the Aragón front, where the troops were pre-
dominantly Anarchist. Until April 1937 the only Russian weapon I saw–with the exception of some
aeroplanes which may or may not have been Russian–was a solitary sub-machinegun.
35

CHAPTER 5
hands of the trade unions. It was done by a series of small moves–a policy of pin-
pricks, as somebody called it–and on the whole very cleverly. There was no general
and obvious counter-revolutionary move, and until May 1937 it was scarcely neces-
sary to use force. The workers could always be brought to heel by an argument that is
almost too obvious to need stating: ’Unless you do this, that, and the other we shall
lose the war.’ In every case, needless to say, it appeared that the thing demanded
by military necessity was the surrender of something that the workers had won for
themselves in 1936. But the argument could hardly fail, because to lose the war was
the last thing that the revolutionary parties wanted; if the war was lost democracy
and revolution. Socialism and Anarchism, became meaningless words. The Anar-
chists, the only revolutionary party that was big enough to matter, were obliged to
give way on point after point. The process of collectivization was checked, the lo-
cal committees were got rid of, the workers patrols were abolished and the pre-war
police forces, largely reinforced and very heavily armed, were restored, and various
key industries which had been under the control of the trade unions were taken over
by the Government (the seizure of the Barcelona Telephone Exchange, which led to
the May fighting, was one incident in this process); finally, most important of all,
the workers’ militias, based on the trade unions, were gradually broken up and re-
distributed among the new Popular Army, a ’non-political’ army on semi-bourgeois
lines, with a differential pay rate, a privileged officer-caste, etc., etc. In the special
circumstances this was the really decisive step; it happened later in Catalonia than
elsewhere because it was there that the revolutionary parties were strongest. Obvi-
ously the only guarantee that the workers could have of retaining their winnings was
to keep some of the armed forces under their own control. As usual, the breaking-
up of the militias was done in the name of military efficiency; and no one denied
that a thorough military reorganization was needed. It would, however, have been
quite possible to reorganize the militias and make them more efficient while keeping
them under direct control of the trade unions; the main purpose of the change was
to make sure that the Anarchists did not possess an army of their own. Moreover,
the democratic spirit of the militias made them breeding-grounds for revolution-
ary ideas. The Communists were well aware of this, and inveighed ceaselessly and
bitterly against the P.O.U.M. and Anarchist principle of equal pay for all ranks. A
general ’bourgeoisification’, a deliberate destruction of the equalitarian spirit of the
first few months of the revolution, was taking place. All happened so swiftly that
people making successive visits to Spain at intervals of a few months have declared
that they seemed scarcely to be visiting the same country; what had seemed on the
surface and for a brief instant to be a workers’ State was changing before one’s eyes
into an ordinary bourgeois republic with the normal division into rich and poor. By
the autumn of 1937 the ’Socialist’ Negrin was declaring in public speeches that ’we
respect private property’, and members of the Cortes who at the beginning of the
war had had to fly the country because of their suspected Fascist sympathies were
returning to Spain.
The whole process is easy to understand if one remembers that it proceeds from
the temporary alliance that Fascism, in certain forms, forces upon the bourgeois and
the worker. This alliance, known as the Popular Front, is in essential an alliance of
enemies, and it seems probable that it must always end by one partner swallowing
the other. The only unexpected feature in the Spanish situation–and outside Spain it
36

CHAPTER 5
has caused an immense amount of misunderstanding–is that among the parties on
the Government side the Communists stood not upon the extreme Left, but upon
the extreme Right. In reality this should cause no surprise, because the tactics of the
Communist Party elsewhere, especially in France, have made it clear that Official
Communism must be regarded, at any rate for the time being, as an antirevolution-
ary force. The whole of Comintern policy is now subordinated (excusably, consid-
ering the world situation) to the defence of U.S.S.R., which depends upon a system
of military alliances. In particular, the U.S.S.R. is in alliance with France, a capitalist-
imperialist country. The alliance is of little use to Russia unless French capitalism is
strong, therefore Communist policy in France has got to be anti-revolutionary. This
means not only that French Communists now march behind the tricolour and sing
the Marseillaise, but, what is more important, that they have had to drop all effective
agitation in the French colonies. It is less than three years since Thorez, the Secre-
tary of the French Communist Party, was declaring that the French workers would
never be bamboozled into fighting against their German comrades;5 he is now one
of the loudest-lunged patriots in France. The clue to the behaviour of the Commu-
nist Party in any country is the military relation of that country, actual or potential,
towards the U.S.S.R. In England, for instance, the position is still uncertain, hence
the English Communist Party is still hostile to the National Government, and, os-
tensibly, opposed to rearmament. If, however, Great Britain enters into an alliance
or military understanding with the U.S.S.R., the English Communist, like the French
Communist, will have no choice but to become a good patriot and imperialist; there
are premonitory signs of this already. In Spain the Communist ’line’ was undoubt-
edly influenced by the fact that France, Russia’s ally, would strongly object to a rev-
olutionary neighbour and would raise heaven and earth to prevent the liberation
of Spanish Morocco. The Daily Mail, with its tales of red revolution financed by
Moscow, was even more wildly wrong than usual. In reality it was the Communists
above all others who prevented revolution in Spain. Later, when the Right-wing
forces were in full control, the Communists showed themselves willing to go a great
deal further than the Liberals in hunting down the revolutionary leaders.6
I have tried to sketch the general course of the Spanish revolution during its first
year, because this makes it easier to understand the situation at any given moment.
But I do not want to suggest that in February I held all of the opinions that are im-
plied in what I have said above. To begin with, the things that most enlightened me
had not yet happened, and in any case my sympathies were in some ways different
from what they are now. This was partly because the political side of the war bored
me and I naturally reacted against the viewpoint of which I heard most–i.e. the
P.O.U.M.-I.L.P. viewpoint. The Englishmen I was among were mostly I.L.P. mem-
bers, with a few C.P. members among them, and most of them were much better
educated politically than myself. For weeks on end, during the dull period when
nothing was happening round Huesca, I found myself in the middle of a political
discussion that practically never ended. In the draughty evil-smelling barn of the
farm-house where we were billeted, in the stuffy blackness of dug-outs, behind the
5In the Chamber of Deputies, March 1935.
6For the best account of the interplay between the parties on the Government side, see Franz
Borkenau’s The Spanish Cockpit. This is by a long way the ablest book that has yet appeared on the
Spanish war.
37

CHAPTER 5
parapet in the freezing midnight hours, the conflicting party ’lines’ were debated
over and over. Among the Spaniards it was the same, and most of the newspapers
we saw made the inter-party feud their chief feature. One would have had to be deaf
or an imbecile not to pick up some idea of what the various parties stood for.
From the point of view of political theory there were only three parties that mat-
tered, the P.S.U.C., the P.O.U.M., and the C.N.T.-F.A.I., loosely described as the An-
archists. I take the P.S.U.C. first, as being the most important; it was the party that
finally triumphed, and even at this time it was visibly in the ascendant.
It is necessary to explain that when one speaks of the P.S.U.C. ’line’ one really
means the Communist Party ’line’. The P.S.U.C. (Partido Socialista Unificado de
Cataluña) was the Socialist Party of Catalonia; it had been formed at the beginning
of the war by the fusion of various Marxist parties, including the Catalan Commu-
nist Party, but it was now entirely under Communist control and was affiliated to
the Third International. Elsewhere in Spain no formal unification between Socialists
and Communists had taken place, but the Communist viewpoint and the Right-wing
Socialist viewpoint could everywhere be regarded as identical. Roughly speaking,
the P.S.U.C. was the political organ of the U.G.T. (Union General de Trabajadores),
the Socialist trade unions. The membership of these unions throughout Spain now
numbered about a million and a half. They contained many sections of the manual
workers, but since the outbreak of war they had also been swollen by a large influx
of middle-class members, for in the early ’revolutionary’ days people of all kinds
had found it useful to join either the U.G.T. or the C.N.T. The two blocks of unions
overlapped, but of the two the C.N.T. was more definitely a working-class organiza-
tion. The P.S.U.C. was therefore a party partly of the workers and partly of the small
bourgeoisie–the shopkeepers, the officials, and the wealthier peasants.
The P.S.U.C. ’line’ which was preached in the Communist and pro-Communist
press throughout the world, was approximately this:
’At present nothing matters except winning the war; without victory in the war
all else is meaningless. Therefore this is not the moment to talk of pressing forward
with the revolution. We can’t afford to alienate the peasants by forcing Collectiviza-
tion upon them, and we can’t afford to frighten away the middle classes who were
fighting on our side. Above all for the sake of efficiency we must do away with
revolutionary chaos. We must have a strong central government in place of local
committees, and we must have a properly trained and fully militarized army un-
der a unified command. Clinging on to fragments of workers’ control and parroting
revolutionary phrases is worse than useless; it is not merely obstructive, but even
counterrevolutionary, because it leads to divisions which can be used against us by
the Fascists. At this stage we are not fighting for the dictatorship of the proletariat,
we are fighting for parliamentary democracy. Whoever tries to turn the civil war
into a social revolution is playing into the hands of the Fascists and is in effect, if not
in intention, a traitor.’
The P.O.U.M. ’line’ differed from this on every point except, of course, the impor-
tance of winning the war. The P.O.U.M. (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista)
was one of those dissident Communist parties which have appeared in many coun-
tries in the last few years as a result of the opposition to ’Stalinism’; i.e. to the change,
real or apparent, in Communist policy. It was made up partly of ex-Communists
38

CHAPTER 5
and partly of an earlier party, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc. Numerically it was a
small party,7 with not much influence outside Catalonia, and chiefly important be-
cause it contained an unusually high proportion of politically conscious members.
In Catalonia its chief stronghold was Lérida. It did not represent any block of trade
unions. The P.O.U.M. militiamen were mostly C.N.T. members, but the actual party-
members generally belonged to the U.G.T. It was, however, only in the C.N.T. that
the P.O.U.M. had any influence.
The P.O.U.M. ’line’ was approximately this:
’It is nonsense to talk of opposing Fascism by bourgeois “democracy”. Bourgeois
“democracy” is only another name for capitalism, and so is Fascism; to fight against
Fascism on behalf of “democracy” is to fight against one form of capitalism on behalf
of a second which is liable to turn into the first at any moment. The only real alter-
native to Fascism is workers’ control. If you set up any less goal than this, you will
either hand the victory to Franco, or, at best, let in Fascism by the back door. Mean-
while the workers must cling to every scrap of what they have won; if they yield
anything to the semi-bourgeois Government they can depend upon being cheated.
The workers’ militias and police-forces must be preserved in their present form and
every effort to “bourgeoisify” them must be resisted. If the workers do not control the
armed forces, the armed forces will control the workers. The war and the revolution
are inseparable.’
The Anarchist viewpoint is less easily defined. In any case the loose term ’Anar-
chists’ is used to cover a multitude of people of very varying opinions. The huge
block of unions making up the C.N.T. (Confederacion Nacional de Trabajadores),
with round about two million members in all, had for its political organ the F.A.I.
(Federacion Anarquista Iberica), an actual Anarchist organization. But even the
members of the F.A.I., though always tinged, as perhaps most Spaniards are, with
the Anarchist philosophy, were not necessarily Anarchists in the purest sense. Es-
pecially since the beginning of the war they had moved more in the direction of or-
dinary Socialism, because circumstances had forced them to take part in centralized
administration and even to break all their principles by entering the Government.
Nevertheless they differed fundamentally from the Communists in so much that,
like the P.O.U.M., they aimed at workers’ control and not a parliamentary democ-
racy. They accepted the P.O.U.M. slogan: ’The war and the revolution are insepara-
ble’, though they were less dogmatic about it. Roughly speaking, the C.N.T.-F.A.I.
stood for: (1) Direct control over industry by the workers engaged in each indus-
try, e.g. transport, the textile factories, etc.; (2) Government by local committees and
resistance to all forms of centralized authoritarianism; (3) Uncompromising hostil-
ity to the bourgeoisie and the Church. The last point, though the least precise, was
the most important. The Anarchists were the opposite of the majority of so-called
revolutionaries in so much that though their principles were rather vague their ha-
tred of privilege and injustice was perfectly genuine. Philosophically, Communism
and Anarchism are poles apart. Practically–i.e. in the form of society aimed at–the
7The figures for the P.O.U.M. membership are given as: July 1936, 10,000; December 1936,
70,000; June 1937, 40,000. But these are from P.O.U.M. sources; a hostile estimate would proba-
bly divide them by four. The only thing one can say with any certainty about the membership of
the Spanish political parties is that every party overestimates its own numbers.
39

CHAPTER 5
difference is mainly one of emphasis, but it is quite irreconcilable. The Communist’s
emphasis is always on centralism and efficiency, the Anarchist’s on liberty and equal-
ity. Anarchism is deeply rooted in Spain and is likely to outlive Communism when
the Russian influence is withdrawn. During the first two months of the war it was
the Anarchists more than anyone else who had saved the situation, and much later
than this the Anarchist militia, in spite of their indiscipline, were notoriously the best
fighters among the purely Spanish forces. From about February 1937 onwards the
Anarchists and the P.O.U.M. could to some extent be lumped together. If the Anar-
chists, the P.O.U.M., and the Left wing of the Socialists had had the sense to combine
at the start and press a realistic policy, the history of the war might have been dif-
ferent. But in the early period, when the revolutionary parties seemed to have the
game in their hands, this was impossible. Between the Anarchists and the Socialists
there were ancient jealousies, the P.O.U.M., as Marxists, were sceptical of Anarchism,
while from the pure Anarchist standpoint the ’Trotskyism’ of the P.O.U.M. was not
much preferable to the ’Stalinism’ of the Communists. Nevertheless the Communist
tactics tended to drive the two parties together. When the P.O.U.M. joined in the dis-
astrous fighting in Barcelona in May, it was mainly from an instinct to stand by the
C.N.T., and later, when the P.O.U.M. was suppressed, the Anarchists were the only
people who dared to raise a voice in its defence.
So, roughly speaking, the alignment of forces was this. On the one side the C.N.T.-
F.A.I., the P.O.U.M., and a section of the Socialists, standing for workers’ control:
on the other side the Right-wing Socialists, Liberals, and Communists, standing for
centralized government and a militarized army.
It is easy to see why, at this time, I preferred the Communist viewpoint to that
of the P.O.U.M. The Communists had a definite practical policy, an obviously better
policy from the point of view of the common sense which looks only a few months
ahead. And certainly the day-to-day policy of the P.O.U.M., their propaganda and so
forth, was unspeakably bad; it must have been so, or they would have been able to at-
tract a bigger mass-following. What clinched everything was that the Communists–
so it seemed to me–were getting on with the war while we and the Anarchists were
standing still. This was the general feeling at the time. The Communists had gained
power and a vast increase of membership partly by appealing to the middle classes
against the revolutionaries, but partly also because they were the only people who
looked capable of winning the war. The Russian arms and the magnificent defence of
Madrid by troops mainly under Communist control had made the Communists the
heroes of Spain. As someone put it, every Russian aeroplane that flew over our heads
was Communist propaganda. The revolutionary purism of the P.O.U.M., though I
saw its logic, seemed to me rather futile. After all, the one thing that mattered was
to win the war.
Meanwhile there was the diabolical inter-party feud that was going on in the
newspapers, in pamphlets, on posters, in books–everywhere. At this time the news-
papers I saw most often were the P.O.U.M. papers La Batalla and Adelante, and their
ceaseless carping against the ’counter-revolutionary’ P.S.U.C. struck me as priggish
and tiresome. Later, when I studied the P.S.U.C. and Communist press more closely,
I realized that the P.O.U.M. were almost blameless compared with their adversaries.
Apart from anything else, they had much smaller opportunities. Unlike the Commu-
nists, they had no footing in any press outside their own country, and inside Spain
40

CHAPTER 5
they were at an immense disadvantage because the press censorship was mainly
under Communist control, which meant that the P.O.U.M. papers were liable to be
suppressed or fined if they said anything damaging. It is also fair to the P.O.U.M. to
say that though they might preach endless sermons on revolution and quote Lenin ad
nauseam, they did not usually indulge in personal libel. Also they kept their polemics
mainly to newspaper articles. Their large coloured posters, designed for a wider
public (posters are important in Spain, with its large illiterate population), did not
attack rival parties, but were simply anti-Fascist or abstractedly revolutionary; so
were the songs the militiamen sang. The Communist attacks were quite a different
matter. I shall have to deal with some of these later in this book. Here I can only give
a brief indication of the Communist line of attack.
On the surface the quarrel between the Communists and the P.O.U.M. was one of
tactics. The P.O.U.M. was for immediate revolution, the Communists not. So far so
good; there was much to be said on both sides. Further, the Communists contended
that the P.O.U.M. propaganda divided and weakened the Government forces and
thus endangered the war; again, though finally I do not agree, a good case could be
made out for this. But here the peculiarity of Communist tactics came in. Tentatively
at first, then more loudly, they began to assert that the P.O.U.M. was splitting the
Government forces not by bad judgement but by deliberate design. The P.O.U.M.
was declared to be no more than a gang of disguised Fascists, in the pay of Franco
and Hitler, who were pressing a pseudo-revolutionary policy as a way of aiding
the Fascist cause. The P.O.U.M. was a ’Trotskyist’ organization and ’Franco’s Fifth
Column’. This implied that scores of thousands of working-class people, including
eight or ten thousand soldiers who were freezing in the front-line trenches and hun-
dreds of foreigners who had come to Spain to fight against Fascism, often sacrificing
their livelihood and their nationality by doing so, were simply traitors in the pay of
the enemy. And this story was spread all over Spain by means of posters, etc., and
repeated over and over in the Communist and pro-Communist press of the whole
world. I could fill half a dozen books with quotations if I chose to collect them.
This, then, was what they were saying about us: we were Trotskyists, Fascists,
traitors, murderers, cowards, spies, and so forth. I admit it was not pleasant, espe-
cially when one thought of some of the people who were responsible for it. It is not
a nice thing to see a Spanish boy of fifteen carried down the line on a stretcher, with
a dazed white face looking out from among the blankets, and to think of the sleek
persons in London and Paris who are writing pamphlets to prove that this boy is
a Fascist in disguise. One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-
propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people
who are not fighting. The P.S.U.C. militiamen whom I knew in the line, the Com-
munists from the International Brigade whom I met from time to time, never called
me a Trotskyist or a traitor; they left that kind of thing to the journalists in the rear.
The people who wrote pamphlets against us and vilified us in the newspapers all
remained safe at home, or at worst in the newspaper offices of Valencia, hundreds of
miles from the bullets and the mud. And apart from the libels of the inter-party feud,
all the usual war-stuff, the tub-thumping, the heroics, the vilification of the enemy–
all these were done, as usual, by people who were not fighting and who in many
cases would have run a hundred miles sooner than fight. One of the dreariest effects
of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and
41

CHAPTER 5
dishonest as that of the Right.8 I do earnestly feel that on our side–the Government
side–this war was different from ordinary, imperialistic wars; but from the nature
of the war-propaganda you would never have guessed it. The fighting had barely
started when the newspapers of the Right and Left dived simultaneously into the
same cesspool of abuse. We all remember the Daily Mail’s poster: ’REDS CRUCIFY
NUNS’, while to the Daily Worker Franco’s Foreign Legion was ’composed of mur-
derers, white-slavers, dope-fiends, and the offal of every European country’. As late
as October 1937 the New Statesman was treating us to tales of Fascist barricades made
of the bodies of living children (a most unhandy thing to make barricades with), and
Mr Arthur Bryant was declaring that ’the sawing-off of a Conservative tradesman’s
legs’ was ’a commonplace’ in Loyalist Spain. The people who write that kind of stuff
never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the
same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no
true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-
tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the
conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight
unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.
As far as the journalistic part of it went, this war was a racket like all other wars.
But there was this difference, that whereas the journalists usually reserve their most
murderous invective for the enemy, in this case, as time went on, the Communists
and the P.O.U.M. came to write more bitterly about one another than about the Fas-
cists. Nevertheless at the time I could not bring myself to take it very seriously. The
inter-party feud was annoying and even disgusting, but it appeared to me as a do-
mestic squabble. I did not believe that it would alter anything or that there was any
really irreconcilable difference of policy. I grasped that the Communists and Liberals
had set their faces against allowing the revolution to go forward; I did not grasp that
they might be capable of swinging it back.
There was a good reason for this. All this time I was at the front, and at the front
the social and political atmosphere did not change. I had left Barcelona in early Jan-
uary and I did not go on leave till late April; and all this time–indeed, till later–in the
strip of Aragón controlled by Anarchist and P.O.U.M. troops, the same conditions
persisted, at least outwardly. The revolutionary atmosphere remained as I had first
known it. General and private, peasant and militiaman, still met as equals; everyone
drew the same pay, wore the same clothes, ate the same food, and called everyone
else ’thou’ and ’comrade’; there was no boss-class, no menial-class, no beggars, no
prostitutes, no lawyers, no priests, no boot-licking, no cap-touching. I was breath-
ing the air of equality, and I was simple enough to imagine that it existed all over
Spain. I did not realize that more or less by chance I was isolated among the most
revolutionary section of the Spanish working class.
So, when my more politically educated comrades told me that one could not take a
purely military attitude towards the war, and that the choice lay between revolution
and Fascism, I was inclined to laugh at them. On the whole I accepted the Commu-
nist viewpoint, which boiled down to saying: ’We can’t talk of revolution till we’ve
8I should like to make an exception of the Manchester Guardian. In connexion with this book I
have had to go through the files of a good many English papers. Of our larger papers, the Manchester
Guardian is the only one that leaves me with an increased respect for its honesty.
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CHAPTER 5
won the war’, and not the P.O.U.M. viewpoint, which boiled down to saying: ’We
must go forward or we shall go back.’ When later on I decided that the P.O.U.M.
were right, or at any rate righter than the Communists, it was not altogether upon
a point of theory. On paper the Communist case was a good one; the trouble was
that their actual behaviour made it difficult to believe that they were advancing it
in good faith. The often-repeated slogan: ’The war first and the revolution after-
wards’, though devoutly believed in by the average P.S.U.C. militiaman, who hon-
estly thought that the revolution could continue when the war had been won, was
eyewash. The thing for which the Communists were working was not to postpone
the Spanish revolution till a more suitable time, but to make sure that it never hap-
pened. This became more and more obvious as time went on, as power was twisted
more and more out of working-class hands, and as more and more revolutionaries
of every shade were flung into jail. Every move was made in the name of military
necessity, because this pretext was, so to speak, ready-made, but the effect was to
drive the workers back from an advantageous position and into a position in which,
when the war was over, they would find it impossible to resist the reintroduction of
capitalism. Please notice that I am saying nothing against the rank-and-file Commu-
nists, least of all against the thousands of Communists who died heroically round
Madrid. But those were not the men who were directing party policy. As for the
people higher up, it is inconceivable that they were not acting with their eyes open.
But, finally, the war was worth winning even if the revolution was lost. And in the
end I came to doubt whether, in the long run, the Communist policy made for victory.
Very few people seem to have reflected that a different policy might be appropriate at
different periods of the war. The Anarchists probably saved the situation in the first
two months, but they were incapable of organizing resistance beyond a certain point;
the Communists probably saved the situation in October-December, but to win the
war outright was a different matter. In England the Communist war-policy has been
accepted without question, because very few criticisms of it have been allowed to get
into print and because its general line–do away with revolutionary chaos, speed up
production, militarize the army–sounds realistic and efficient. It is worth pointing
out its inherent weakness.
In order to check every revolutionary tendency and make the war as much like an
ordinary war as possible, it became necessary to throw away the strategic opportuni-
ties that actually existed. I have described how we were armed, or not armed, on the
Aragón front. There is very little doubt that arms were deliberately withheld lest too
many of them should get into the hands of the Anarchists, who would afterwards
use them for a revolutionary purpose; consequently the big Aragón offensive which
would have made Franco draw back from Bilbao, and possibly from Madrid, never
happened. But this was comparatively a small matter. What was more important
was that once the war had been narrowed down to a ’war for democracy’ it became
impossible to make any large-scale appeal for working-class aid abroad. If we face
facts we must admit that the working class of the world has regarded the Spanish
war with detachment. Tens of thousands of individuals came to fight, but the tens
of millions behind them remained apathetic. During the first year of the war the en-
tire British public is thought to have subscribed to various ’aid Spain’ funds about a
quarter of a million pounds–probably less than half of what they spend in a single
week on going to the pictures. The way in which the working class in the democratic
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CHAPTER 5
countries could really have helped her Spanish comrades was by industrial action–
strikes and boycotts. No such thing ever even began to happen. The Labour and
Communist leaders everywhere declared that it was unthinkable; and no doubt they
were right, so long as they were also shouting at the tops of their voices that ’red’
Spain was not ’red’. Since 1914-18 ’war for democracy’ has had a sinister sound. For
years past the Communists themselves had been teaching the militant workers in all
countries that ’democracy’ was a polite name for capitalism. To say first ’Democ-
racy is a swindle’, and then ’Fight for democracy!’ is not good tactics. If, with the
huge prestige of Soviet Russia behind them, they had appealed to the workers of the
world in the name not of ’democratic Spain’, but of ’revolutionary Spain’, it is hard
to believe that they would not have got a response.
But what was most important of all, with a non-revolutionary policy it was dif-
ficult, if not impossible, to strike at Franco’s rear. By the summer of 1937 Franco
was controlling a larger population than the Government–much larger, if one counts
in the colonies–with about the same number of troops. As everyone knows, with a
hostile population at your back it is impossible to keep an army in the field with-
out an equally large army to guard your communications, suppress sabotage, etc.
Obviously, therefore, there was no real popular movement in Franco’s rear. It was
inconceivable that the people in his territory, at any rate the town-workers and the
poorer peasants, liked or wanted Franco, but with every swing to the Right the Gov-
ernment’s superiority became less apparent. What clinches everything is the case
of Morocco. Why was there no rising in Morocco? Franco was trying to set up an
infamous dictatorship, and the Moors actually preferred him to the Popular Front
Government! The palpable truth is that no attempt was made to foment a rising in
Morocco, because to do so would have meant putting a revolutionary construction
on the war. The first necessity, to convince the Moors of the Government’s good
faith, would have been to proclaim Morocco liberated. And we can imagine how
pleased the French would have been by that! The best strategic opportunity of the
war was flung away in the vain hope of placating French and British capitalism. The
whole tendency of the Communist policy was to reduce the war to an ordinary, non-
revolutionary war in which the Government was heavily handicapped. For a war of
that kind has got to be won by mechanical means, i.e. ultimately, by limitless sup-
plies of weapons; and the Government’s chief donor of weapons, the U.S.S.R., was
at a great disadvantage, geographically, compared with Italy and Germany. Perhaps
the P.O.U.M. and Anarchist slogan: ’The war and the revolution are inseparable’,
was less visionary than it sounds.
I have given my reasons for thinking that the Communist anti-revolutionary pol-
icy was mistaken, but so far as its effect upon the war goes I do not hope that my
judgement is right. A thousand times I hope that it is wrong. I would wish to see
this war won by any means whatever. And of course we cannot tell yet what may
happen. The Government may swing to the Left again, the Moors may revolt of their
own accord, England may decide to buy Italy out, the war may be won by straight-
forward military means–there is no knowing. I let the above opinions stand, and
time will show how far I am right or wrong.
But in February 1936 I did not see things quite in this light. I was sick of the
inaction on the Aragón front and chiefly conscious that I had not done my fair share
of the fighting. I used to think of the recruiting poster in Barcelona which demanded
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CHAPTER 5
accusingly of passers-by: ’What have you done for democracy?’ and feel that I could
only answer: ’I have drawn my rations.’ When I joined the militia I had promised
myself to kill one Fascist–after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct–
and I had killed nobody yet, had hardly had the chance to do so. And of course I
wanted to go to Madrid. Everyone in the army, whatever his political opinions,
always wanted to go to Madrid. This would probably mean exchanging into the
International Column, for the P.O.U.M. had now very few troops at Madrid and the
Anarchists not so many as formerly.
For the present, of course, one had to stay in the line, but I told everyone that
when we went on leave I should, if possible, exchange into the International Col-
umn, which meant putting myself under Communist control. Various people tried
to dissuade me, but no one attempted to interfere. It is fair to say that there was very
little heresy-hunting in the P.O.U.M., perhaps not enough, considering their special
circumstances; short of being a pro-Fascist no one was penalized for holding the
wrong political opinions. I spent much of my time in the militia in bitterly criticizing
the P.O.U.M. ’line’, but I never got into trouble for it. There was not even any pres-
sure upon one to become a political member of the party, though I think the majority
of the militiamen did so. I myself never joined the party–for which afterwards, when
the P.O.U.M. was suppressed, I was rather sorry.
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Chapter 6
Meanwhile, the daily–more particularly nightly–round, the common task. Sentry-
go, patrols, digging; mud, rain, shrieking winds, and occasional snow. It was not till
well into April that the nights grew noticeably warmer. Up here on the plateau the
March days were mostly like an English March, with bright blue skies and nagging
winds. The winter barley was a foot high, crimson buds were forming on the cherry
trees (the line here ran through deserted orchards and vegetable gardens), and if you
searched the ditches you could find violets and a kind of wild hyacinth like a poor
specimen of a bluebell. Immediately behind the line there ran a wonderful, green,
bubbling stream, the first transparent water I had seen since coming to the front. One
day I set my teeth and crawled into the river to have my first bath in six weeks. It
was what you might call a brief bath, for the water was mainly snow-water and not
much above freezing-point.
Meanwhile nothing happened, nothing ever happened. The English had got into
the habit of saying that this wasn’t a war, it was a bloody pantomime. We were
hardly under direct fire from the Fascists. The only danger was from stray bullets,
which, as the lines curved forward on either side, came from several directions. All
the casualties at this time were from strays. Arthur Clinton got a mysterious bullet
that smashed his left shoulder and disabled his arm, permanently, I am afraid. There
was a little shell-fire, but it was extraordinarily ineffectual. The scream and crash of
the shells was actually looked upon as a mild diversion. The Fascists ever dropped
their shells on our parapet. A few hundred yards behind us there was a country
house, called La Granja, with big farm-buildings, which was used as a store, head-
quarters, and cookhouse for this sector of the line. It was this that the Fascist gunners
were trying for, but they were five or six kilometres away and they never aimed well
enough to do more than smash the windows and chip the walls. You were only in
danger if you happened to be coming up the road when the firing started, and the
shells plunged into the fields on either side of you. One learned almost immediately
the mysterious art of knowing by the sound of a shell how close it will fall. The shells
the Fascists were firing at this period were wretchedly bad. Although they were 150
mm. they only made a crater about six feet wide by four deep, and at least one in
four failed to explode. There were the usual romantic tales of sabotage in the Fascist
factories and unexploded shells in which, instead of the charge, there was found a
scrap of paper saying ’Red Front’, but I never saw one. The truth was that the shells
were hopelessly old; someone picked up a brass fuse-cap stamped with the date, and
it was 1917. The Fascist guns were of the same make and calibre as our own, and
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CHAPTER 6
the unexploded shells were often reconditioned and fired back. There was said to
be one old shell with a nickname of its own which travelled daily to and fro, never
exploding.
At night small patrols used to be sent into no man’s land to lie in ditches near
the Fascist lines and listen for sounds (bugle-calls, motor-horns, and so forth) that
indicated activity in Huesca. There was a constant come-and-go of Fascist troops,
and the numbers could be checked to some extent from listeners’ reports. We always
had special orders to report the ringing of church bells. It seemed that the Fascists
always heard mass before going into action. In among the fields and orchards there
were deserted mud-walled huts which it was safe to explore with a lighted match
when you had plugged up the windows. Sometimes you came on valuable pieces of
loot such as a hatchet or a Fascist water-bottle (better than ours and greatly sought af-
ter). You could explore in the daytime as well, but mostly it had to be done crawling
on all fours. It was queer to creep about in those empty, fertile fields where every-
thing had been arrested just at the harvest-moment. Last year’s crops had never
been touched. The unpruned vines were snaking across the ground, the cobs on
the standing maize had gone as hard as stone, the mangels and sugar-beets were
hyper-trophied into huge woody lumps. How the peasants must have cursed both
armies! Sometimes parties of men went spud-gathering in no man’s land. About
a mile to the right of us, where the lines were closer together, there was a patch of
potatoes that was frequented both by the Fascists and ourselves. We went there in
the daytime, they only at night, as it was commanded by our machine-guns. One
night to our annoyance they turned out en masse and cleared up the whole patch. We
discovered another patch farther on, where there was practically no cover and you
had to lift the potatoes lying on your belly–a fatiguing job. If their machine-gunners
spotted you, you had to flatten yourself out like a rat when it squirms under a door,
with the bullets cutting up the clods a few yards behind you. It seemed worth it at
the time. Potatoes were getting very scarce. If you got a sackful you could take them
down to the cook-house and swap them for a water-bottleful of coffee.
And still nothing happened, nothing ever looked like happening. ’When are we
going to attack? Why don’t we attack?’ were the questions you heard night and
day from Spaniard and Englishman alike. When you think what fighting means it is
queer that soldiers want to fight, and yet undoubtedly they do. In stationary warfare
there are three things that all soldiers long for: a battle, more cigarettes, and a week’s
leave. We were somewhat better armed now than before. Each man had a hundred
and fifty rounds of ammunition instead of fifty, and by degrees we were being issued
with bayonets, steel helmets, and a few bombs. There were constant rumours of
forthcoming battles, which I have since thought were deliberately circulated to keep
up the spirits of the troops. It did not need much military knowledge to see that
there would be no major action on this side of Huesca, at any rate for the time being.
The strategic point was the road to Jaca, over on the other side. Later, when the
Anarchists made their attacks on the Jaca road, our job was to make ’holding attacks’
and force the Fascists to divert troops from the other side.
During all this time, about six weeks, there was only one action on our part of
the front. This was when our Shock Troopers attacked the Manicomio, a disused
lunatic asylum which the Fascists had converted into a fortress. There were several
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CHAPTER 6
hundred refugee Germans serving with the P.O.U.M. They were organized in a spe-
cial battalion called the Batallon de Cheque, and from a military point of view they
were on quite a different level from the rest of the militia–indeed, were more like
soldiers than anyone I saw in Spain, except the Assault Guards and some of the In-
ternational Column. The attack was mucked up, as usual. How many operations in
this war, on the Government side, were not mucked up, I wonder? The Shock Troops
took the Manicomio by storm, but the troops, of I forget which militia, who were
to support them by seizing the neighbouring hill that commanded the Manicomio,
were badly let down. The captain who led them was one of those Regular Army
officers of doubtful loyalty whom the Government persisted in employing. Either
from fright or treachery he warned the Fascists by flinging a bomb when they were
two hundred yards away. I am glad to say his men shot him dead on the spot. But
the surprise-attack was no surprise, and the militiamen were mown down by heavy
fire and driven off the hill, and at nightfall the Shock Troops had to abandon the
Manicomio. Through the night the ambulances filed down the abominable road to
Sietamo, killing the badly wounded with their joltings.
All of us were lousy by this time; though still cold it was warm enough for that.
I have had a big experience of body vermin of various kinds, and for sheer beast-
liness the louse beats everything I have encountered. Other insects, mosquitoes for
instance, make you suffer more, but at least they aren’t resident vermin. The human
louse somewhat resembles a tiny lobster, and he lives chiefly in your trousers. Short
of burning all your clothes there is no known way of getting rid of him. Down the
seams of your trousers he lays his glittering white eggs, like tiny grains of rice, which
hatch out and breed families of their own at horrible speed. I think the pacifists
might find it helpful to illustrate their pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice.
Glory of war, indeed! In war all soldiers are lousy, at least when it is warm enough.
The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae–
every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles. We kept the brutes down to
some extent by burning out the eggs and by bathing as often as we could face it.
Nothing short of lice could have driven me into that ice-cold river.
Everything was running short–boots, clothes, tobacco, soap, candles, matches,
olive oil. Our uniforms were dropping to pieces, and many of the men had no boots,
only rope-soled sandals. You came on piles of worn-out boots everywhere. Once
we kept a dug-out fire burning for two days mainly with boots, which are not bad
fuel. By this time my wife was in Barcelona and used to send me tea, chocolate, and
even cigars when such things were procurable, but even in Barcelona everything was
running short, especially tobacco. The tea was a godsend, though we had no milk
and seldom any sugar. Parcels were constantly being sent from England to men in
the contingent but they never arrived; food, clothes, cigarettes–everything was ei-
ther refused by the Post Office or seized in France. Curiously enough, the only firm
that succeeded in sending packets of tea–even, on one memorable occasion, a tin of
biscuits–to my wife was the Army and Navy Stores. Poor old Army and Navy! They
did their duty nobly, but perhaps they might have felt happier if the stuff had been
going to Franco’s side of the barricade. The shortage of tobacco was the worst of all.
At the beginning we had been issued with a packet of cigarettes a day, then it got
down to eight cigarettes a day, then to five. Finally there were ten deadly days when
there was no issue of tobacco at all. For the first time, in Spain, I saw something that
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CHAPTER 6
you see every day in London–people picking up fag-ends.
Towards the end of March I got a poisoned hand that had to be lanced and put
in a sling. I had to go into hospital, but it was not worth sending me to Sietamo
for such a petty injury, so I stayed in the so-called hospital at Monflorite, which was
merely a casualty clearing station. I was there ten days, part of the time in bed. The
practicantes (hospital assistants) stole practically every valuable object I possessed,
including my camera and all my photographs. At the front everyone stole, it was the
inevitable effect of shortage, but the hospital people were always the worst. Later,
in the hospital at Barcelona, an American who had come to join the International
Column on a ship that was torpedoed by an Italian submarine, told me how he was
carried ashore wounded, and how, even as they lifted him into the ambulance, the
stretcher-bearers pinched his wrist-watch.
While my arm was in the sling I spent several blissful days wandering about the
country-side. Monflorite was the usual huddle of mud and stone houses, with nar-
row tortuous alleys that had been churned by lorries till they looked like the craters
of the moon. The church had been badly knocked about but was used as a military
store. In the whole neighbourhood there were only two farm-houses of any size,
Torre Lorenzo and Torre Fabian, and only two really large buildings, obviously the
houses of the landowners who had once lorded it over the countryside; you could
see their wealth reflected in the miserable huts of the peasants. Just behind the river,
close to the front line, there was an enormous flour-mill with a country-house at-
tached to it. It seemed shameful to see the huge costly machine rusting useless and
the wooden flour chutes torn down for firewood. Later on, to get firewood for the
troops farther back, parties of men were sent in lorries to wreck the place system-
atically. They used to smash the floorboards of a room by bursting a hand-grenade
in it. La Granja, our store and cook-house, had possibly at one time been a convent.
It had huge courtyards and out-houses, covering an acre or more, with stabling for
thirty or forty horses. The country-houses in that part of Spain are of no interest ar-
chitecturally, but their farm-buildings, of lime-washed stone with round arches and
magnificent roof-beams, are noble places, built on a plan that has probably not al-
tered for centuries. Sometimes it gave you a sneaking sympathy with the Fascist
ex-owners to see the way the militia treated the buildings they had seized. In La
Granja every room that was not in use had been turned into a latrine–a frightful
shambles of smashed furniture and excrement. The little church that adjoined it, its
walls perforated by shell-holes, had its floor inches deep in dung. In the great court-
yard where the cooks ladled out the rations the litter of rusty tins, mud, mule dung,
and decaying food was revolting. It gave point to the old army song:
There are rats, rats, Rats as big as cats, In the quartermaster’s store!
The ones at La Granja itself really were as big as cats, or nearly; great bloated
brutes that waddled over the beds of muck, too impudent even to run away unless
you shot at them.
Spring was really here at last. The blue in the sky was softer, the air grew sud-
denly balmy. The frogs were mating noisily in the ditches. Round the drinking-pool
that served for the village mules I found exquisite green frogs the size of a penny,
so brilliant that the young grass looked dull beside them. Peasant lads went out
with buckets hunting for snails, which they roasted alive on sheets of tin. As soon
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CHAPTER 6
as the weather improved the peasants had turned out for the spring ploughing. It is
typical of the utter vagueness in which the Spanish agrarian revolution is wrapped
that I could not even discover for certain whether the land here was collectivized or
whether the peasants had simply divided it up among themselves. I fancy that in
theory it was collectivized, this being P.O.U.M. and Anarchist territory. At any rate
the landowners were gone, the fields were being cultivated, and people seemed sat-
isfied. The friendliness of the peasants towards ourselves never ceased to astonish
me. To some of the older ones the war must have seemed meaningless, visibly it pro-
duced a shortage of everything and a dismal dull life for everybody, and at the best
of times peasants hate having troops quartered upon them. Yet they were invariably
friendly–I suppose reflecting that, however intolerable we might be in other ways,
we did stand between them and their one-time landlords. Civil war is a queer thing.
Huesca was not five miles away, it was these people’s market town, all of them had
relatives there, every week of their lives they had gone there to sell their poultry and
vegetables. And now for eight months an impenetrable barrier of barbed wire and
machine-guns had lain between. Occasionally it slipped their memory. Once I was
talking to an old woman who was carrying one of those tiny iron lamps in which the
Spaniards bum olive oil. ’Where can I buy a lamp like that?’ I said.’ In Huesca,’ she
said without thinking, and then we both laughed. The village girls were splendid
vivid creatures with coal-black hair, a swinging walk, and a straightforward, man-
to-man demeanour which was probably a by-product of the revolution.
Men in ragged blue shirts and black corduroy breeches, with broad-brimmed
straw hats, were ploughing the fields behind teams of mules with rhythmically flop-
ping ears. Their ploughs were wretched things, only stirring the soil, not cutting
anything we should regard as a furrow. All the agricultural implements were piti-
fully antiquated, everything being governed by the expensiveness of metal. A bro-
ken plough-share, for instance, was patched, and then patched again, till sometimes
it was mainly patches. Rakes and pitchforks were made of wood. Spades, among
a people who seldom possessed boots, were unknown; they did their digging with
a clumsy hoe like those used in India. There was a kind of harrow that took one
straight back to the later Stone Age. It was made of boards joined together, to about
the size of a kitchen table; in the boards hundreds of holes were morticed, and into
each hole was jammed a piece of flint which had been chipped into shape exactly as
men used to chip them ten thousand years ago. I remember my feelings almost of
horror when I first came upon one of these things in a derelict hut in no man’s land.
I had to puzzle over it for a long while before grasping that it was a harrow. It made
me sick to think of the work that must go into the making of such a thing, and the
poverty that was obliged to use flint in place of steel. I have felt more kindly towards
industrialism ever since. But in the village there were two up-to-date farm tractors,
no doubt seized from some big landowner’s estate.
Once or twice I wandered out to the little walled graveyard that stood a mile or
so from the village. The dead from the front were normally sent to Sietamo; these
were the village dead. It was queerly different from an English graveyard. No rever-
ence for the dead here! Everything overgrown with bushes and coarse grass, human
bones littered everywhere. But the really surprising thing was the almost complete
lack of religious inscriptions on the gravestones, though they all dated from before
the revolution. Only once, I think, I saw the ’Pray for the Soul of So-and-So’ which
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CHAPTER 6
is usual on Catholic graves. Most of the inscriptions were purely secular, with ludi-
crous poems about the virtues of the deceased. On perhaps one grave in four or five
there was a small cross or a perfunctory reference to Heaven; this had usually been
chipped off by some industrious atheist with a chisel.
It struck me that the people in this part of Spain must be genuinely without reli-
gious feeling–religious feeling, I mean, in the orthodox sense. It is curious that all
the time I was in Spain I never once saw a person cross himself; yet you would think
such a movement would become instinctive, revolution or no revolution. Obviously
the Spanish Church will come back (as the saying goes, night and the Jesuits always
return), but there is no doubt that at the outbreak of the revolution it collapsed and
was smashed up to an extent that would be unthinkable even for the moribund C. of
E. in like circumstances. To the Spanish people, at any rate in Catalonia and Aragón,
the Church was a racket pure and simple. And possibly Christian belief was re-
placed to some extent by Anarchism, whose influence is widely spread and which
undoubtedly has a religious tinge.
It was the day I came back from hospital that we advanced the line to what was
really its proper position, about a thousand yards forward, along the little stream
that lay a couple of hundred yards in front of the Fascist line. This operation ought
to have been carried out months earlier. The point of doing it now was that the
Anarchists were attacking on the Jaca road, and to advance on this side made them
divert troops to face us.
We were sixty or seventy hours without sleep, and my memories go down into a
sort of blue, or rather a series of pictures. Listening-duty in no man’s land, a hundred
yards from the Casa Francesa, a fortified farm-house which was part of the Fascist
line. Seven hours lying in a horrible marsh, in reedy-smelling water into which one’s
body subsided gradually deeper and deeper: the reedy smell, the numbing cold, the
stars immovable in the black sky, the harsh croaking of the frogs. Though this was
April it was the coldest night that I remember in Spain. Only a hundred yards be-
hind us the working-parties were hard at it, but there was utter silence except for the
chorus of the frogs. Just once during the night I heard a sound–the familiar noise
of a sand-bag being flattened with a spade. It is queer how, just now and again,
Spaniards can carry out a brilliant feat of organization. The whole move was beauti-
fully planned. In seven hours six hundred men constructed twelve hundred metres
of trench and parapet, at distances of from a hundred and fifty to three hundred
yards from the Fascist line, and all so silently that the Fascists heard nothing, and
during the night there was only one casualty. There were more next day, of course.
Every man had his job assigned to him, even to the cook-house orderlies who sud-
denly arrived when the work was done with buckets of wine laced with brandy.
And then the dawn coming up and the Fascists suddenly discovering that we were
there. The square white block of the Casa Francesa, though it was two hundred yards
away, seemed to tower over us, and the machine-guns in its sandbagged upper win-
dows seemed to be pointing straight down into the trench. We all stood gaping at it,
wondering why the Fascists didn’t see us. Then a vicious swirl of bullets, and every-
one had flung himself on his knees and was frantically digging, deepening the trench
and scooping out small shelters in the side. My arm was still in bandages, I could not
dig, and I spent most of that day reading a detective story–The Missing Moneylender
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CHAPTER 6
its name was. I don’t remember the plot of it, but I remember very clearly the feel-
ing of sitting there reading it; the dampish clay of the trench bottom underneath me,
the constant shifting of my legs out of the way as men hurried stopping down the
trench, the crack-crack-crack of bullets a foot or two overhead. Thomas Parker got
a bullet through the top of his thigh, which, as he said, was nearer to being a D.S.O.
than he cared about. Casualties were happening all along the line, but nothing to
what there would have been if they had caught us on the move during the night. A
deserter told us afterwards that five Fascist sentries were shot for negligence. Even
now they could have massacred us if they had had the initiative to bring up a few
mortars. It was an awkward job getting the wounded down the narrow, crowded
trench. I saw one poor devil, his breeches dark with blood, flung out of his stretcher
and gasping in agony. One had to carry wounded men a long distance, a mile or
more, for even when a road existed the ambulances never came very near the front
line. If they came too near the Fascists had a habit of shelling them–justifiably, for in
modern war no one scruples to use an ambulance for carrying ammunition.
And then, next night, waiting at Torre Fabian for an attack that was called off at
the last moment by wireless. In the barn where we waited the floor was a thin layer
of chaff over deep beds of bones, human bones and cows’ bones mixed up, and the
place was alive with rats. The filthy brutes came swarming out of the ground on
every side. If there is one thing I hate more than another it is a rat running over
me in the darkness. However, I had the satisfaction of catching one of them a good
punch that sent him flying.
And then waiting fifty or sixty yards from the Fascist parapet for the order to at-
tack. A long line of men crouching in an irrigation ditch with their bayonets peeping
over the edge and the whites of their eyes shining through the darkness. Kopp and
Benjamin squatting behind us with a man who had a wireless receiving-box strapped
to his shoulders. On the western horizon rosy gun-flashes followed at intervals of
several seconds by enormous explosions. And then a pip-pip-pip noise from the
wireless and the whispered order that we were to get out of it while the going was
good. We did so, but not quickly enough. Twelve wretched children of the J.C.I.
(the Youth League of the P.O.U.M., corresponding to the J.S.U. of the P.S.U.C.) who
had been posted only about forty yards from the Fascist parapet, were caught by the
dawn and unable to escape. All day they had to lie there, with only tufts of grass for
cover, the Fascists shooting at them every time they moved. By nightfall seven were
dead, then the other five managed to creep away in the darkness.
And then, for many mornings to follow, the sound of the Anarchist attacks on the
other side of Huesca. Always the same sound. Suddenly, at some time in the small
hours, the opening crash of several score bombs bursting simultaneously–even from
miles away a diabolical, rending crash–and then the unbroken roar of massed rifles
and machine-guns, a heavy rolling sound curiously similar to the roll of drums. By
degrees the firing would spread all round the lines that encircled Huesca, and we
would stumble out into the trench to lean sleepily against the parapet while a ragged
meaningless fire swept overhead.
In the daytime the guns thundered fitfully. Torre Fabian, now our cookhouse, was
shelled and partially destroyed. It is curious that when you are watching artillery-
fire from a safe distance you always want the gunner to hit his mark, even though the
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mark contains your dinner and some of your comrades. The Fascists were shooting
well that morning; perhaps there were German gunners on the job. They bracketed
neatly on Torre Fabian. One shell beyond it, one shell short of it, then whizz-BOOM’
Burst rafters leaping upwards and a sheet of uralite skimming down the air like a
nicked playing-card. The next shell took off a corner of a building as neatly as a giant
might do it with a knife. But the cooks produced dinner on time–a memorable feat.
As the days went on the unseen but audible guns began each to assume a distinct
personality. There were the two batteries of Russian 75-mm. guns which fired from
close in our rear and which somehow evoked in my mind the picture of a fat man
hitting a golf-ball. These were the first Russian guns I had seen–or heard, rather.
They had a low trajectory and a very high velocity, so that you heard the cartridge
explosion, the whizz, and the shell-burst almost simultaneously. Behind Monflorite
were two very heavy guns which fired a few times a day, with a deep, muffled roar
that was like the baying of distant chained-up monsters. Up at Mount Aragón, the
medieval fortress which the Government troops had stormed last year (the first time
in its history, it was said), and which guarded one of the approaches to Huesca, there
was a heavy gun which must have dated well back into the nineteenth century. Its
great shells whistled over so slowly that you felt certain you could run beside them
and keep up with them. A shell from this gun sounded like nothing so much as
a man riding along on a bicycle and whistling. The trench-mortars, small though
they were, made the most evil sound of all. Their shells are really a kind of winged
torpedo, shaped like the darts thrown in public-houses and about the size of a quart
bottle; they go off with a devilish metallic crash, as of some monstrous globe of brittle
steel being shattered on an anvil. Sometimes our aeroplanes flew over and let loose
the aerial torpedoes whose tremendous echoing roar makes the earth tremble even
at two miles’ distance. The shell-bursts from the Fascist anti-aircraft guns dotted the
sky like cloudlets in a bad water-colour, but I never saw them get within a thousand
yards of an aeroplane. When an aeroplane swoops down and uses its machine-gun
the sound, from below, is like the fluttering of wings.
On our part of the line not much was happening. Two hundred yards to the right
of us, where the Fascists were on higher ground, their snipers picked off a few of
our comrades. Two hundred yards to the left, at the bridge over the stream, a sort
of duel was going on between the Fascist mortars and the men who were building
a concrete barricade across the bridge. The evil little shells whizzed over, zwing-
crash! zwing-crash!, making a doubly diabolical noise when they landed on the
asphalt road. A hundred yards away you could stand in perfect safety and watch
the columns of earth and black smoke leaping into the air like magic trees. The poor
devils round the bridge spent much of the daytime cowering in the little man-holes
they had scooped in the side of the trench. But there were less casualties than might
have been expected, and the barricade rose steadily, a wall of concrete two feet thick,
with embrasures for two machine-guns and a small field gun. The concrete was
being reinforced with old bedsteads, which apparently was the only iron that could
be found for the purpose.
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One afternoon Benjamin told us that he wanted fifteen volunteers. The attack on the
Fascist redoubt which had been called off on the previous occasion was to be carried
out tonight. I oiled my ten Mexican cartridges, dirtied my bayonet (the things give
your position away if they flash too much), and packed up a hunk of bread, three
inches of red sausage, and a cigar which my wife had sent from Barcelona and which
I had been hoarding for a long time. Bombs were served out, three to a man. The
Spanish Government had at last succeeded in producing a decent bomb. It was on
the principle of a Mills bomb, but with two pins instead of one. After you had pulled
the pins out there was an interval of seven seconds before the bomb exploded. Its
chief disadvantage was that one pin was very stiff and the other very loose, so that
you had the choice of leaving both pins in place and being unable to pull the stiff
one out in a moment of emergency, or pulling out the stiff one beforehand and being
in a constant stew lest the thing should explode in your pocket. But it was a handy
little bomb to throw.
A little before midnight Benjamin led the fifteen of us down to Torre Fabian. Ever
since evening the rain had been pelting down. The irrigation ditches were brimming
over, and every time you stumbled into one you were in water up to your waist.
In the pitch darkness and sheeting rain in the farm-yard a dim mass of men was
waiting. Kopp addressed us, first in Spanish, then in English, and explained the plan
of attack. The Fascist line here made an L-bend and the parapet we were to attack
lay on rising ground at the corner of the L. About thirty of us, half English, and half
Spanish, under the command of Jorge Roca, our battalion commander (a battalion in
the militia was about four hundred men), and Benjamin, were to creep up and cut
the Fascist wire. Jorge would fling the first bomb as a signal, then the rest of us were
to send in a rain of bombs, drive the Fascists out of the parapet, and seize it before
they could rally. Simultaneously seventy Shock Troopers were to assault the next
Fascist ’position’, which lay two hundred yards to the right of the other, joined to it
by a communication-trench. To prevent us from shooting each other in the darkness
white armlets would be worn. At this moment a messenger arrived to say that there
were no white armlets. Out of the darkness a plaintive voice suggested: ’Couldn’t
we arrange for the Fascists to wear white armlets instead?’
There was an hour or two to put in. The barn over the mule stable was so wrecked
by shell-fire that you could not move about in it without a light. Half the floor had
been torn away by a plunging shell and there was a twenty-foot drop on to the stones
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CHAPTER 7
beneath. Someone found a pick and levered a burst plank out of the floor, and in
a few minutes we had got a fire alight and our drenched clothes were steaming.
Someone else produced a pack of cards. A rumour–one of those mysterious rumours
that are endemic in war–flew round that hot coffee with brandy in it was about to
be served out. We filed eagerly down the almost-collapsing staircase and wandered
round the dark yard, inquiring where the coffee was to be found. Alas! there was no
coffee. Instead, they called us together, ranged us into single file, and then Jorge and
Benjamin set off rapidly into the darkness, the rest of us following.
It was still raining and intensely dark, but the wind had dropped. The mud was
unspeakable. The paths through the beet-fields were simply a succession of lumps,
as slippery as a greasy pole, with huge pools everywhere. Long before we got to the
place where we were to leave our own parapet everyone had fallen several times and
our rifles were coated with mud. At the parapet a small knot of men, our reserves,
were waiting, and the doctor and a row of stretchers. We filed through the gap in the
parapet and waded through another irrigation ditch. Splash-gurgle! Once again in
water up to your waist, with the filthy, slimy mud oozing over your boot-tops. On
the grass outside Jorge waited till we were all through. Then, bent almost double, he
began creeping slowly forward. The Fascist parapet was about a hundred and fifty
yards away. Our one chance of getting there was to move without noise.
I was in front with Jorge and Benjamin. Bent double, but with faces raised, we
crept into the almost utter darkness at a pace that grew slower at every step. The
rain beat lightly in our faces. When I glanced back I could see the men who were
nearest to me, a bunch of humped shapes like huge black mushrooms gliding slowly
forward. But every time I raised my head Benjamin, close beside me, whispered
fiercely in my ear: ’To keep ze head down! To keep ze head down!’ I could have told
him that he needn’t worry. I knew by experiment that on a dark night you can never
see a man at twenty paces. It was far more important to go quietly. If they once heard
us we were done for. They had only to spray the darkness with their machine-gun
and there was nothing for it but to run or be massacred.
But on the sodden ground it was almost impossible to move quietly. Do what you
would your feet stuck to the mud, and every step you took was slop-slop, slop-slop.
And the devil of it was that the wind had dropped, and in spite of the rain it was
a very quiet night. Sounds would carry a long way. There was a dreadful moment
when I kicked against a tin and thought every Fascist within miles must have heard
it. But no, not a sound, no answering shot, no movement in the Fascist lines. We
crept onwards, always more slowly. I cannot convey to you the depth of my desire
to get there. Just to get within bombing distance before they heard us! At such a
time you have not even any fear, only a tremendous hopeless longing to get over the
intervening ground. I have felt exactly the same thing when stalking a wild animal;
the same agonized desire to get within range, the same dreamlike certainty that it
is impossible. And how the distance stretched out! I knew the ground well, it was
barely a hundred and fifty yards, and yet it seemed more like a mile. When you are
creeping at that pace you are aware as an ant might be of the enormous variations
in the ground; the splendid patch of smooth grass here, the evil patch of sticky mud
there, the tall rustling reeds that have got to be avoided, the heap of stones that
almost makes you give up hope because it seems impossible to get over it without
noise.
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CHAPTER 7
We had been creeping forward for such an age that I began to think we had gone
the wrong way. Then in the darkness thin parallel lines of something blacker were
faintly visible. It was the outer wire (the Fascists had two lines of wire). Jorge knelt
down, fumbled in his pocket. He had our only pair of wire-cutters. Snip, snip.
The trailing stuff was lifted delicately aside. We waited for the men at the back to
close up. They seemed to be making a frightful noise. It might be fifty yards to
the Fascist parapet now. Still onwards, bent double. A stealthy step, lowering your
foot as gently as a cat approaching a mousehole; then a pause to listen; then another
step. Once I raised my head; in silence Benjamin put his hand behind my neck and
pulled it violently down. I knew that the inner wire was barely twenty yards from
the parapet. It seemed to me inconceivable that thirty men could get there unheard.
Our breathing was enough to give us away. Yet somehow we did get there. The
Fascist parapet was visible now, a dim black mound, looming high above us. Once
again Jorge knelt and fumbled. Snip, snip. There was no way of cutting the stuff
silently.
So that was the inner wire. We crawled through it on all fours and rather more
rapidly. If we had time to deploy now all was well. Jorge and Benjamin crawled
across to the right. But the men behind, who were spread out, had to form into
single file to get through the narrow gap in the wire, and just as this moment there
was a flash and a bang from the Fascist parapet. The sentry had heard us at last.
Jorge poised himself on one knee and swung his arm like a bowler. Crash! His bomb
burst somewhere over the parapet. At once, far more promptly than one would
have thought possible, a roar of fire, ten or twenty rifles, burst out from the Fascist
parapet. They had been waiting for us after all. Momentarily you could see every
sand-bag in the lurid light. Men too far back were flinging their bombs and some
of them were falling short of the parapet. Every loophole seemed to be spouting
jets of flame. It is always hateful to be shot at in the dark–every rifle-flash seems
to be pointed straight at yourself–but it was the bombs that were the worst. You
cannot conceive the horror of these things till you have seen one burst close to you
in darkness; in the daytime there is only the crash of the explosion, in the darkness
there is the blinding red glare as well. I had flung myself down at the first volley.
All this while I was lying on my side in the greasy mud, wrestling savagely with the
pin of a bomb. The damned thing would not come out. Finally I realized that I was
twisting it in the wrong direction. I got the pin out, rose to my knees, hurled the
bomb, and threw myself down again. The bomb burst over to the right, outside the
parapet; fright had spoiled my aim. Just at this moment another bomb burst right in
front of me, so close that I could feel the heat of the explosion. I flattened myself out
and dug my face into the mud so hard that I hurt my neck and thought that I was
wounded. Through the din I heard an English voice behind me say quietly: ’I’m hit.’
The bomb had, in fact, wounded several people round about me without touching
myself. I rose to my knees and flung my second bomb. I forget where that one went.
The Fascists were firing, our people behind were firing, and I was very conscious
of being in the middle. I felt the blast of a shot and realized that a man was firing
from immediately behind me. I stood up and shouted at him: ’Don’t shoot at me,
you bloody fool!’ At this moment I saw that Benjamin, ten or fifteen yards to my
right, was motioning to me with his arm. I ran across to him. It meant crossing the
line of spouting loop-holes, and as I went I clapped my left hand over my cheek; an
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CHAPTER 7
idiotic gesture–as though one’s hand could stop a bullet!–but I had a horror of being
hit in the face. Benjamin was kneeling on one knee with a pleased, devilish sort
of expression on his face and firing carefully at the rifle-flashes with his automatic
pistol. Jorge had dropped wounded at the first volley and was somewhere out of
sight. I knelt beside Benjamin, pulled the pin out of my third bomb and flung it. Ah!
No doubt about it that time. The bomb crashed inside the parapet, at the corner, just
by the machine-gun nest.
The Fascist fire seemed to have slackened very suddenly. Benjamin leapt to his feet
and shouted: ’Forward! Charge!’ We dashed up the short steep slope on which the
parapet stood. I say ’dashed’; ’lumbered’ would be a better word; the fact is that you
can’t move fast when you are sodden and mudded from head to foot and weighted
down with a heavy rifle and bayonet and a hundred and fifty cartridges. I took it
for granted that there would be a Fascist waiting for me at the top. If he fired at that
range he could not miss me, and yet somehow I never expected him to fire, only to
try for me with his bayonet. I seemed to feel in advance the sensation of our bayonets
crossing, and I wondered whether his arm would be stronger than mine. However,
there was no Fascist waiting. With a vague feeling of relief I found that it was a low
parapet and the sand-bags gave a good foothold. As a rule they are difficult to get
over. Everything inside was smashed to pieces, beams flung all over the place, and
great shards of uralite littered everywhere. Our bombs had wrecked all the huts and
dug-outs. And still there was not a soul visible. I thought they would be lurking
somewhere underground, and shouted in English (I could not think of any Spanish
at the moment): ’Come on out of it! Surrender!’ No answer. Then a man, a shadowy
figure in the half-light, skipped over the roof of one of the ruined huts and dashed
away to the left. I started after him, prodding my bayonet ineffectually into the
darkness. As I rounded the comer of the hut I saw a man–I don’t know whether
or not it was the same man as I had seen before–fleeing up the communication-
trench that led to the other Fascist position. I must have been very close to him, for
I could see him clearly. He was bareheaded and seemed to have nothing on except
a blanket which he was clutching round his shoulders. If I had fired I could have
blown him to pieces. But for fear of shooting one another we had been ordered to
use only bayonets once we were inside the parapet, and in any case I never even
thought of firing. Instead, my mind leapt backwards twenty years, to our boxing
instructor at school, showing me in vivid pantomime how he had bayoneted a Turk
at the Dardanelles. I gripped my rifle by the small of the butt and lunged at the
man’s back. He was just out of my reach. Another lunge: still out of reach. And for
a little distance we proceeded like this, he rushing up the trench and I after him on
the ground above, prodding at his shoulder-blades and never quite getting there–a
comic memory for me to look back upon, though I suppose it seemed less comic to
him.
Of course, he knew the ground better than I and had soon slipped away from me.
When I came back the position was full of shouting men. The noise of firing had
lessened somewhat. The Fascists were still pouring a heavy fire at us from three
sides, but it was coming from a greater distance.
We had driven them back for the time being. I remember saying in an oracular
manner: ’We can hold this place for half an hour, not more.’ I don’t know why
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CHAPTER 7
I picked on half an hour. Looking over the right-hand parapet you could see in-
numerable greenish rifle-flashes stabbing the darkness; but they were a long way
back, a hundred or two hundred yards. Our job now was to search the position
and loot anything that was worth looting. Benjamin and some others were already
scrabbling among the ruins of a big hut or dug-out in the middle of the position.
Benjamin staggered excitedly through the ruined roof, tugging at the rope handle of
an ammunition box.
’Comrades! Ammunition! Plenty ammunition here!’
’We don’t want ammunition,’ said a voice, ’we want rifles.’
This was true. Half our rifles were jammed with mud and unusable. They could
be cleaned, but it is dangerous to take the bolt out of a rifle in the darkness; you
put it down somewhere and then you lose it. I had a tiny electric torch which my
wife had managed to buy in Barcelona, otherwise we had no light of any description
between us. A few men with good rifles began a desultory fire at the flashes in the
distance. No one dared fire too rapidly; even the best of the rifles were liable to jam if
they got too hot. There were about sixteen of us inside the parapet, including one or
two who were wounded. A number of wounded, English and Spanish, were lying
outside. Patrick O’Hara, a Belfast Irishman who had had some training in first-aid,
went to and fro with packets of bandages, binding up the wounded men and, of
course, being shot at every time he returned to the parapet, in spite of his indignant
shouts of ’POUM!’
We began searching the position. There were several dead men lying about, but I
did not stop to examine them. The thing I was after was the machine-gun. All the
while when we were lying outside I had been wondering vaguely why the gun did
not fire. I flashed my torch inside the machine-gun nest. A bitter disappointment!
The gun was not there. Its tripod was there, and various boxes of ammunition and
spare parts, but the gun was gone. They must have unscrewed it and carried it
off at the first alarm. No doubt they were acting under orders, but it was a stupid
and cowardly thing to do, for if they had kept the gun in place they could have
slaughtered the whole lot of us. We were furious. We had set our hearts on capturing
a machine-gun.
We poked here and there but did not find anything of much value. There were
quantities of Fascist bombs lying about–a rather inferior type of bomb, which you
touched off by pulling a string–and I put a couple of them in my pocket as souvenirs.
It was impossible not to be struck by the bare misery of the Fascist dug-outs. The
litter of spare clothes, books, food, petty personal belongings that you saw in our
own dug-outs was completely absent; these poor unpaid conscripts seemed to own
nothing except blankets and a few soggy hunks of bread. Up at the far end there was
a small dug-out which was partly above ground and had a tiny window. We flashed
the torch through the window and instantly raised a cheer. A cylindrical object in a
leather case, four feet high and six inches in diameter, was leaning against the wall.
Obviously the machine-gun barrel. We dashed round and got in at the doorway, to
find that the thing in the leather case was not a machine-gun but something which, in
our weapon-starved army, was even more precious. It was an enormous telescope,
probably of at least sixty or seventy magnifications, with a folding tripod. Such
telescopes simply did not exist on our side of the line and they were desperately
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CHAPTER 7
needed. We brought it out in triumph and leaned it against the parapet, to be carried
off after.
At this moment someone shouted that the Fascists were closing in. Certainly the
din of firing had grown very much louder. But it was obvious that the Fascists would
not counterattack from the right, which meant crossing no man’s land and assaulting
their own parapet. If they had any sense at all they would come at us from inside
the line. I went round to the other side of the dug-outs. The position was roughly
horseshoe-shaped, with the dug-outs in the middle, so that we had another parapet
covering us on the left. A heavy fire was coming from that direction, but it did not
matter greatly. The danger-spot was straight in front, where there was no protection
at all. A stream of bullets was passing just overhead. They must be coming from
the other Fascist position farther up the line; evidently the Shock Troopers had not
captured it after all. But this time the noise was deafening. It was the unbroken,
drum-like roar of massed rifles which I was used to hearing from a little distance; this
was the first time I had been in the middle of it. And by now, of course, the firing had
spread along the line for miles around. Douglas Thompson, with a wounded arm
dangling useless at his side, was leaning against the parapet and firing one-handed
at the flashes. Someone whose rifle had jammed was loading for him.
There were four or five of us round this side. It was obvious what we must do.
We must drag the sand-bags from the front parapet and make a barricade across the
unprotected side. And we had got to be quick. The fire was high at present, but they
might lower it at any moment; by the flashes all round I could see that we had a
hundred or two hundred men against us. We began wrenching the sand-bags loose,
carrying them twenty yards forward and dumping them into a rough heap. It was
a vile job. They were big sand-bags, weighing a hundredweight each and it took
every ounce of your strength to prise them loose; and then the rotten sacking split
and the damp earth cascaded all over you, down your neck and up your sleeves. I
remember feeling a deep horror at everything: the chaos, the darkness, the frightful
din, the slithering to and fro in the mud, the struggles with the bursting sand-bags–
all the time encumbered with my rifle, which I dared not put down for fear of losing
it. I even shouted to someone as we staggered along with a bag between us: ’This
is war! Isn’t it bloody?’ Suddenly a succession of tall figures came leaping over the
front parapet. As they came nearer we saw that they wore the uniform of the Shock
Troopers, and we cheered, thinking they were reinforcements. However, there were
only four of them, three Germans and a Spaniard. We heard afterwards what had
happened to the Shock Troopers. They did not know the ground and in the darkness
had been led to the wrong place, where they were caught on the Fascist wire and
numbers of them were shot down. These were four who had got lost, luckily for
themselves. The Germans did not speak a word of English, French, or Spanish. With
difficulty and much gesticulation we explained what we were doing and got them
to help us in building the barricade.
The Fascists had brought up a machine-gun now. You could see it spitting like a
squib a hundred or two hundred yards away; the bullets came over us with a steady,
frosty crackle. Before long we had flung enough sand-bags into place to make a low
breastwork behind which the few men who were on this side of the position could
lie down and fire. I was kneeling behind them. A mortar-shell whizzed over and
crashed somewhere in no man’s land. That was another danger, but it would take
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CHAPTER 7
them some minutes to find our range. Now that we had finished wrestling with
those beastly sand-bags it was not bad fun in a way; the noise, the darkness, the
flashes approaching, our own men blazing back at the flashes. One even had time
to think a little. I remember wondering whether I was frightened, and deciding that
I was not. Outside, where I was probably in less danger, I had been half sick with
fright. Suddenly there was another shout that the Fascists were closing in. There was
no doubt about it this time, the rifle-flashes were much nearer. I saw a flash hardly
twenty yards away. Obviously they were working their way up the communication-
trench. At twenty yards they were within easy bombing range; there were eight
or nine of us bunched together and a single well-placed bomb would blow us all
to fragments. Bob Smillie, the blood running down his face from a small wound,
sprang to his knee and flung a bomb. We cowered, waiting for the crash. The fuse
fizzled red as it sailed through the air, but the bomb failed to explode. (At least a
quarter of these bombs were duds). I had no bombs left except the Fascist ones and
I was not certain how these worked. I shouted to the others to know if anyone had
a bomb to spare. Douglas Moyle felt in his pocket and passed one across. I flung
it and threw myself on my face. By one of those strokes of luck that happen about
once in a year I had managed to drop the bomb almost exactly where the rifle had
flashed. There was the roar of the explosion and then, instantly, a diabolical outcry
of screams and groans. We had got one of them, anyway; I don’t know whether he
was killed, but certainly he was badly hurt. Poor wretch, poor wretch! I felt a vague
sorrow as I heard him screaming. But at the same instant, in the dim light of the
rifle-flashes, I saw or thought I saw a figure standing near the place where the rifle
had flashed. I threw up my rifle and let fly. Another scream, but I think it was still
the effect of the bomb. Several more bombs were thrown. The next rifle-flashes we
saw were a long way off, a hundred yards or more. So we had driven them back,
temporarily at least.
Everyone began cursing and saying why the hell didn’t they send us some sup-
ports. With a sub-machine-gun or twenty men with clean rifles we could hold this
place against a battalion. At this moment Paddy Donovan, who was second-in-
command to Benjamin and had been sent back for orders, climbed over the front
parapet.
’Hi! Come on out of it! All men to retire at once!’
’What?’
’Retire! Get out of it!’
’Why?’
’Orders. Back to our own lines double-quick.’
People were already climbing over the front parapet. Several of them were strug-
gling with a heavy ammunition box. My mind flew to the telescope which I had left
leaning against the parapet on the other side of the position. But at this moment I
saw that the four Shock Troopers, acting I suppose on some mysterious orders they
had received beforehand, had begun running up the communication-trench. It led
to the other Fascist position and–if they got there–to certain death. They were dis-
appearing into the darkness. I ran after them, trying to think of the Spanish for
’retire’; finally I shouted, ’Atrás! Atrás!’ which perhaps conveyed the right meaning.
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The Spaniard understood it and brought the others back. Paddy was waiting at the
parapet.
’Come on, hurry up.’
’But the telescope!’
’Bugger the telescope! Benjamin’s waiting outside.’
We climbed out. Paddy held the wire aside for me. As soon as we got away from
the shelter of the Fascist parapet we were under a devilish fire that seemed to be
coming at us from every direction. Part of it, I do not doubt, came from our own
side, for everyone was firing all along the line. Whichever way we turned a fresh
stream of bullets swept past; we were driven this way and that in the darkness like
a flock of sheep. It did not make it any easier that we were dragging a captured
box of ammunition–one of those boxes that hold 1750 rounds and weigh about a
hundredweight–besides a box of bombs and several Fascist rifles. In a few minutes,
although the distance from parapet to parapet was not two hundred yards and most
of us knew the ground, we were completely lost. We found ourselves slithering
about in a muddy field, knowing nothing except that bullets were coming from both
sides. There was no moon to go by, but the sky was growing a little lighter. Our
lines lay east of Huesca; I wanted to stay where we were till the first crack of dawn
showed us which was east and which was west; but the others were against it. We
slithered onwards, changing our direction several times and taking it in turns to haul
at the ammunition-box. At last we saw the low flat line of a parapet looming in front
of us. It might be ours or it might be the Fascists’; nobody had the dimmest idea
which way we were going. Benjamin crawled on his belly through some tall whitish
weed till he was about twenty yards from the parapet and tried a challenge. A shout
of ’POUM!’ answered him. We jumped to our feet, found our way along the parapet,
slopped once more through the irrigation ditch–splash-gurgle!–and were in safety.
Kopp was waiting inside the parapet with a few Spaniards. The doctor and the
stretchers were gone. It appeared that all the wounded had been got in except Jorge
and one of our own men, Hiddlestone by name, who were missing. Kopp was pacing
up and down, very pale. Even the fat folds at the back of his neck were pale; he was
paying no attention to the bullets that streamed over the low parapet and cracked
close to his head. Most of us were squatting behind the parapet for cover. Kopp was
muttering. ’Jorge! Coño! Jorge!’ And then in English. ’If Jorge is gone it is terreeble,
terreeble!’ Jorge was his personal friend and one of his best officers. Suddenly he
turned to us and asked for five volunteers, two English and three Spanish, to go and
look for the missing men. Moyle and I volunteered with three Spaniards.
As we got outside the Spaniards murmured that it was getting dangerously light.
This was true enough; the sky was dimly blue. There was a tremendous noise of
excited voices coming from the Fascist redoubt. Evidently they had re-occupied the
place in much greater force than before. We were sixty or seventy yards from the
parapet when they must have seen or heard us, for they sent over a heavy burst of
fire which made us drop on our faces. One of them flung a bomb over the parapet–a
sure sign of panic. We were lying in the grass, waiting for an opportunity to move
on, when we heard or thought we heard–I have no doubt it was pure imagination,
but it seemed real enough at the time–that the Fascist voices were much closer. They
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had left the parapet and were coming after us. ’Run!’ I yelled to Moyle, and jumped
to my feet. And heavens, how I ran! I had thought earlier in the night that you
can’t run when you are sodden from head to foot and weighted down with a rifle
and cartridges; I learned now you can always run when you think you have fifty or a
hundred armed men after you. But if I could run fast, others could run faster. In my
flight something that might have been a shower of meteors sped past me. It was the
three Spaniards, who had been in front. They were back to our own parapet before
they stopped and I could catch up with them. The truth was that our nerves were
all to pieces. I knew, however, that in a half light one man is invisible where five are
clearly visible, so I went back alone. I managed to get to the outer wire and searched
the ground as well as I could, which was not very well, for I had to lie on my belly.
There was no sign of Jorge or Hiddlestone, so I crept back. We learned afterwards
that both Jorge and Hiddlestone had been taken to the dressing-station earlier. Jorge
was lightly wounded through the shoulder. Hiddlestone had received a dreadful
wound–a bullet which travelled right up his left arm, breaking the bone in several
places; as he lay helpless on the ground a bomb had burst near him and torn various
other parts of his body. He recovered, I am glad to say. Later he told me that he
had worked his way some distance lying on his back, then had clutched hold of a
wounded Spaniard and they had helped one another in.
It was getting light now. Along the line for miles around a ragged meaningless
fire was thundering, like the rain that goes on raining after a storm. I remember
the desolate look of everything, the morasses of mud, the weeping poplar trees, the
yellow water in the trench-bottoms; and men’s exhausted faces, unshaven, streaked
with mud, and blackened to the eyes with smoke. When I got back to my dug-out
the three men I shared it with were already fast sleep. They had flung themselves
down with all their equipment on and their muddy rifles clutched against them.
Everything was sodden, inside the dug-out as well as outside. By long searching I
managed to collect enough chips of dry wood to make a tiny fire. Then I smoked
the cigar which I had been hoarding and which, surprisingly enough, had not got
broken during the night.
Afterwards we learned that the action had been a success, as such things go. It
was merely a raid to make the Fascists divert troops from the other side of Huesca,
where the Anarchists were attacking again. I had judged that the Fascists had thrown
a hundred or two hundred men into the counterattack, but a deserter told us later on
that it was six hundred. I dare say he was lying–deserters, for obvious reasons, often
try to curry favour. It was a great pity about the telescope. The thought of losing that
beautiful bit of loot worries me even now.
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The days grew hotter and even the nights grew tolerably warm. On a bullet-chipped
tree in front of our parapet thick clusters of cherries were forming. Bathing in the
river ceased to be an agony and became almost a pleasure. Wild roses with pink
blooms the size of saucers straggled over the shell-holes round Torre Fabian. Behind
the line you met peasants wearing wild roses over their ears. In the evenings they
used to go out with green nets, hunting quails. You spread the net over the tops
of the grasses and then lay down and made a noise like a female quail. Any male
quail that was within hearing then came running towards you, and when he was
underneath the net you threw a stone to scare him, whereupon he sprang into the
air and was entangled in the net. Apparently only male quails were caught, which
struck me as unfair.
There was a section of Andalusians next to us in the line now. I do not know
quite how they got to this front. The current explanation was that they had run
away from Málaga so fast that they had forgotten to stop at Valencia; but this, of
course, came from the Catalans, who professed to look down on the Andalusians as
a race of semi-savages. Certainly the Andalusians were very ignorant. Few if any of
them could read, and they seemed not even to know the one thing that everybody
knows in Spain–which political party they belonged to. They thought they were
Anarchists, but were not quite certain; perhaps they were Communists. They were
gnarled, rustic-looking men, shepherds or labourers from the olive groves, perhaps,
with faces deeply stained by the ferocious suns of farther south. They were very
useful to us, for they had an extraordinary dexterity at rolling the dried-up Span-
ish tobacco into cigarettes. The issue of cigarettes had ceased, but in Monflorite it
was occasionally possible to buy packets of the cheapest kind of tobacco, which in
appearance and texture was very like chopped chaff. Its flavour was not bad, but
it was so dry that even when you had succeeded in making a cigarette the tobacco
promptly fell out and left an empty cylinder. The Andalusians, however, could roll
admirable cigarettes and had a special technique for tucking the ends in.
Two Englishmen were laid low by sunstroke. My salient memories of that time
are the heat of the midday sun, and working half-naked with sand-bags punish-
ing one’s shoulders which were already flayed by the sun; and the lousiness of our
clothes and boots, which were literally dropping to pieces; and the struggles with
the mule which brought our rations and which did not mind rifle-fire but took to
flight when shrapnel burst in the air; and the mosquitoes (just beginning to be ac-
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tive) and the rats, which were a public nuisance and would even devour leather
belts and cartridge-pouches. Nothing was happening except an occasional casualty
from a sniper’s bullet and the sporadic artillery-fire and air-raids on Huesca. Now
that the trees were in full leaf we had constructed snipers’ platforms, like machans,
in the poplar trees that fringed the line. On the other side of Huesca the attacks
were petering out. The Anarchists had had heavy losses and had not succeeded in
completely cutting the Jaca road. They had managed to establish themselves close
enough on either side to bring the road itself under machine-gun fire and make it
impassable for traffic; but the gap was a kilometre wide and the Fascists had con-
structed a sunken road, a sort of enormous trench, along which a certain number of
lorries could come and go. Deserters reported that in Huesca there were plenty of
munitions and very little food. But the town was evidently not going to fall. Proba-
bly it would have been impossible to take it with the fifteen thousand ill-armed men
who were available. Later, in June, the Government brought troops from the Madrid
front and concentrated thirty thousand men on Huesca, with an enormous quantity
of aeroplanes, but still the town did not fall.
When we went on leave I had been a hundred and fifteen days in the line, and at
the time this period seemed to me to have been one of the most futile of my whole
life. I had joined the militia in order to fight against Fascism, and as yet I had scarcely
fought at all, had merely existed as a sort of passive object, doing nothing in return
for my rations except to suffer from cold and lack of sleep. Perhaps that is the fate of
most soldiers in most wars. But now that I can see this period in perspective I do not
altogether regret it. I wish, indeed, that I could have served the Spanish Government
a little more effectively; but from a personal point of view–from the point of view of
my own development–those first three or four months that I spent in the line were
less futile than I then thought. They formed a kind of interregnum in my life, quite
different from anything that had gone before and perhaps from anything that is to
come, and they taught me things that I could not have learned in any other way.
The essential point is that all this time I had been isolated–for at the front one was
almost completely isolated from the outside world: even of what was happening in
Barcelona one had only a dim conception–among people who could roughly but not
too inaccurately be described as revolutionaries. This was the result of the militia-
system, which on the Aragón front was not radically altered till about June 1937. The
workers’ militias, based on the trade unions and each composed of people of approx-
imately the same political opinions, had the effect of canalizing into one place all the
most revolutionary sentiment in the country. I had dropped more or less by chance
into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political conscious-
ness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in
Aragón one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of
working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality.
In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a
sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Social-
ism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism.
Many of the normal motives of civilized life–snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of
the boss, etc.–had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had
disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of Eng-
land; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned
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anyone else as his master. Of course such a state of affairs could not last. It was sim-
ply a temporary and local phase in an enormous game that is being played over the
whole surface of the earth. But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone
who experienced it. However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards
that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been
in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the
word ’comrade’ stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug.
One had breathed the air of equality. I am well aware that it is now the fashion to
deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a
huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy ’proving’ that Socialism
means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But
fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing
that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for
it, the ’mystique’ of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people
Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all. And it was here that
those few months in the militia were valuable to me. For the Spanish militias, while
they lasted, were a sort of microcosm of a classless society. In that community where
no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege
and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages
of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply at-
tracted me. The effect was to make my desire to see Socialism established much
more actual than it had been before. Partly, perhaps, this was due to the good luck
of being among Spaniards, who, with their innate decency and their ever-present
Anarchist tinge, would make even the opening stages of Socialism tolerable if they
had the chance.
Of course at the time I was hardly conscious of the changes that were occurring
in my own mind. Like everyone about me I was chiefly conscious of boredom, heat,
cold, dirt, lice, privation, and occasional danger. It is quite different now. This period
which then seemed so futile and eventless is now of great importance to me. It is
so different from the rest of my life that already it has taken on the magic quality
which, as a rule, belongs only to memories that are years old. It was beastly while it
was happening, but it is a good patch for my mind to browse upon. I wish I could
convey to you the atmosphere of that time. I hope I have done so, a little, in the
earlier chapters of this book. It is all bound up in my mind with the winter cold,
the ragged uniforms of militiamen, the oval Spanish faces, the morse-like tapping of
machine-guns, the smells of urine and rotting bread, the tinny taste of bean-stews
wolfed hurriedly out of unclean pannikins.
The whole period stays by me with curious vividness. In my memory I live over
incidents that might seem too petty to be worth recalling. I am in the dug-out at
Monte Pocero again, on the ledge of limestone that serves as a bed, and young Ra-
mon is snoring with his nose flattened between my shoulder-blades. I am stumbling
up the mucky trench, through the mist that swirls round me like cold steam. I am
half-way up a crack in the mountain-side, struggling to keep my balance and to tug
a root of wild rosemary out of the ground. High overhead some meaningless bullets
are singing.
I am lying hidden among small fir-trees on the low ground west of Monte Oscuro,
with Kopp and Bob Edwards and three Spaniards. Up the naked grey hill to the right
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CHAPTER 8
of us a string of Fascists are climbing like ants. Close in front a bugle-call rings out
from the Fascist lines. Kopp catches my eye and, with a schoolboy gesture, thumbs
his nose at the sound.
I am in the mucky yard at La Granja, among the mob of men who are struggling
with their tin pannikins round the cauldron of stew. The fat and harassed cook is
warding them off with the ladle. At a table nearby a bearded man with a huge au-
tomatic pistol strapped to his belt is hewing loaves of bread into five pieces. Behind
me a Cockney voice (Bill Chambers, with whom I quarrelled bitterly and who was
afterwards killed outside Huesca) is singing:
There are rats, rats, Rats as big as cats, In the…
A shell comes screaming over. Children of fifteen fling themselves on their faces.
The cook dodges behind the cauldron. Everyone rises with a sheepish expression as
the shell plunges and booms a hundred yards away.
I am walking up and down the line of sentries, under the dark boughs of the
poplars. In the flooded ditch outside the rats are paddling about, making as much
noise as otters. As the yellow dawn comes up behind us, the Andalusian sentry, muf-
fled in his cloak, begins singing. Across no man’s land, a hundred or two hundred
yards away, you can hear the Fascist sentry also singing.
On 25 April, after the usual mañanas, another section relieved us and we handed
over our rifles, packed our kits, and marched back to Monflorite. I was not sorry
to leave the line. The lice were multiplying in my trousers far faster than I could
massacre them, and for a month past I had had no socks and my boots had very
little sole left, so that I was walking more or less barefoot. I wanted a hot bath, clean
clothes, and a night between sheets more passionately than it is possible to want
anything when one has been living a normal civilized life. We slept a few hours
in a barn in Monflorite, jumped a lorry in the small hours, caught the five o’clock
train at Barbastro, and–having the luck to connect with a fast train at Lérida–were
in Barcelona by three o’clock in the afternoon of the 26th. And after that the trouble
began.
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From Mandalay, in Upper Burma, you can travel by train to Maymyo, the princi-
pal hill-station of the province, on the edge of the Shan plateau. It is rather a queer
experience. You start off in the typical atmosphere of an eastern city–the scorching
sunlight, the dusty palms, the smells of fish and spices and garlic, the squashy trop-
ical fruits, the swarming dark-faced human beings–and because you are so used to
it you carry this atmosphere intact, so to speak, in your railway carriage. Mentally
you are still in Mandalay when the train stops at Maymyo, four thousand feet above
sea-level. But in stepping out of the carriage you step into a different hemisphere.
Suddenly you are breathing cool sweet air that might be that of England, and all
round you are green grass, bracken, fir-trees, and hill-women with pink cheeks sell-
ing baskets of strawberries.
Getting back to Barcelona, after three and a half months at the front, reminded me
of this. There was the same abrupt and startling change of atmosphere. In the train,
all the way to Barcelona, the atmosphere of the front persisted; the dirt, the noise, the
discomfort, the ragged clothes, the feeling of privation, comradeship, and equality.
The train, already full of militiamen when it left Barbastro, was invaded by more
and more peasants at every station on the line; peasants with bundles of vegetables,
with terrified fowls which they carried head-downwards, with sacks which looped
and writhed all over the floor and were discovered to be full of live rabbits–finally
with a quite considerable flock of sheep which were driven into the compartments
and wedged into every empty space. The militiamen shouted revolutionary songs
which drowned the rattle of the train and kissed their hands or waved red and black
handkerchiefs to every pretty girl along the line. Bottles of wine and of anis, the
filthy Aragónese liqueur, travelled from hand to hand. With the Spanish goat-skin
water-bottles you can squirt a jet of wine right across a railway carriage into your
friend’s mouth, which saves a lot of trouble. Next to me a black-eyed boy of fifteen
was recounting sensational and, I do not doubt, completely untrue stories of his own
exploits at the front to two old leather-faced peasants who listened open-mouthed.
Presently the peasants undid their bundles and gave us some sticky dark-red wine.
Everyone was profoundly happy, more happy than I can convey. But when the train
had rolled through Sabadell and into Barcelona, we stepped into an atmosphere that
was scarcely less alien and hostile to us and our kind than if this had been Paris or
London.
Everyone who has made two visits, at intervals of months, to Barcelona during
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the war has remarked upon the extraordinary changes that took place in it. And
curiously enough, whether they went there first in August and again in January, or,
like myself, first in December and again in April, the thing they said was always the
same: that the revolutionary atmosphere had vanished. No doubt to anyone who
had been there in August, when the blood was scarcely dry in the streets and mili-
tia were quartered in the smart hotels, Barcelona in December would have seemed
bourgeois; to me, fresh from England, it was liker to a workers’ city than anything I
had conceived possible. Now the tide had rolled back. Once again it was an ordinary
city, a little pinched and chipped by war, but with no outward sign of working-class
predominance.
The change in the aspect of the crowds was startling. The militia uniform and the
blue overalls had almost disappeared; everyone seemed to be wearing the smart
summer suits in which Spanish tailors specialize. Fat prosperous men, elegant
women, and sleek cars were everywhere. (It appeared that there were still no pri-
vate cars; nevertheless, anyone who ’was anyone’ seemed able to command a car.)
The officers of the new Popular Army, a type that had scarcely existed when I left
Barcelona, swarmed in surprising numbers. The Popular Army was officered at the
rate of one officer to ten men. A certain number of these officers had served in the
militia and been brought back from the front for technical instruction, but the major-
ity were young men who had gone to the School of War in preference to joining the
militia. Their relation to their men was not quite the same as in a bourgeois army,
but there was a definite social difference, expressed by the difference of pay and uni-
form. The men wore a kind of coarse brown overalls, the officers wore an elegant
khaki uniform with a tight waist, like a British Army officer’s uniform, only a little
more so. I do not suppose that more than one in twenty of them had yet been to the
front, but all of them had automatic pistols strapped to their belts; we, at the front,
could not get pistols for love or money. As we made our way up the street I noticed
that people were staring at our dirty exteriors. Of course, like all men who have been
several months in the line, we were a dreadful sight. I was conscious of looking like
a scarecrow. My leather jacket was in tatters, my woollen cap had lost its shape and
slid perpetually over one eye, my boots consisted of very little beyond splayed-out
uppers. All of us were in more or less the same state, and in addition we were dirty
and unshaven, so it was no wonder that the people stared. But it dismayed me a
little, and brought it home to me that some queer things had been happening in the
last three months.
During the next few days I discovered by innumerable signs that my first impres-
sion had not been wrong. A deep change had come over the town. There were two
facts that were the keynote of all else. One was that the people–the civil population–
had lost much of their interest in the war; the other was that the normal division of
society into rich and poor, upper class and lower class, was reasserting itself.
The general indifference to the war was surprising and rather disgusting. It hor-
rified people who came to Barcelona from Madrid or even from Valencia. Partly it
was due to the remoteness of Barcelona from the actual fighting; I noticed the same
thing a month later in Tarragona, where the ordinary life of a smart seaside town was
continuing almost undisturbed. But it was significant that all over Spain voluntary
enlistment had dwindled from about January onwards. In Catalonia, in February,
there had been a wave of enthusiasm over the first big drive for the Popular Army,
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CHAPTER 9
but it had not led to any great increase in recruiting. The war was only six months old
or thereabouts when the Spanish Government had to resort to conscription, which
would be natural in a foreign war, but seems anomalous in a civil war. Undoubtedly
it was bound up with the disappointment of the revolutionary hopes with which
the war had started. The trade union members who formed themselves into militias
and chased the Fascists back to Zaragoza in the first few weeks of war had done so
largely because they believed themselves to be fighting for working-class control;
but it was becoming more and more obvious that working-class control was a lost
cause, and the common people, especially the town proletariat, who have to fill the
ranks in any war, civil or foreign, could not be blamed for a certain apathy. Nobody
wanted to lose the war, but the majority were chiefly anxious for it to be over. You
noticed this wherever you went. Everywhere you met with the same perfunctory
remark: ’This war–terrible, isn’t it? When is it going to end?’ Politically conscious
people were far more aware of the internecine struggle between Anarchist and Com-
munist than of the fight against Franco. To the mass of the people the food shortage
was the most important thing. ’The front’ had come to be thought of as a mythical
far-off place to which young men disappeared and either did not return or returned
after three or four months with vast sums of money in their pockets. (A militiaman
usually received his back pay when he went on leave.) Wounded men, even when
they were hopping about on crutches, did not receive any special consideration. To
be in the militia was no longer fashionable. The shops, always the barometers of
public taste, showed this clearly. When I first reached Barcelona the shops, poor and
shabby though they were, had specialized in militiamen’s equipment. Forage-caps,
zipper jackets, Sam Browne belts, hunting-knives, water-bottles, revolver-holsters
were displayed in every window. Now the shops were markedly smarter, but the
war had been thrust into the background. As I discovered later, when buying my kit
before going back to the front, certain things that one badly needed at the front were
very difficult to procure.
Meanwhile there was going on a systematic propaganda against the party mili-
tias and in favour of the Popular Army. The position here was rather curious. Since
February the entire armed forces had theoretically been incorporated in the Popular
Army, and the militias were, on paper, reconstructed along Popular Army lines, with
differential pay-rates, gazetted rank, etc., etc. The divisions were made up of ’mixed
brigades’, which were supposed to consist partly of Popular Army troops and partly
of militia. But the only changes that had actually taken place were changes of name.
The P.O.U.M. troops, for instance, previously called the Lenin Division, were now
known as the 29th Division. Until June very few Popular Army troops reached the
Aragón front, and in consequence the militias were able to retain their separate struc-
ture and their special character. But on every wall the Government agents had sten-
cilled: ’We need a Popular Army’, and over the radio and in the Communist Press
there was a ceaseless and sometimes very malignant jibing against the militias, who
were described as ill-trained, undisciplined, etc., etc.; the Popular Army was always
described as ’heroic’. From much of this propaganda you would have derived the
impression that there was something disgraceful in having gone to the front volun-
tarily and something praiseworthy in waiting to be conscripted. For the time being,
however, the militias were holding the line while the Popular Army was training
in the rear, and this fact had to be advertised as little as possible. Drafts of militia
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returning to the front were no longer marched through the streets with drums beat-
ing and flags flying. They were smuggled away by train or lorry at five o’clock in
the morning. A few drafts of the Popular Army were now beginning to leave for
the front, and these, as before, were marched ceremoniously through the streets; but
even they, owing to the general waning of interest in the war, met with compara-
tively little enthusiasm. The fact that the militia troops were also, on paper. Popular
Army troops, was skilfully used in the Press propaganda. Any credit that happened
to be going was automatically handed to the Popular Army, while all blame was re-
served for the militias. It sometimes happened that the same troops were praised in
one capacity and blamed in the other.
But besides all this there was the startling change in the social atmosphere–a thing
difficult to conceive unless you have actually experienced it. When I first reached
Barcelona I had thought it a town where class distinctions and great differences of
wealth hardly existed. Certainly that was what it looked like. ’Smart’ clothes were
an abnormality, nobody cringed or took tips, waiters and flower-women and boot-
blacks looked you in the eye and called you ’comrade’. I had not grasped that this
was mainly a mixture of hope and camouflage. The working class believed in a revo-
lution that had been begun but never consolidated, and the bourgeoisie were scared
and temporarily disguising themselves as workers. In the first months of revolution
there must have been many thousands of people who deliberately put on overalls
and shouted revolutionary slogans as a way of saving their skins. Now things were
returning to normal. The smart restaurants and hotels were full of rich people wolf-
ing expensive meals, while for the working-class population food-prices had jumped
enormously without any corresponding rise in wages. Apart from the expensiveness
of everything, there were recurrent shortages of this and that, which, of course, al-
ways hit the poor rather than the rich. The restaurants and hotels seemed to have
little difficulty in getting whatever they wanted, but in the working-class quarters
the queues for bread, olive oil, and other necessaries were hundreds of yards long.
Previously in Barcelona I had been struck by the absence of beggars; now there were
quantities of them. Outside the delicatessen shop at the top of the Ramblas gangs
of barefooted children were always waiting to swarm round anyone who came out
and clamour for scraps of food. The ’revolutionary’ forms of speech were dropping
out of use. Strangers seldom addressed you as tú and camarada nowadays; it was
usually señor and usted. Buenos días was beginning to replace salud. The waiters were
back in their boiled shirts and the shop-walkers were cringing in the familiar man-
ner. My wife and I went into a hosiery shop on the Ramblas to buy some stockings.
The shopman bowed and rubbed his hands as they do not do even in England nowa-
days, though they used to do it twenty or thirty years ago. In a furtive indirect way
the practice of tipping was coming back. The workers’ patrols had been ordered to
dissolve and the pre-war police forces were back on the streets. One result of this
was that the cabaret show and high-class brothels, many of which had been closed
by the workers’ patrols, had promptly reopened9
9Orwell’s footnote to the original edition read: “The workers’ patrols are said to have closed 75
per cent of the brothels.” An errata note found after his death says: “Remark should be modified.
I have no good evidence that prostitution decreased 75 per cent in the early days of the war, and I
believe the Anarchists went on the principle of ’collectivizing’ the brothels, not suppressing them.
But there was a drive against prostitution (posters, etc.) and it is a fact that the smart brothel and
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A small but significant instance of the way in which everything was now orien-
tated in favour of the wealthier classes could be seen in the tobacco shortage. For
the mass of the people the shortage of tobacco was so desperate that cigarettes filled
with sliced liquorice-root were being sold in the streets. I tried some of these once.
(A lot of people tried them once.) Franco held the Canaries, where all the Spanish
tobacco is grown; consequently the only stocks of tobacco left on the Government
side were those that had been in existence before the war. These were running so
low that the tobacconists’ shops only opened once a week; after waiting for a couple
of hours in a queue you might, if you were lucky, get a three-quarter-ounce packet
of tobacco. Theoretically the Government would not allow tobacco to be purchased
from abroad, because this meant reducing the gold-reserves, which had got to be
kept for arms and other necessities. Actually there was a steady supply of smuggled
foreign cigarettes of the more expensive kinds, Lucky Strikes and so forth, which
gave a grand opportunity for profiteering. You could buy the smuggled cigarettes
openly in the smart hotels and hardly less openly in the streets, provided that you
could pay ten pesetas (a militiaman’s daily wage) for a packet. The smuggling was
for the benefit of wealthy people, and was therefore connived at. If you had enough
money there was nothing that you could not get in any quantity, with the possible
exception of bread, which was rationed fairly strictly. This open contrast of wealth
and poverty would have been impossible a few months earlier, when the working
class still were or seemed to be in control. But it would not be fair to attribute it solely
to the shift of political power. Partly it was a result of the safety of life in Barcelona,
where there was little to remind one of the war except an occasional air-raid. Every-
one who had been in Madrid said that it was completely different there. In Madrid
the common danger forced people of almost all kinds into some sense of comrade-
ship. A fat man eating quails while children are begging for bread is a disgusting
sight, but you are less likely to see it when you are within sound of the guns.
A day or two after the street-fighting I remember passing through one of the fash-
ionable streets and coming upon a confectioner’s shop with a window full of pastries
and bonbons of the most elegant kinds, at staggering prices. It was the kind of shop
you see in Bond Street or the Rue de la Paix. And I remember feeling a vague horror
and amazement that money could still be wasted upon such things in a hungry war-
stricken country. But God forbid that I should pretend to any personal superiority.
After several months of discomfort I had a ravenous desire for decent food and wine,
cocktails, American cigarettes, and so forth, and I admit to having wallowed in ev-
ery luxury that I had money to buy. During that first week, before the street-fighting
began, I had several preoccupations which interacted upon one another in a curious
way. In the first place, as I have said, I was busy making myself as comfortable as I
could. Secondly, thanks to over-eating and over-drinking, I was slightly out of health
all that week. I would feel a little unwell, go to bed for half a day, get up and eat an-
other excessive meal, and then feel ill again. At the same time I was making secret
negotiations to buy a revolver. I badly wanted a revolver–in trench-fighting much
more useful than a rifle–and they were very difficult to get hold of. The Government
issued them to policemen and Popular Army officers, but refused to issue them to
the militia; you had to buy them, illegally, from the secret stores of the Anarchists.
naked cabaret shows were shut in the early months of the war and open again when the war was
about a year old.”
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After a lot of fuss and nuisance an Anarchist friend managed to procure me a tiny
26-mm. automatic pistol, a wretched weapon, useless at more than five yards but
better than nothing. And besides all this I was making preliminary arrangements
to leave the P.O.U.M. militia and enter some other unit that would ensure my being
sent to the Madrid front.
I had told everyone for a long time past that I was going to leave the P.O.U.M.
As far as my purely personal preferences went I would have liked to join the Anar-
chists. If one became a member of the C.N.T. it was possible to enter the F.A.I. militia,
but I was told that the F.A.I. were likelier to send me to Teruel than to Madrid. If I
wanted to go to Madrid I must join the International Column, which meant getting
a recommendation from a member of the Communist Party. I sought out a Commu-
nist friend, attached to the Spanish Medical Aid, and explained my case to him. He
seemed very anxious to recruit me and asked me, if possible, to persuade some of the
other I.L.P. Englishmen to come with me. If I had been in better health I should prob-
ably have agreed there and then. It is hard to say now what difference this would
have made. Quite possibly I should have been sent to Albacete before the Barcelona
fighting started; in which case, not having seen the fighting at close quarters, I might
have accepted the official version of it as truthful. On the other hand, if I had been
in Barcelona during the fighting, under Communist orders but still with a sense of
personal loyalty to my comrades in the P.O.U.M., my position would have been im-
possible. But I had another week’s leave due to me and I was very anxious to get
my health back before returning to the line. Also–the kind of detail that is always
deciding one’s destiny–I had to wait while the boot-makers made me a new pair of
marching boots. (The entire Spanish army had failed to produce a pair of boots big
enough to fit me.) I told my Communist friend that I would make definite arrange-
ments later. Meanwhile I wanted a rest. I even had a notion that we–my wife and
I–might go to the seaside for two or three days. What an idea! The political atmo-
sphere ought to have warned me that that was not the kind of thing one could do
nowadays.
For under the surface-aspect of the town, under the luxury and growing poverty,
under the seeming gaiety of the streets, with their flower-stalls, their many-coloured
flags, their propaganda-posters, and thronging crowds, there was an unmistakable
and horrible feeling of political rivalry and hatred. People of all shades of opinion
were saying forebodingly: ’There’s going to be trouble before long.’ The danger was
quite simple and intelligible. It was the antagonism between those who wished the
revolution to go forward and those who wished to check or prevent it–ultimately, be-
tween Anarchists and Communists. Politically there was now no power in Catalonia
except the P.S.U.C. and their Liberal allies. But over against this there was the uncer-
tain strength of the C.N.T., less well-armed and less sure of what they wanted than
their adversaries, but powerful because of their numbers and their predominance in
various key industries. Given this alignment of forces there was bound to be trou-
ble. From the point of view of the P.S.U.C.-controlled Generalite, the first necessity,
to make their position secure, was to get the weapons out of the C.N.T. workers’
hands. As I have pointed out earlier, the move to break up the party militias was at
bottom a manoeuvre towards this end. At the same time the pre-war armed police
forces, Civil Guards, and so forth, had been brought back into use and were being
heavily reinforced and armed. This could mean only one thing. The Civil Guards,
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in particular, were a gendarmerie of the ordinary continental type, who for nearly a
century past had acted as the bodyguards of the possessing class. Meanwhile a de-
cree had been issued that all arms held by private persons were to be surrendered.
Naturally this order had not been obeyed; it was clear that the Anarchists’ weapons
could only be taken from them by force. Throughout this time there were rumours,
always vague and contradictory owing to newspaper censorship, of minor clashes
that were occurring all over Catalonia. In various places the armed police forces
had made attacks on Anarchist strongholds. At Puigcerda, on the French frontier, a
band of Carabineros were sent to seize the Customs Office, previously controlled by
Anarchists and Antonio Martin, a well-known Anarchist, was killed.10
Similar incidents had occurred at Figueras and, I think, at Tarragona. In Barcelona
there had been a series of more or less unofficial brawls in the working-class suburbs.
C.N.T. and U.G.T. members had been murdering one another for some time past; on
several occasions the murders were followed by huge, provocative funerals which
were quite deliberately intended to stir up political hatred. A short time earlier a
C.N.T. member had been murdered, and the C.N.T. had turned out in hundreds of
thousands to follow the cortege. At the end of April, just after I got to Barcelona,
Roldan, a prominent member of the U.G.T., was murdered, presumably by someone
in the C.N.T. The Government ordered all shops to close and staged an enormous
funeral procession, largely of Popular Army troops, which took two hours to pass
a given point. From the hotel window I watched it without enthusiasm. It was
obvious that the so-called funeral was merely a display of strength; a little more of
this kind of thing and there might be bloodshed. The same night my wife and I were
woken by a fusillade of shots from the Plaza de Cataluña, a hundred or two hundred
yards away. We learned next day that it was a man being bumped off, presumably by
someone in the U.G.T. It was of course distinctly possible that all these murders were
committed by agents provocateurs. One can gauge the attitude of the foreign capitalist
Press towards the Communist-Anarchist feud by the fact that Roldan’s murder was
given wide publicity, while the answering murder was carefully unmentioned.
The 1st of May was approaching, and there was talk of a monster demonstra-
tion in which both the C.N.T. and the U.G.T. were to take part. The C.N.T. leaders,
more moderate than many of their followers, had long been working for a recon-
ciliation with the U.G.T.; indeed the keynote of their policy was to try and form
the two blocks of unions into one huge coalition. The idea was that the C.N.T.and
U.G.T. should march together and display their solidarity. But at the last moment
the demonstration was called off. It was perfectly clear that it would only lead to
rioting. So nothing happened on 1 May. It was a queer state of affairs. Barcelona, the
so-called revolutionary city, was probably the only city in non-Fascist Europe that
had no celebrations that day. But I admit I was rather relieved. The I.L.P. contingent
was expected to march in the P.O.U.M. section of the procession, and everyone ex-
pected trouble. The last thing I wished for was to be mixed up in some meaningless
street-fight. To be marching up the street behind red flags inscribed with elevating
slogans, and then to be bumped off from an upper window by some total stranger
with a sub-machine-gun–that is not my idea of a useful way to die.
10Errata note found after Orwell’s death: “I am told my reference to this incident is incorrect and
misleading.”
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About midday on 3 May a friend crossing the lounge of the hotel said casually:
’There’s been some kind of trouble at the Telephone Exchange, I hear.’ For some
reason I paid no attention to it at the time.
That afternoon, between three and four, I was half-way down the Ramblas when
I heard several rifle-shots behind me. I turned round and saw some youths, with
rifles in their hands and the red and black handkerchiefs of the Anarchists round
their throats, edging up a side-street that ran off the Ramblas northward. They were
evidently exchanging shots with someone in a tall octagonal tower–a church, I think–
that commanded the side-street. I thought instantly: ’It’s started!’ But I thought it
without any very great feeling of surprise–for days past everyone had been expect-
ing ’it’ to start at any moment. I realized that I must get back to the hotel at once
and see if my wife was all right. But the knot of Anarchists round the opening of the
side-street were motioning the people back and shouting to them not to cross the line
of fire. More shots rang out. The bullets from the tower were flying across the street
and a crowd of panic-stricken people was rushing down the Ramblas, away from
the firing; up and down the street you could hear snap-snap-snap as the shopkeep-
ers slammed the steel shutters over their windows. I saw two Popular Army officers
retreating cautiously from tree to tree with their hands on their revolvers. In front
of me the crowd was surging into the Metro station in the middle of the Ramblas to
take cover. I immediately decided not to follow them. It might mean being trapped
underground for hours.
At this moment an American doctor who had been with us at the front ran up to
me and grabbed me by the arm. He was greatly excited.
’Come on, we must get down to the Hotel Falcon.’ (The Hotel Falcon was a sort
of boarding-house maintained by the P.O.U.M. and used chiefly by militiamen on
leave.) ’The P.O.U.M. chaps will be meeting there. The trouble’s starting. We must
hang together.’
’But what the devil is it all about?’ I said.
The doctor was hauling me along by the arm. He was too excited to give a very
clear statement. It appeared that he had been in the Plaza de Cataluña when sev-
eral lorry-loads of armed Civil Guards11 had driven up to the Telephone Exchange,
11Errata note found after Orwell’s death: ’All through these chapters are constant references to
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CHAPTER 10
which was operated mainly by C.N.T. workers, and made a sudden assault upon it.
Then some Anarchists had arrived and there had been a general affray. I gathered
that the ’trouble’ earlier in the day had been a demand by the Government to hand
over the Telephone Exchange, which, of course, was refused.
As we moved down the street a lorry raced past us from the opposite direction.
It was full of Anarchists with rifles in their hands. In front a ragged youth was
lying on a pile of mattresses behind a light machine-gun. When we got to the Hotel
Falcon, which was at the bottom of the Ramblas, a crowd of people was seething
in the entrance-hall; there was a great confusion, nobody seemed to know what we
were expected to do, and nobody was armed except the handful of Shock Troopers
who usually acted as guards for the building. I went across to the Comite Local of
the P.O.U.M., which was almost opposite. Upstairs, in the room where militiamen
normally went to draw their pay, another crowd was seething. A tall, pale, rather
handsome man of about thirty, in civilian clothes, was trying to restore order and
handing out belts and cartridge-boxes from a pile in the corner. There seemed to
be no rifles as yet. The doctor had disappeared–I believe there had already been
casualties and a call for doctors–but another Englishman had arrived. Presently,
from an inner office, the tall man and some others began bringing out armfuls of
rifles and handing them round. The other Englishman and myself, as foreigners,
were slightly under suspicion and at first nobody would give us a rifle. Then a
militiaman whom I had known at the front arrived and recognized me, after which
we were given rifles and a few clips of cartridges, somewhat grudgingly.
There was a sound of firing in the distance and the streets were completely empty
of people. Everyone said that it was impossible to go up the Ramblas. The Civil
Guards had seized buildings in commanding positions and were letting fly at every-
one who passed. I would have risked it and gone back to the hotel, but there was
a vague idea floating round that the Comite Local was likely to be attacked at any
moment and we had better stand by. All over the building, on the stairs, and on the
pavement outside, small knots of people were standing and talking excitedly. No
one seemed to have a very clear idea of what was happening. All I could gather
was that the Civil Guards had attacked the Telephone Exchange and seized various
strategic spots that commanded other buildings belonging to the workers. There was
a general impression that the Civil Guards were ’after’ the C.N.T. and the working
class generally. It was noticeable that, at this stage, no one seemed to put the blame
on the Government. The poorer classes in Barcelona looked upon the Civil Guards
as something rather resembling the Black and Tans, and it seemed to be taken for
granted that they had started this attack on their own initiative. Once I heard how
things stood I felt easier in my mind. The issue was clear enough. On one side
the C.N.T., on the other side the police. I have no particular love for the idealized
’worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual
flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not
’Civil Guards.’ Should be ’Assault Guards’ all the way through. I was misled because the Assault
Guards in Catalonia wore a different uniform from those afterwards sent from Valenica, and by the
Spaniards’ referring to all these formations as ’la guardia.’ The undoubted fact that civil guards often
joined Franco when able to do so makes no reflection on the Assault Guards who were a formation
raised since the Second Republic. But the general reference to popular hostility to ’la guardia’ and
this having played its part in the Barcelona business should stand.
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have to ask myself which side I am on.
A long time passed and nothing seemed to be happening at our end of the town.
It did not occur to me that I could ring up the hotel and find out whether my wife
was all right; I took it for granted that the Telephone Exchange would have stopped
working–though, as a matter of fact, it was only out of action for a couple of hours.
There seemed to be about three hundred people in the two buildings. Predominantly
they were people of the poorest class, from the back-streets down by the quays; there
was a number of women among them, some of them carrying babies, and a crowd
of little ragged boys. I fancy that many of them had no notion what was happening
and had simply fled into the P.O.U.M. buildings for protection. There was also a
number of militiamen on leave, and a sprinkling of foreigners. As far as I could
estimate, there were only about sixty rifles between the lot of us. The office upstairs
was ceaselessly besieged by a crowd of people who were demanding rifles and being
told that there were none left. The younger militia boys, who seemed to regard the
whole affair as a kind of picnic, were prowling round and trying to wheedle or steal
rifles from anyone who had them. It was not long before one of them got my rifle
away from me by a clever dodge and immediately made himself scarce. So I was
unarmed again, except for my tiny automatic pistol, for which I had only one clip of
cartridges.
It grew dark, I was getting hungry, and seemingly there was no food in the Falcon.
My friend and I slipped out to his hotel, which was not far away, to get some dinner.
The streets were utterly dark and silent, not a soul stirring, steel shutters drawn over
all the shop windows, but no barricades built yet. There was a great fuss before
they would let us into the hotel, which was locked and barred. When we got back
I learned that the Telephone Exchange was working and went to the telephone in
the office upstairs to ring up my wife. Characteristically, there was no telephone
directory in the building, and I did not know the number of the Hotel Continental;
after a searching from room to room for about an hour I came upon a guide-book
which gave me the number. I could not make contact with my wife, but I managed
to get hold of John McNair, the I.L.P. representative in Barcelona. He told me that
all was well, nobody had been shot, and asked me if we were all right at the Comite
Local. I said that we should be all right if we had some cigarettes. I only meant
this as a joke; nevertheless half an hour later McNair appeared with two packets of
Lucky Strikes. He had braved the pitch-dark streets, roamed by Anarchist patrols
who had twice stopped him at the pistol’s point and examined his papers. I shall not
forget this small act of heroism. We were very glad of the cigarettes.
They had placed armed guards at most of the windows, and in the street below a
little group of Shock Troopers were stopping and questioning the few passers-by. An
Anarchist patrol car drove up, bristling with weapons. Beside the driver a beautiful
dark-haired girl of about eighteen was nursing a sub-machine-gun across her knees.
I spent a long time wandering about the building, a great rambling place of which it
was impossible to learn the geography. Everywhere was the usual litter, the broken
furniture and torn paper that seem to be the inevitable products of revolution. All
over the place people were sleeping; on a broken sofa in a passage two poor women
from the quayside were peacefully snoring. The place had been a cabaret-theatre
before the P.O.U.M. took it over. There were raised stages in several of the rooms;
on one of them was a desolate grand piano. Finally I discovered what I was looking
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for–the armoury. I did not know how this affair was going to turn out, and I badly
wanted a weapon. I had heard it said so often that all the rival parties, P.S.U.C.,
P.O.U.M., and C.N.T.-F.A.I. alike, were hoarding arms in Barcelona, that I could not
believe that two of the principal P.O.U.M. buildings contained only the fifty or sixty
rifles that I had seen. The room which acted as an armoury was unguarded and had
a flimsy door; another Englishman and myself had no difficulty in prizing it open.
When we got inside we found that what they had told us was true–there were no
more weapons. All we found there were about two dozen small-bore rifles of an
obsolete pattern and a few shot-guns, with no cartridges for any of them. I went
up to the office and asked if they had any spare pistol ammunition; they had none.
There were a few boxes of bombs, however, which one of the Anarchist patrol cars
had brought us. I put a couple in one of my cartridge-boxes. They were a crude type
of bomb, ignited by rubbing a sort of match at the top and very liable to go off of
their own accord.
People were sprawling asleep all over the floor. In one room a baby was crying,
crying ceaselessly. Though this was May the night was getting cold. On one of
the cabaret-stages the curtains were still up, so I ripped a curtain down with my
knife, rolled myself up in it, and had a few hours’ sleep. My sleep was disturbed,
I remember, by the thought of those beastly bombs, which might blow me into the
air if I rolled on them too vigorously. At three in the morning the tall handsome
man who seemed to be in command woke me up, gave me a rifle, and put me on
guard at one of the windows. He told me that Salas, the Chief of Police responsible
for the attack on the Telephone Exchange, had been placed under arrest. (Actually,
as we learned later, he had only been deprived of his post. Nevertheless the news
confirmed the general impression that the Civil Guards had acted without orders.)
As soon as it was dawn the people downstairs began building two barricades, one
outside the Comite Local and the other outside the Hotel Falcon. The Barcelona
streets are paved with square cobbles, easily built up into a wall, and under the
cobbles is a kind of shingle that is good for filling sand-bags. The building of those
barricades was a strange and wonderful sight; I would have given something to be
able to photograph it. With the kind of passionate energy that Spaniards display
when they have definitely decided to begin upon any job of work, long lines of men,
women, and quite small children were tearing up the cobblestones, hauling them
along in a hand-cart that had been found somewhere, and staggering to and fro
under heavy sacks of sand. In the doorway of the Comite Local a German-Jewish
girl, in a pair of militiaman’s trousers whose knee-buttons just reached her ankles,
was watching with a smile. In a couple of hours the barricades were head-high, with
riflemen posted at the loopholes, and behind one barricade a fire was burning and
men were frying eggs.
They had taken my rifle away again, and there seemed to be nothing that one
could usefully do. Another Englishman and myself decided to go back to the Hotel
Continental. There was a lot of firing in the distance, but seemingly none in the
Ramblas. On the way up we looked in at the food-market. A very few stalls had
opened; they were besieged by a crowd of people from the working-class quarters
south of the Ramblas. Just as we got there, there was a heavy crash of rifle-fire
outside, some panes of glass in the roof were shivered, and the crowd went flying
for the back exits. A few stalls remained open, however; we managed to get a cup
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of coffee each and buy a wedge of goat’s-milk cheese which I tucked in beside my
bombs. A few days later I was very glad of that cheese.
At the street-corner where I had seen the Anarchists begin firing the day before
a barricade was now standing. The man behind it (I was on the other side of the
street) shouted to me to be careful. The Civil Guards in the church tower were fir-
ing indiscriminately at everyone who passed. I paused and then crossed the open-
ing at a run; sure enough, a bullet cracked past me, uncomfortably close. When I
neared the P.O.U.M. Executive Building, still on the other side of the road, there were
fresh shouts of warning from some Shock Troopers standing in the doorway–shouts
which, at the moment, I did not understand. There were trees and a newspaper kiosk
between myself and the building (streets of this type in Spain have a broad walk run-
ning down the middle), and I could not see what they were pointing at. I went up to
the Continental, made sure that all was well, washed my face, and then went back
to the P.O.U.M. Executive Building (it was about a hundred yards down the street)
to ask for orders. By this time the roar of rifle and machine-gun fire from various
directions was almost comparable to the din of a battle. I had just found Kopp and
was asking him what we were supposed to do when there was a series of appalling
crashes down below. The din was so loud that I made sure someone must be firing
at us with a field-gun. Actually it was only hand-grenades, which make double their
usual noise when they burst among stone buildings.
Kopp glanced out of the window, cocked his stick behind his back, said: ’Let us in-
vestigate,’ and strolled down the stairs in his usual unconcerned manner, I following.
Just inside the doorway a group of Shock Troopers were bowling bombs down the
pavement as though playing skittles. The bombs were bursting twenty yards away
with a frightful, ear-splitting crash which was mixed up with the banging of rifles.
Half across the street, from behind the newspaper kiosk, a head–it was the head of
an American militiaman whom I knew well–was sticking up, for all the world like
a coconut at a fair. It was only afterwards that I grasped what was really happen-
ing. Next door to the P.O.U.M. building there was a café with a hotel above it, called
the Café Moka. The day before twenty or thirty armed Civil Guards had entered
the café and then, when the fighting started, had suddenly seized the building and
barricaded themselves in. Presumably they had been ordered to seize the café as a
preliminary to attacking the P.O.U.M. offices later. Early in the morning they had at-
tempted to come out, shots had been exchanged, and one Shock Trooper was badly
wounded and a Civil Guard killed. The Civil Guards had fled back into the café,
but when the American came down the street they had opened fire on him, though
he was not armed. The American had flung himself behind the kiosk for cover, and
the Shock Troopers were flinging bombs at the Civil Guards to drive them indoors
again.
Kopp took in the scene at a glance, pushed his way forward and hauled back a
red-haired German Shock Trooper who was just drawing the pin out of a bomb with
his teeth. He shouted to everyone to stand back from the doorway, and told us in
several languages that we had got to avoid bloodshed. Then he stepped out on to the
pavement and, in sight of the Civil Guards, ostentatiously took off his pistol and laid
it on the ground. Two Spanish militia officers did the same, and the three of them
walked slowly up to the doorway where the Civil Guards were huddling. It was a
thing I would not have done for twenty pounds. They were walking, unarmed, up
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to men who were frightened out of their wits and had loaded guns in their hands.
A Civil Guard, in shirt-sleeves and livid with fright, came out of the door to parley
with Kopp. He kept pointing in an agitated manner at two unexploded bombs that
were lying on the pavement. Kopp came back and told us we had better touch the
bombs off. Lying there, they were a danger to anyone who passed. A Shock Trooper
fired his rifle at one of the bombs and burst it, then fired at the other and missed.
I asked him to give me his rifle, knelt down and let fly at the second bomb. I also
missed it, I am sorry to say. This was the only shot I fired during the disturbances.
The pavement was covered with broken glass from the sign over the Café Moka, and
two cars that were parked outside, one of them Kopp’s official car, had been riddled
with bullets and their windscreens smashed by bursting bombs.
Kopp took me upstairs again and explained the situation. We had got to defend
the P.O.U.M. buildings if they were attacked, but the P.O.U.M. leaders had sent in-
structions that we were to stand on the defensive and not open fire if we could possi-
bly avoid it. Immediately opposite there was a cinematograph, called the Poliorama,
with a museum above it, and at the top, high above the general level of the roofs, a
small observatory with twin domes. The domes commanded the street, and a few
men posted up there with rifles could prevent any attack on the P.O.U.M. buildings.
The caretakers at the cinema were C.N.T. members and would let us come and go.
As for the Civil Guards in the Café Moka, there would be no trouble with them; they
did not want to fight and would be only too glad to live and let live. Kopp repeated
that our orders were not to fire unless we were fired on ourselves or our buildings at-
tacked. I gathered, though he did not say so, that the P.O.U.M. leaders were furious
at being dragged into this affair, but felt that they had got to stand by the C.N.T.
They had already placed guards in the observatory. The next three days and nights
I spent continuously on the roof of the Poliorama, except for brief intervals when I
slipped across to the hotel for meals. I was in no danger, I suffered from nothing
worse than hunger and boredom, yet it was one of the most unbearable periods of
my whole life. I think few experiences could be more sickening, more disillusioning,
or, finally, more nerve-racking than those evil days of street warfare.
I used to sit on the roof marvelling at the folly of it all. From the little windows
in the observatory you could see for miles around–vista after vista of tall slender
buildings, glass domes, and fantastic curly roofs with brilliant green and copper
tiles; over to eastward the glittering pale blue sea–the first glimpse of the sea that
I had had since coming to Spain. And the whole huge town of a million people
was locked in a sort of violent inertia, a nightmare of noise without movement. The
sunlit streets were quite empty. Nothing was happening except the streaming of
bullets from barricades and sand-bagged windows. Not a vehicle was stirring in the
streets; here and there along the Ramblas the trams stood motionless where their
drivers had jumped out of them when the fighting started. And all the while the
devilish noise, echoing from thousands of stone buildings, went on and on and on,
like a tropical rainstorm. Crack-crack, rattle-rattle, roar–sometimes it died away to
a few shots, sometimes it quickened to a deafening fusillade, but it never stopped
while daylight lasted, and punctually next dawn it started again.
What the devil was happening, who was fighting whom, and who was winning,
was at first very difficult to discover. The people of Barcelona are so used to street-
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fighting and so familiar with the local geography that they knew by a kind of instinct
which political party will hold which streets and which buildings. A foreigner is at
a hopeless disadvantage. Looking out from the observatory, I could grasp that the
Ramblas, which is one of the principal streets of the town, formed a dividing line.
To the right of the Ramblas the working-class quarters were solidly Anarchist; to the
left a confused fight was going on among the tortuous by-streets, but on that side
the P.S.U.C. and the Civil Guards were more or less in control. Up at our end of
the Ramblas, round the Plaza de Cataluña, the position was so complicated that it
would have been quite unintelligible if every building had not flown a party flag.
The principal landmark here was the Hotel Colon, the headquarters of the P.S.U.C.,
dominating the Plaza de Cataluña. In a window near the last O but one in the huge
’Hotel Colon’ that sprawled across its face they had a machine-gun that could sweep
the square with deadly effect. A hundred yards to the right of us, down the Ramblas,
the J.S.U., the youth league of the P.S.U.C. (corresponding to the Young Communist
League in England), were holding a big department store whose sandbagged side-
windows fronted our observatory. They had hauled down their red flag and hoisted
the Catalan national flag. On the Telephone Exchange, the starting-point of all the
trouble, the Catalan national flag and the Anarchist flag were flying side by side.
Some kind of temporary compromise had been arrived at there, the exchange was
working uninterruptedly and there was no firing from the building.
In our position it was strangely peaceful. The Civil Guards in the Café Moka had
drawn down the steel curtains and piled up the café furniture to make a barricade.
Later half a dozen of them came on to the roof, opposite to ourselves, and built an-
other barricade of mattresses, over which they hung a Catalan national flag. But it
was obvious that they had no wish to start a fight. Kopp had made a definite agree-
ment with them: if they did not fire at us we would not fire at them. He had grown
quite friendly with the Civil Guards by this time, and had been to visit them several
times in the Café Moka. Naturally they had looted everything drinkable the café
possessed, and they made Kopp a present of fifteen bottles of beer. In return Kopp
had actually given them one of our rifles to make up for one they had somehow
lost on the previous day. Nevertheless, it was a queer feeling sitting on that roof.
Sometimes I was merely bored with the whole affair, paid no attention to the hellish
noise, and spent hours reading a succession of Penguin Library books which, luckily,
I had bought a few days earlier; sometimes I was very conscious of the armed men
watching me fifty yards away. It was a little like being in the trenches again; several
times I caught myself, from force of habit, speaking of the Civil Guards as ’the Fas-
cists’. There were generally about six of us up there. We placed a man on guard in
each of the observatory towers, and the rest of us sat on the lead roof below, where
there was no cover except a stone palisade. I was well aware that at any moment
the Civil Guards might receive telephone orders to open fire. They had agreed to
give us warning before doing so, but there was no certainty that they would keep to
their agreement. Only once, however, did trouble look like starting. One of the Civil
Guards opposite knelt down and began firing across the barricade. I was on guard
in the observatory at the time. I trained my rifle on him and shouted across:
’Hi! Don’t you shoot at us!’
’What?’
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’Don’t you fire at us or we’ll fire back!’
’No, no! I wasn’t firing at you. Look–down there!’
He motioned with his rifle towards the side-street that ran past the bottom of our
building. Sure enough, a youth in blue overalls, with a rifle in his hand, was dodging
round the corner. Evidently he had just taken a shot at the Civil Guards on the roof.
’I was firing at him. He fired first.’ (I believe this was true.) ’We don’t want to
shoot you. We’re only workers, the same as you are.’
He made the anti-Fascist salute, which I returned. I shouted across:
’Have you got any more beer left?’
’No, it’s all gone.’
The same day, for no apparent reason, a man in the J.S.U. building farther down
the street suddenly raised his rifle and let fly at me when I was leaning out of the
window. Perhaps I made a tempting mark. I did not fire back. Though he was only
a hundred yards away the bullet went so wide that it did not even hit the roof of
the observatory. As usual, Spanish standards of marksmanship had saved me. I was
fired at several times from this building.
The devilish racket of firing went on and on. But so far as I could see, and from all
I heard, the fighting was defensive on both sides. People simply remained in their
buildings or behind their barricades and blazed away at the people opposite. About
half a mile away from us there was a street where some of the main offices of the
C.N.T. and the U.G.T. were almost exactly facing one another; from that direction
the volume of noise was terrific. I passed down that street the day after the fighting
was over and the panes of the shop-windows were like sieves. (Most of the shop-
keepers in Barcelona had their windows criss-crossed with strips of paper, so that
when a bullet hit a pane it did not shiver to pieces.) Sometimes the rattle of rifle
and machine-gun fire was punctuated by the crash of hand-grenades. And at long
intervals, perhaps a dozen times in all, there were tremendously heavy explosions
which at the time I could not account for; they sounded like aerial bombs, but that
was impossible, for there were no aeroplanes about. I was told afterwards–quite
possibly it was true–that agents provocateurs were touching off masses of explosive in
order to increase the general noise and panic. There was, however, no artillery-fire.
I was listening for this, for if the guns began to fire it would mean that the affair was
becoming serious (artillery is the determining factor in street warfare). Afterwards
there were wild tales in the newspapers about batteries of guns firing in the streets,
but no one was able to point to a building that had been hit by a shell. In any case
the sound of gunfire is unmistakable if one is used to it.
Almost from the start food was running short. With difficulty and under cover
of darkness (for the Civil Guards were constantly sniping into the Ramblas) food
was brought from the Hotel Falcon for the fifteen or twenty militiamen who were in
the P.O.U.M. Executive Building, but there was barely enough to go round, and as
many of us as possible went to the Hotel Continental for our meals. The Continen-
tal had been ’collectivized’ by the Generalite and not, like most of the hotels, by the
C.N.T. or U.G.T., and it was regarded as neutral ground. No sooner had the fighting
started than the hotel filled to the brim with a most extraordinary collection of peo-
ple. There were foreign journalists, political suspects of every shade, an American
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airman in the service of the Government, various Communist agents, including a fat,
sinister-looking Russian, said to be an agent of the Ogpu, who was nicknamed Char-
lie Chan and wore attached to his waist-band a revolver and a neat little bomb, some
families of well-to-do Spaniards who looked like Fascist sympathizers, two or three
wounded men from the International Column, a gang of lorry drivers from some
huge French lorries which had been carrying a load of oranges back to France and
had been held up by the fighting, and a number of Popular Army officers. The Popu-
lar Army, as a body, remained neutral throughout the fighting, though a few soldiers
slipped away from the barracks and took part as individuals; on the Tuesday morn-
ing I had seen a couple of them at the P.O.U.M. barricades. At the beginning, before
the food-shortage became acute and the newspapers began stirring up hatred, there
was a tendency to regard the whole affair as a joke. This was the kind of thing that
happened every year in Barcelona, people were saying. George Tioli, an Italian jour-
nalist, a great friend of ours, came in with his trousers drenched with blood. He had
gone out to see what was happening and had been binding up a wounded man on
the pavement when someone playfully tossed a hand-grenade at him, fortunately
not wounding him seriously. I remember his remarking that the Barcelona paving-
stones ought to be numbered; it would save such a lot of trouble in building and
demolishing barricades. And I remember a couple of men from the International
Column sitting in my room at the hotel when I came in tired, hungry, and dirty af-
ter a night on guard. Their attitude was completely neutral. If they had been good
party-men they would, I suppose, have urged me to change sides, or even have pin-
ioned me and taken away the bombs of which my pockets were full; instead they
merely commiserated with me for having to spend my leave in doing guard-duty
on a roof. The general attitude was: ’This is only a dust-up between the Anarchists
and the police–it doesn’t mean anything.’ In spite of the extent of the fighting and
the number of casualties I believe this was nearer the truth than the official version
which represented the affair as a planned rising.
It was about Wednesday (5 May) that a change seemed to come over things. The
shuttered streets looked ghastly. A very few pedestrians, forced abroad for one rea-
son or another, crept to and fro, flourishing white handkerchiefs, and at a spot in
the middle of the Ramblas that was safe from bullets some men were crying news-
papers to the empty street. On Tuesday Solidaridad Obrera, the Anarchist paper, had
described the attack on the Telephone Exchange as a ’monstrous provocation’ (or
words to that effect), but on Wednesday it changed its tune and began imploring
everyone to go back to work. The Anarchist leaders were broadcasting the same
message. The office of La Batalla, the P.O.U.M. paper, which was not defended, had
been raided and seized by the Civil Guards at about the same time as the Telephone
Exchange, but the paper was being printed, and a few copies distributed, from an-
other address. I urged everyone to remain at the barricades. People were divided in
their minds and wondering uneasily how the devil this was going to end. I doubt
whether anyone left the barricades as yet, but everyone was sick of the meaning-
less fighting, which could obviously lead to no real decision, because no one wanted
this to develop into a full-sized civil war which might mean losing the war against
Franco. I heard this fear expressed on all sides. So far as one could gather from what
people were saying at the time the C.N.T. rank and file wanted, and had wanted
from the beginning, only two things: the handing back of the Telephone Exchange
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and the disarming of the hated Civil Guards. If the Generalite had promised to do
these two things, and also promised to put an end to the food profiteering, there
is little doubt that the barricades would have been down in two hours. But it was
obvious that the Generalite was not going to give in. Ugly rumours were flying
round. It was said that the Valencia Government was sending six thousand men to
occupy Barcelona, and that five thousand Anarchist and P.O.U.M. troops had left the
Aragón front to oppose them. Only the first of these rumours was true. Watching
from the observatory tower we saw the low grey shapes of warships closing in upon
the harbour. Douglas Moyle, who had been a sailor, said that they looked like British
destroyers. As a matter of fact they were British destroyers, though we did not learn
this till afterwards.
That evening we heard that on the Plaza de España four hundred Civil Guards
had surrendered and handed their arms to the Anarchists; also the news was vaguely
filtering through that in the suburbs (mainly working-class quarters) the C.N.T. were
in control. It looked as though we were winning. But the same evening Kopp sent
for me and, with a grave face, told me that according to information he had just
received the Government was about to outlaw the P.O.U.M. and declare a state of
war upon it. The news gave me a shock. It was the first glimpse I had had of the
interpretation that was likely to be put upon this affair later on. I dimly foresaw that
when the fighting ended the entire blame would be laid upon the P.O.U.M., which
was the weakest party and therefore the most suitable scapegoat. And meanwhile
our local neutrality was at an end. If the Government declared war upon us we
had no choice but to defend ourselves, and here at the Executive building we could
be certain that the Civil Guards next door would get orders to attack us. Our only
chance was to attack them first. Kopp was waiting for orders on the telephone; if we
heard definitely that the P.O.U.M. was outlawed we must make preparations at once
to seize the Café Moka.
I remember the long, nightmarish evening that we spent in fortifying the build-
ing. We locked the steel curtains across the front entrance and behind them built a
barricade of slabs of stone left behind by the workmen who had been making some
alterations. We went over our stock of weapons. Counting the six rifles that were on
the roof of the Poliorama opposite, we had twenty-one rifles, one of them defective,
about fifty rounds of ammunition for each rifle, and a few dozen bombs; otherwise
nothing except a few pistols and revolvers. About a dozen men, mostly Germans,
had volunteered for the attack on the Café Moka, if it came off. We should attack
from the roof, of course, some time in the small hours, and take them by surprise;
they were more numerous, but our morale was better, and no doubt we could storm
the place, though people were bound to be killed in doing so. We had no food in the
building except a few slabs of chocolate, and the rumour had gone round that ’they’
were going to cut off the water supply. (Nobody knew who ’they’ were. It might be
the Government that controlled the waterworks, or it might be the C.N.T.–nobody
knew.) We spent a long time filling up every basin in the lavatories, every bucket we
could lay hands on, and, finally, the fifteen beer bottles, now empty, which the Civil
Guards had given to Kopp.
I was in a ghastly frame of mind and dog-tired after about sixty hours without
much sleep. It was now late into the night. People were sleeping all over the floor
behind the barricade downstairs. Upstairs there was a small room, with a sofa in it,
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which we intended to use as a dressing-station, though, needless to say, we discov-
ered that there was neither iodine nor bandages in the building. My wife had come
down from the hotel in case a nurse should be needed. I lay down on the sofa, feeling
that I would like half an hour’s rest before the attack on the Moka, in which I should
presumably be killed. I remember the intolerable discomfort caused by my pistol,
which was strapped to my belt and sticking into the small of my back. And the next
thing I remember is waking up with a jerk to find my wife standing beside me. It
was broad daylight, nothing had happened, the Government had not declared war
on the P.O.U.M., the water had not been cut off, and except for the sporadic firing in
the streets everything was normal. My wife said that she had not had the heart to
wake me and had slept in an arm-chair in one of the front rooms.
That afternoon there was a kind of armistice. The firing died away and with sur-
prising suddenness the streets filled with people. A few shops began to pull up
their shutters, and the market was packed with a huge crowd clamouring for food,
though the stalls were almost empty. It was noticeable, however, that the trams did
not start running. The Civil Guards were still behind their barricades in the Moka;
on neither side were the fortified buildings evacuated. Everyone was rushing round
and trying to buy food. And on every side you heard the same anxious questions:
’Do you think it’s stopped? Do you think it’s going to start again?’ ’It’–the fighting–
was now thought of as some kind of natural calamity, like a hurricane or an earth-
quake, which was happening to us all alike and which we had no power of stopping.
And sure enough, almost immediately–I suppose there must really have been sev-
eral hours’ truce, but they seemed more like minutes than hours–a sudden crash of
rifle-fire, like a June cloud-burst, sent everyone scurrying; the steel shutters snapped
into place, the streets emptied like magic, the barricades were manned, and ’it’ had
started again.
I went back to my post on the roof with a feeling of concentrated disgust and fury.
When you are taking part in events like these you are, I suppose, in a small way,
making history, and you ought by rights to feel like a historical character. But you
never do, because at such times the physical details always outweigh everything
else. Throughout the fighting I never made the correct ’analysis’ of the situation
that was so glibly made by journalists hundreds of miles away. What I was chiefly
thinking about was not the rights and wrongs of this miserable internecine scrap,
but simply the discomfort and boredom of sitting day and night on that intolerable
roof, and the hunger which was growing worse and worse–for none of us had had a
proper meal since Monday. It was in my mind all the while that I should have to go
back to the front as soon as this business was over. It was infuriating. I had been a
hundred and fifteen days in the line and had come back to Barcelona ravenous for a
bit of rest and comfort; and instead I had to spend my time sitting on a roof opposite
Civil Guards as bored as myself, who periodically waved to me and assured me that
they were ’workers’ (meaning that they hoped I would not shoot them), but who
would certainly open fire if they got the order to do so. If this was history it did not
feel like it. It was more like a bad period at the front, when men were short and we
had to do abnormal hours of guard-duty; instead of being heroic one just had to stay
at one’s post, bored, dropping with sleep, and completely uninterested as to what it
was all about.
Inside the hotel, among the heterogeneous mob who for the most part had not
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dared to put their noses out of doors, a horrible atmosphere of suspicion had grown
up. Various people were infected with spy mania and were creeping round whisper-
ing that everyone else was a spy of the Communists, or the Trotskyists, or the Anar-
chists, or what-not. The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in
turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched
him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose pro-
fession was telling lies–unless one counts journalists. There was something repulsive
in the parody of smart hotel life that was still going on behind shuttered windows
amid the rattle of rifle-fire. The front dining-room had been abandoned after a bul-
let came through the window and chipped a pillar, and the guests were crowded
into a darkish room at the back, where there were never quite enough tables to go
round. The waiters were reduced in numbers–some of them were C.N.T. members
and had joined in the general strike–and had dropped their boiled shirts for the time
being, but meals were still being served with a pretence of ceremony. There was,
however, practically nothing to eat. On that Thursday night the principal dish at
dinner was one sardine each. The hotel had had no bread for days, and even the
wine was running so low that we were drinking older and older wines at higher and
higher prices. This shortage of food went on for several days after the fighting was
over. Three days running, I remember, my wife and I breakfasted off a little piece
of goat’s-milk cheese with no bread and nothing to drink. The only thing that was
plentiful was oranges. The French lorry drivers brought quantities of their oranges
into the hotel. They were a tough-looking bunch; they had with them some flashy
Spanish girls and a huge porter in a black blouse. At any other time the little snob
of a hotel manager would have done his best to make them uncomfortable, in fact
would have refused to have them on the premises, but at present they were popular
because, unlike the rest of us, they had a private store of bread which everyone was
trying to cadge from them.
I spent that final night on the roof, and the next day it did really look as though
the fighting was coming to an end. I do not think there was much firing that day–the
Friday. No one seemed to know for certain whether the troops from Valencia were
really coming; they arrived that evening, as a matter of fact. The Government was
broadcasting half-soothing, half-threatening messages, asking everyone to go home
and saying that after a certain hour anyone found carrying arms would be arrested.
Not much attention was paid to the Government’s broadcasts, but everywhere the
people were fading away from the barricades. I have no doubt that it was mainly the
food shortage that was responsible. From every side you heard the same remark: ’We
have no more food, we must go back to work.’ On the other hand the Civil Guards,
who could count on getting their rations so long as there was any food in the town,
were able to stay at their posts. By the afternoon the streets were almost normal,
though the deserted barricades were still standing; the Ramblas were thronged with
people, the shops nearly all open, and–most reassuring of all–the trams that had
stood so long in frozen blocks jerked into motion and began running. The Civil
Guards were still holding the Café Moka and had not taken down their barricades,
but some of them brought chairs out and sat on the pavement with their rifles across
their knees. I winked at one of them as I went past and got a not unfriendly grin; he
recognized me, of course. Over the Telephone Exchange the Anarchist flag had been
hauled down and only the Catalan flag was flying. That meant that the workers
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were definitely beaten; I realized–though, owing to my political ignorance, not so
clearly as I ought to have done–that when the Government felt more sure of itself
there would be reprisals. But at the time I was not interested in that aspect of things.
All I felt was a profound relief that the devilish din of firing was over, and that one
could buy some food and have a bit of rest and peace before going back to the front.
It must have been late that evening that the troops from Valencia first appeared
in the streets. They were the Assault Guards, another formation similar to the Civil
Guards and the Carabineros (i.e. a formation intended primarily for police work),
and the picked troops of the Republic. Quite suddenly they seemed to spring up
out of the ground; you saw them everywhere patrolling the streets in groups of ten–
tall men in grey or blue uniforms, with long rifles slung over their shoulders, and a
sub-machine-gun to each group. Meanwhile there was a delicate job to be done. The
six rifles which we had used for the guard in the observatory towers were still lying
there, and by hook or by crook we had got to get them back to the P.O.U.M. build-
ing. It was only a question of getting them across the street. They were part of the
regular armoury of the building, but to bring them into the street was to contravene
the Government’s order, and if we were caught with them in our hands we should
certainly be arrested–worse, the rifles would be confiscated. With only twenty-one
rifles in the building we could not afford to lose six of them. After a lot of discussion
as to the best method, a red-haired Spanish boy and myself began to smuggle them
out. It was easy enough to dodge the Assault Guard patrols; the danger was the
Civil Guards in the Moka, who were well aware that we had rifles in the observatory
and might give the show away if they saw us carrying them across. Each of us par-
tially undressed and slung a rifle over the left shoulder, the butt under the armpit,
the barrel down the trouser-leg. It was unfortunate that they were long Mausers.
Even a man as tall as I am cannot wear a long Mauser down his trouser-leg without
discomfort. It was an intolerable job getting down the corkscrew staircase of the ob-
servatory with a completely rigid left leg. Once in the street, we found that the only
way to move was with extreme slowness, so slowly that you did not have to bend
your knees. Outside the picture-house I saw a group of people staring at me with
great interest as I crept along at tortoise-speed. I have often wondered what they
thought was the matter with me. Wounded in the war, perhaps. However, all the
rifles were smuggled across without incident.
Next day the Assault Guards were everywhere, walking the streets like con-
querors. There was no doubt that the Government was simply making a display
of force in order to overawe a population which it already knew would not resist;
if there had been any real fear of further outbreaks the Assault Guards would have
been kept in barracks and not scattered through the streets in small bands. They
were splendid troops, much the best I had seen in Spain, and, though I suppose they
were in a sense ’the enemy’, I could not help liking the look of them. But it was
with a sort of amazement that I watched them strolling to and fro. I was used to
the ragged, scarcely-armed militia on the Aragón front, and I had not known that
the Republic possessed troops like these. It was not only that they were picked men
physically, it was their weapons that most astonished me. All of them were armed
with brand-new rifles of the type known as ’the Russian rifle’ (these rifles were sent
to Spain by the U.S.S.R., but were, I believe, manufactured in America). I examined
one of them. It was a far from perfect rifle, but vastly better than the dreadful old
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blunderbusses we had at the front. The Assault Guards had one submachine-gun
between ten men and an automatic pistol each; we at the front had approximately
one machine-gun between fifty men, and as for pistols and revolvers, you could only
procure them illegally. As a matter of fact, though I had not noticed it till now, it was
the same everywhere. The Civil Guards and Carabineros, who were not intended
for the front at all, were better armed and far better clad than ourselves. I suspect it
is the same in all wars–always the same contrast between the sleek police in the rear
and the ragged soldiers in the line. On the whole the Assault Guards got on very
well with the population after the first day or two. On the first day there was a cer-
tain amount of trouble because some of the Assault Guards–acting on instructions,
I suppose–began behaving in a provocative manner. Bands of them boarded trams,
searched the passengers, and, if they had C.N.T. membership cards in their pockets,
tore them up and stamped on them. This led to scuffles with armed Anarchists, and
one or two people were killed. Very soon, however, the Assault Guards dropped
their conquering air and relations became more friendly. It was noticeable that most
of them had picked up a girl after a day or two.
The Barcelona fighting had given the Valencia Government the long-wanted ex-
cuse to assume fuller control of Catalonia. The workers’ militias were to be broken
up and redistributed among the Popular Army. The Spanish Republican flag was
flying all over Barcelona–the first time I had seen it, I think, except over a Fascist
trench. In the working-class quarters the barricades were being pulled down, rather
fragmentarily, for it is a lot easier to build a barricade than to put the stones back.
Outside the P.S.U.C. buildings the barricades were allowed to remain standing, and
indeed many were standing as late as June. The Civil Guards were still occupying
strategic points. Huge seizures of arms were being made from C.N.T. strongholds,
though I have no doubt a good many escaped seizure. La Batalla was still appearing,
but it was censored until the front page was almost completely blank. The P.S.U.C.
papers were uncensored and were publishing inflammatory articles demanding the
suppression of the P.O.U.M. The P.O.U.M. was declared to be a disguised Fascist or-
ganization, and a cartoon representing the P.O.U.M. as a figure slipping off a mask
marked with the hammer and sickle and revealing a hideous, maniacal face marked
with the swastika, was being circulated all over the town by P.S.U.C. agents. Evi-
dently the official version of the Barcelona fighting was already fixed upon: it was to
be represented as a ’fifth column’ Fascist rising engineered solely by the P.O.U.M.
In the hotel the horrible atmosphere of suspicion and hostility had grown worse
now that the fighting was over. In the face of the accusations that were being flung
about it was impossible to remain neutral. The posts were working again, the foreign
Communist papers were beginning to arrive, and their accounts of the fighting were
not only violently partisan but, of course, wildly inaccurate as to facts. I think some
of the Communists on the spot, who had seen what was actually happening, were
dismayed by the interpretation that was being put upon events, but naturally they
had to stick to their own side. Our Communist friend approached me once again
and asked me whether I would not transfer into the International Column.
I was rather surprised. ’Your papers are saying I’m a Fascist,’ I said. ’Surely I
should be politically suspect, coming from the P.O.U.M.’
’Oh, that doesn’t matter. After all, you were only acting under orders.’
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I had to tell him that after this affair I could not join any Communist-controlled
unit. Sooner or later it might mean being used against the Spanish working class.
One could not tell when this kind of thing would break out again, and if I had to use
my rifle at all in such an affair I would use it on the side of the working class and not
against them. He was very decent about it. But from now on the whole atmosphere
was changed. You could not, as before, ’agree to differ’ and have drinks with a man
who was supposedly your political opponent. There were some ugly wrangles in the
hotel lounge. Meanwhile the jails were already full and overflowing. After the fight-
ing was over the Anarchists had, of course, released their prisoners, but the Civil
Guards had not released theirs, and most of them were thrown into prison and kept
there without trial, in many cases for months on end. As usual, completely innocent
people were being arrested owing to police bungling. I mentioned earlier that Dou-
glas Thompson was wounded about the beginning of April. Afterwards we had lost
touch with him, as usually happened when a man was wounded, for wounded men
were frequently moved from one hospital to another. Actually he was at Tarragona
hospital and was sent back to Barcelona about the time when the fighting started. On
the Tuesday morning I met him in the street, considerably bewildered by the firing
that was going on all round. He asked the question everyone was asking:
’What the devil is this all about?’
I explained as well as I could. Thompson said promptly:
’I’m going to keep out of this. My arm’s still bad. I shall go back to my hotel and
stay there.’
He went back to his hotel, but unfortunately (how important it is in street-fighting
to understand the local geography!) it was a hotel in a part of the town controlled
by the Civil Guards. The place was raided and Thompson was arrested, flung into
jail, and kept for eight days in a cell so full of people that nobody had room to lie
down. There were many similar cases. Numerous foreigners with doubtful political
records were on the run, with the police on their track and in constant fear of denun-
ciation. It was worst for the Italians and Germans, who had no passports and were
generally wanted by the secret police in their own countries. If they were arrested
they were liable to be deported to France, which might mean being sent back to Italy
or Germany, where God knew what horrors were awaiting them. One or two foreign
women hurriedly regularized their position by ’marrying’ Spaniards. A German girl
who had no papers at all dodged the police by posing for several days as a man’s
mistress. I remember the look of shame and misery on the poor girl’s face when I
accidentally bumped into her coming out of the man’s bedroom. Of course she was
not his mistress, but no doubt she thought I thought she was. You had all the while a
hateful feeling that someone hitherto your friend might be denouncing you to the se-
cret police. The long nightmare of the fighting, the noise, the lack of food and sleep,
the mingled strain and boredom of sitting on the roof and wondering whether in an-
other minute I should be shot myself or be obliged to shoot somebody else had put
my nerves on edge. I had got to the point when every time a door banged I grabbed
for my pistol. On the Saturday morning there was an uproar of shots outside and
everyone cried out: ’It’s starting again!’ I ran into the street to find that it was only
some Assault Guards shooting a mad dog. No one who was in Barcelona then, or
for months later, will forget the horrible atmosphere produced by fear, suspicion,
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hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food queues, and prowling
gangs of armed men.
I have tried to give some idea of what it felt like to be in the middle of the Barcelona
fighting; yet I do not suppose I have succeeded in conveying much of the strangeness
of that time. One of the things that stick in my mind when I look back is the casual
contacts one made at the time, the sudden glimpses of non-combatants to whom the
whole thing was simply a meaningless uproar. I remember the fashionably-dressed
woman I saw strolling down the Ramblas, with a shopping-basket over her arm and
leading a white poodle, while the rifles cracked and roared a street or two away. It
is conceivable that she was deaf. And the man I saw rushing across the completely
empty Plaza de Cataluña, brandishing a white handkerchief in each hand. And the
large party of people all dressed in black who kept trying for about an hour to cross
the Plaza de Cataluña and always failing. Every time they emerged from the side-
street at the corner the P.S.U.C. machine-gunners in the Hotel Colon opened fire and
drove them back–I don’t know why, for they were obviously unarmed. I have since
thought that they may have been a funeral party. And the little man who acted as
caretaker at the museum over the Poliorama and who seemed to regard the whole
affair as a social occasion. He was so pleased to have the English visiting him–the
English were so simpático, he said. He hoped we would all come and see him again
when the trouble was over; as a matter of fact I did go and see him. And the other
little man, sheltering in a doorway, who jerked his head in a pleased manner towards
the hell of firing on the Plaza de Cataluña and said (as though remarking that it was
a fine morning): ’So we’ve got the nineteenth of July back again!’ And the people
in the shoe-shop who were making my marching-boots. I went there before the
fighting, after it was over, and, for a very few minutes, during the brief armistice
on 5 May. It was an expensive shop, and the shop-people were U.G.T. and may
have been P.S.U.C. members–at any rate they were politically on the other side and
they knew that I was serving with the P.O.U.M. Yet their attitude was completely
indifferent. ’Such a pity, this kind of thing, isn’t it? And so bad for business. What
a pity it doesn’t stop! As though there wasn’t enough of that kind of thing at the
front!’ etc., etc. There must have been quantities of people, perhaps a majority of the
inhabitants of Barcelona, who regarded the whole affair without a flicker of interest,
or with no more interest than they would have felt in an air-raid.
In this chapter I have described only my personal experiences. In the next chapter
I must discuss as best I can the larger issues–what actually happened and with what
results, what were the rights and wrongs of the affair, and who if anyone was respon-
sible. So much political capital has been made out of the Barcelona fighting that it is
important to try and get a balanced view of it. An immense amount, enough to fill
many books, has already been written on the subject, and I do not suppose I should
exaggerate if I said that nine-tenths of it is untruthful. Nearly all the newspaper
accounts published at the time were manufactured by journalists at a distance, and
were not only inaccurate in their facts but intentionally misleading. As usual, only
one side of the question has been allowed to get to the wider public. Like everyone
who was in Barcelona at the time. I saw only what was happening in my immediate
neighbourhood, but I saw and heard quite enough to be able to contradict many of
the lies that have been circulated. As before, if you are not interested in political con-
troversy and the mob of parties and sub-parties with their confusing names (rather
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like the names of the generals in a Chinese war), please skip. It is a horrible thing to
have to enter into the details of inter-party polemics; it is like diving into a cesspool.
But it is necessary to try and establish the truth, so far as it is possible. This squalid
brawl in a distant city is more important than might appear at first sight.
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It will never be possible to get a completely accurate and unbiased account of the
Barcelona fighting, because the necessary records do not exist. Future historians
will have nothing to go upon except a mass of accusations and party propaganda. I
myself have little data beyond what I saw with my own eyes and what I have learned
from other eyewitnesses whom I believe to be reliable. I can, however, contradict
some of the more flagrant lies and help to get the affair into some kind of perspective.
First of all, what actually happened?
For some time past there had been tension throughout Catalonia. In earlier chap-
ters of this book I have given some account of the struggle between Communists
and Anarchists. By May 1937 things had reached a point at which some kind of
violent outbreak could be regarded as inevitable. The immediate cause of friction
was the Government’s order to surrender all private weapons, coinciding with the
decision to build up a heavily-armed ’non-political’ police-force from which trade
union members were to be excluded. The meaning of this was obvious to everyone;
and it was also obvious that the next move would be the taking over of some of the
key industries controlled by the C.N.T. In addition there was a certain amount of
resentment among the working classes because of the growing contrast of wealth
and poverty and a general vague feeling that the revolution had been sabotaged.
Many people were agreeably surprised when there was no rioting on 1 May. On 3
May the Government decided to take over the Telephone Exchange, which had been
operated since the beginning of the war mainly by C.N.T. workers; it was alleged
that it was badly run and that official calls were being tapped. Salas, the Chief of
Police (who may or may not have been exceeding his orders), sent three lorry-loads
of armed Civil Guards to seize the building, while the streets outside were cleared
by armed police in civilian clothes. At about the same time bands of Civil Guards
seized various other buildings in strategic spots. Whatever the real intention may
have been, there was a widespread belief that this was the signal for a general attack
on the C.N.T. by the Civil Guards and the P.S.U.C. (Communists and Socialists). The
word flew round the town that the workers’ buildings were being attacked, armed
Anarchists appeared on the streets, work ceased, and fighting broke out immedi-
ately. That night and the next morning barricades were built all over the town, and
there was no break in the fighting until the morning of 6 May. The fighting was, how-
ever, mainly defensive on both sides. Buildings were besieged, but, so far as I know,
none were stormed, and there was no use of artillery. Roughly speaking, the C.N.T.-
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F.A.I.-P.O.U.M. forces held the working-class suburbs, and the armed police-forces
and the P.S.U.C. held the central and official portion of the town. On 6 May there
was an armistice, but fighting soon broke out again, probably because of premature
attempts by Civil Guards to disarm C.N.T. workers. Next morning, however, the
people began to leave the barricades of their own accord. Up till, roughly, the night
of 5 May the C.N.T. had had the better of it, and large numbers of Civil Guards had
surrendered. But there was no generally accepted leadership and no fixed plan–
indeed, so far as one could judge, no plan at all except a vague determination to
resist the Civil Guards. The official leaders of the C.N.T. had joined with those of the
U.G.T. in imploring everyone to go back to work; above all, food was running short.
In such circumstances nobody was sure enough of the issue to go on fighting. By
the afternoon of 7 May conditions were almost normal. That evening six thousand
Assault Guards, sent by sea from Valencia, arrived and took control of the town. The
Government issued an order for the surrender of all arms except those held by the
regular forces, and during the next few days large numbers of arms were seized.
The casualties during the fighting were officially given out as four hundred killed
and about a thousand wounded. Four hundred killed is possibly an exaggeration,
but as there is no way of verifying this we must accept it as accurate.
Secondly, as to the after-effects of the fighting. Obviously it is impossible to say
with any certainty what these were. There is no evidence that the outbreak had any
direct effect upon the course of the war, though obviously it must have had if it con-
tinued even a few days longer. It was made the excuse for bringing Catalonia under
the direct control of Valencia, for hastening the break-up of the militias, and for the
suppression of the P.O.U.M., and no doubt it also had its share in bringing down the
Caballero Government. But we may take it as certain that these things would have
happened in any case. The real question is whether the C.N.T. workers who came
into the street gained or lost by showing fight on this occasion. It is pure guess-
work, but my own opinion is that they gained more than they lost. The seizure of
the Barcelona Telephone Exchange was simply one incident in a long process. Since
the previous year direct power had been gradually manoeuvred out of the hands
of the syndicates, and the general movement was away from working-class control
and towards centralized control, leading on to State capitalism or, possibly, towards
the reintroduction of private capitalism. The fact that at this point there was re-
sistance probably slowed the process down. A year after the outbreak of war the
Catalan workers had lost much of their power, but their position was still compar-
atively favourable. It might have been much less so if they had made it clear that
they would lie down under no matter what provocation. There are occasions when
it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.
Thirdly, what purpose, if any, lay behind the outbreak? Was it any kind of coup
d’état or revolutionary attempt? Did it definitely aim at overthrowing the Govern-
ment? Was it preconcerted at all?
My own opinion is that the fighting was only preconcerted in the sense that ev-
eryone expected it. There were no signs of any very definite plan on either side. On
the Anarchist side the action was almost certainly spontaneous, for it was an affair
mainly of the rank and file. The people came into the streets and their political lead-
ers followed reluctantly, or did not follow at all. The only people who even talked
in a revolutionary strain were the Friends of Durruti, a small extremist group within
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the F.A.I., and the P.O.U.M. But once again they were following and not leading. The
Friends of Durruti distributed some kind of revolutionary leaflet, but this did not ap-
pear until 5 May and cannot be said to have started the fighting, which had started
of its own accord two days earlier. The official leaders of the C.N.T. disowned the
whole affair from the start. There were a number of reasons for this. To begin with,
the fact that the C.N.T. was still represented in the Government and the Generalite
ensured that its leaders would be more conservative than their followers. Secondly,
the main object of the C.N.T. leaders was to form an alliance with the U.G.T., and
the fighting was bound to widen the split between C.N.T. and U.G.T., at any rate
for the time being. Thirdly–though this was not generally known at the time–the
Anarchist leaders feared that if things went beyond a certain point and the work-
ers took possession of the town, as they were perhaps in a position to do on 5 May,
there would be foreign intervention. A British cruiser and two British destroyers had
closed in upon the harbour, and no doubt there were other warships not far away.
The English newspapers gave it out that these ships were proceeding to Barcelona
’to protect British interests’, but in fact they made no move to do so; that is, they did
not land any men or take off any refugees. There can be no certainty about this, but it
was at least inherently likely that the British Government, which had not raised a fin-
ger to save the Spanish Government from Franco, would intervene quickly enough
to save it from its own working class.
The P.O.U.M. leaders did not disown the affair, in fact they encouraged their fol-
lowers to remain at the barricades and even gave their approval (in La Batalla, 6 May)
to the extremist leaflet issued by the Friends of Durruti. (There is great uncertainty
about this leaflet, of which no one now seems able to produce a copy.) In some of the
foreign papers it was described as an ’inflammatory poster’ which was ’plastered’
all over the town. There was certainly no such poster. From comparison of various
reports I should say that the leaflet called for (i) The formation of a revolutionary
council (junta), (ii) The shooting of those responsible for the attack on the Telephone
Exchange, (iii) The disarming of the Civil Guards. There is also some uncertainty
as to how far La Batalla expressed agreement with the leaflet. I myself did not see
the leaflet or La Batalla of that date. The only handbill I saw during the fighting was
one issued by the tiny group of Trotskyists (’Bolshevik-Leninists’) on 4 May. This
merely said: ’Everyone to the barricades–general strike of all industries except war
industries.’ (In other words, it merely demanded what was happening already.) But
in reality the attitude of the P.O.U.M. leaders was hesitating. They had never been in
favour of insurrection until the war against Franco was won; on the other hand the
workers had come into the streets, and the P.O.U.M. leaders took the rather pedantic
Marxist line that when the workers are on the streets it is the duty of the revolution-
ary parties to be with them. Hence, in spite of uttering revolutionary slogans about
the ’reawakening of the spirit of 19 July’, and so forth, they did their best to limit
the workers’ action to the defensive. They never, for instance, ordered an attack on
any building; they merely ordered their followers to remain on guard and, as I men-
tioned in the last chapter, not to fire when it could be avoided. La Batalla also issued
instructions that no troops were to leave the front.12
12A recent number of Inprecor states the exact opposite–that La Batalla ordered the P.O.U.M.
troops to leave the front! The point can easily be settled by referring to La Batalla of the date named.
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As far as one can estimate it, I should say that the responsibility of the P.O.U.M.
amounts to having urged everyone to remain at the barricades, and probably to hav-
ing persuaded a certain number to remain there longer than they would otherwise
have done. Those who were in personal touch with the P.O.U.M. leaders at the time
(I myself was not) have told me that they were in reality dismayed by the whole busi-
ness, but felt that they had got to associate themselves with it. Afterwards, of course,
political capital was made out of it in the usual manner. Gorkin, one of the P.O.U.M.
leaders, even spoke later of ’the glorious days of May’.From the propaganda point
of view this may have been the right line; certainly the P.O.U.M. rose somewhat in
numbers during the brief period before its suppression. Tactically it was probably a
mistake to give countenance to the leaflet of the Friends of Durruti, which was a very
small organization and normally hostile to the P.O.U.M. Considering the general ex-
citement and the things that were being said on both sides, the leaflet did not in effect
mean much more than ’Stay at the barricades’, but by seeming to approve of it while
Solidaridad Obrera, the Anarchist paper, repudiated it, the P.O.U.M. leaders made it
easy for the Communist press to say afterwards that the fighting was a kind of in-
surrection engineered solely by the P.O.U.M. However, we may be certain that the
Communist press would have said this in any case. It was nothing compared with
the accusations that were made both before and afterwards on less evidence. The
C.N.T. leaders did not gain much by their more cautious attitude; they were praised
for their loyalty but were levered out of both the Government and the Generalite as
soon as the opportunity arose.
So far as one could judge from what people were saying at the time, there was
no real revolutionary intention anywhere. The people behind the barricades were
ordinary C.N.T. workers, probably with a sprinkling of U.G.T. workers among them,
and what they were attempting was not to overthrow the Government but to resist
what they regarded, rightly or wrongly, as an attack by the police. Their action was
essentially defensive, and I doubt whether it should be described, as it was in nearly
all the foreign newspapers, as a ’rising’. A rising implies aggressive action and a
definite plan. More exactly it was a riot–a very bloody riot, because both sides had
fire-arms in their hands and were willing to use them.
But what about the intentions on the other side? If it was not an Anarchist coup
d’état, was it perhaps a Communist coup d’état–a planned effort to smash the power
of the C.N.T. at one blow?
I do not believe it was, though certain things might lead one to suspect it. It is sig-
nificant that something very similar (seizure of the Telephone Exchange by armed
police acting under orders from Barcelona) happened in Tarragona two days later.
And in Barcelona the raid on the Telephone Exchange was not an isolated act. In
various parts of the town bands of Civil Guards and P.S.U.C. adherents seized build-
ings in strategic spots, if not actually before the fighting started, at any rate with
surprising promptitude. But what one has got to remember is that these things were
happening in Spain and not in England. Barcelona is a town with a long history of
street-fighting. In such places things happen quickly, the factions are ready-made,
everyone knows the local geography, and when the guns begin to shoot people take
their places almost as in a fire-drill. Presumably those responsible for the seizure
of the Telephone Exchange expected trouble–though not on the scale that actually
happened–and had made ready to meet it. But it does not follow that they were
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planning a general attack on the C.N.T. There are two reasons why I do not believe
that either side had made preparations for large-scale fighting:
(i) Neither side had brought troops to Barcelona beforehand. The fighting was
only between those who were in Barcelona already, mainly civilians and police.
(ii) The food ran short almost immediately. Anyone who has served in Spain
knows that the one operation of war that Spaniards really perform really well is
that of feeding their troops. It is most unlikely that if either side had contemplated a
week or two of street-fighting and a general strike they would not have stored food
beforehand.
Finally, as to the rights and wrongs of the affair.
A tremendous dust was kicked up in the foreign anti-Fascist press, but, as usual,
only one side of the case has had anything like a hearing. As a result the Barcelona
fighting has been represented as an insurrection by disloyal Anarchists and Trotsky-
ists who were ’stabbing the Spanish Government in the back’, and so forth. The issue
was not quite so simple as that. Undoubtedly when you are at war with a deadly en-
emy it is better not to begin fighting among yourselves; but it is worth remembering
that it takes two to make a quarrel and that people do not begin building barricades
unless they have received something that they regard as a provocation.
The trouble sprang naturally out of the Government’s order to the Anarchists to
surrender their arms. In the English press this was translated into English terms and
took this form: that arms were desperately needed on the Aragón front and could
not be sent there because the unpatriotic Anarchists were holding them back. To
put it like this is to ignore the conditions actually existing in Spain. Everyone knew
that both the Anarchists and the P.S.U.C. were hoarding arms, and when the fighting
broke out in Barcelona this was made clearer still; both sides produced arms in abun-
dance. The Anarchists were well aware that even if they surrendered their arms, the
P.S.U.C., politically the main power in Catalonia, would still retain theirs; and this
in fact was what happened after the fighting was over. Meanwhile actually visible
on the streets, there were quantities of arms which would have been very welcome
at the front, but which were being retained for the ’non-political’ police forces in the
rear. And underneath this there was the irreconcilable difference between Commu-
nists and Anarchists, which was bound to lead to some kind of struggle sooner or
later. Since the beginning of the war the Spanish Communist Party had grown enor-
mously in numbers and captured most of the political power, and there had come
into Spain thousands of foreign Communists, many of whom were openly express-
ing their intention of ’liquidating’ Anarchism as soon as the war against Franco was
won. In the circumstances one could hardly expect the Anarchists to hand over the
weapons which they had got possession of in the summer of 1936.
The seizure of the Telephone Exchange was simply the match that fired an already
existing bomb. It is perhaps just conceivable that those responsible imagined that it
would not lead to trouble. Companys, the Catalan President, is said to have declared
laughingly a few days earlier that the Anarchists would put up with anything.13 But
certainly it was not a wise action. For months past there had been a long series
of armed clashes between Communists and Anarchists in various parts of Spain.
13New Statesman (14 May).
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Catalonia and especially Barcelona was in a state of tension that had already led to
street affrays, assassinations, and so forth. Suddenly the news ran round the city
that armed men were attacking the buildings that the workers had captured in the
July fighting and to which they attached great sentimental importance. One must
remember that the Civil Guards were not loved by the working-class population.
For generations past la guardia had been simply an appendage of the landlord and
the boss, and the Civil Guards were doubly hated because they were suspected, quite
justly, of being of very doubtful loyalty against the Fascists.14
It is probable that the emotion that brought people into the streets in the first few
hours was much the same emotion as had led them to resist the rebel generals at
the beginning of the war. Of course it is arguable that the C.N.T. workers ought
to have handed over the Telephone Exchange without protest. One’s opinion here
will be governed by one’s attitude on the question of centralized government and
working-class control. More relevantly it may be said: ’Yes, very likely the C.N.T.
had a case. But, after all, there was a war on, and they had no business to start a
fight behind the lines.’ Here I agree entirely. Any internal disorder was likely to aid
Franco. But what actually precipitated the fighting? The Government may or may
not have had the right to seize the Telephone Exchange; the point is that in the actual
circumstances it was bound to lead to a fight. It was a provocative action, a gesture
which said in effect, and presumably was meant to say: ’Your power is at an end–we
are taking over.’ It was not common sense to expect anything but resistance. If one
keeps a sense of proportion one must realize that the fault was not–could not be, in
a matter of this kind–entirely on one side. The reason why a one-sided version has
been accepted is simply that the Spanish revolutionary parties have no footing in the
foreign press. In the English press, in particular, you would have to search for a long
time before finding any favourable reference, at any period of the war, to the Spanish
Anarchists. They have been systematically denigrated, and, as I know by my own
experience, it is almost impossible to get anyone to print anything in their defence.
I have tried to write objectively about the Barcelona fighting, though, obviously,
no one can be completely objective on a question of this kind. One is practically
obliged to take sides, and it must be clear enough which side I am on. Again, I must
inevitably have made mistakes of fact, not only here but in other parts of this nar-
rative. It is very difficult to write accurately about the Spanish war, because of the
lack of non-propagandist documents. I warn everyone against my bias, and I warn
everyone against my mistakes. Still, I have done my best to be honest. But it will be
seen that the account I have given is completely different from that which appeared
in the foreign and especially the Communist press. It is necessary to examine the
Communist version, because it was published all over the world, has been supple-
mented at short intervals ever since, and is probably the most widely accepted one.
In the Communist and pro-Communist press the entire blame for the Barcelona
fighting was laid upon the P.O.U.M. The affair was represented not as a spontaneous
outbreak, but as a deliberate, planned insurrection against the Government, engi-
neered solely by the P.O.U.M. with the aid of a few misguided ’uncontrollables’.
14At the outbreak of war the Civil Guards had everywhere sided with the stronger party. On
several occasions later in the war, e.g. at Santander, the local Civil Guards went over to the Fascists
in a body.
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More than this, it was definitely a Fascist plot, carried out under Fascist orders with
the idea of starting civil war in the rear and thus paralysing the Government. The
P.O.U.M. was ’Franco’s Fifth Column’–a ’Trotskyist’ organization working in league
with the Fascists. According to the Daily Worker (11 May):
The German and Italian agents, who poured into Barcelona ostensibly to ’prepare’
the notorious ’Congress of the Fourth International’, had one big task. It was this:
They were–in cooperation with the local Trotskyists–to prepare a situation of dis-
order and bloodshed, in which it would be possible for the Germans and Italians to
declare that they were ’unable to exercise naval control of the Catalan coasts effec-
tively because of the disorder prevailing in Barcelona’ and were, therefore, ’unable
to do otherwise than land forces in Barcelona’.
In other words, what was being prepared was a situation in which the German
and Italian Governments could land troops or marines quite openly on the Catalan
coasts, declaring that they were doing so ’in order to preserve order’…
The instrument for all this lay ready to hand for the Germans and Italians in the
shape of the Trotskyist organization known as the P.O.U.M.
The P.O.U.M., acting in cooperation with well-known criminal elements, and with
certain other deluded persons in the Anarchist organizations planned, organized,
and led the attack in the rearguard, accurately timed to coincide with the attack on
the front at Bilbao, etc., etc.
Later in the article the Barcelona fighting becomes ’the P.O.U.M. attack’, and in
another article in the same issue it is stated that there is ’no doubt that it is at the
door of the P.O.U.M. that the responsibility for the bloodshed in Catalonia must be
laid’. Inprecor (29 May) states that those who erected the barricades in Barcelona
were ’only members of the P.O.U.M. organized from that party for this purpose’.
I could quote a great deal more, but this is clear enough. The P.O.U.M. was wholly
responsible and the P.O.U.M. was acting under Fascist orders. In a moment I will
give some more extracts from the accounts that appeared in the Communist press;
it will be seen that they are so self-contradictory as to be completely worthless. But
before doing so it is worth pointing to several a priori reasons why this version of the
May fighting as a Fascist rising engineered by the P.O.U.M. is next door to incredible.
(i) The P.O.U.M. had not the numbers or influence to provoke disorders of this
magnitude. Still less had it the power to call a general strike. It was a political
organization with no very definite footing in the trade unions, and it would have
been hardly more capable of producing a strike throughout Barcelona than (say)
the English Communist Party would be of producing a general strike throughout
Glasgow. As I said earlier, the attitude of the P.O.U.M. leaders may have helped to
prolong the fighting to some extent; but they could not have originated it even if
they had wanted to.
(ii) The alleged Fascist plot rests on bare assertion and all the evidence points in
the other direction. We are told that the plan was for the German and Italian Govern-
ments to land troops in Catalonia; but no German or Italian troopships approached
the coast. As to the ’Congress of the Fourth International’ and the ’German and Ital-
ian agents’, they are pure myth. So far as I know there had not even been any talk
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of a Congress of the Fourth International. There were vague plans for a Congress
of the P.O.U.M. and its brother-parties (English I.L.P., German S.A.P., etc., etc.); this
had been tentatively fixed for some time in July–two months later–and not a single
delegate had yet arrived. The ’German and Italian agents’ have no existence outside
the pages of the Daily Worker. Anyone who crossed the frontier at that time knows
that it was not so easy to ’pour’ into Spain, or out of it, for that matter.
(iii) Nothing happened either at Lérida, the chief stronghold of the P.O.U.M., or at
the front. It is obvious that if the P.O.U.M. leaders had wanted to aid the Fascists they
would have ordered their militia to walk out of the line and let the Fascists through.
But nothing of the kind was done or suggested. Nor were any extra men brought out
of the line beforehand, though it would have been easy enough to smuggle, say, a
thousand or two thousand men back to Barcelona on various pretexts. And there was
no attempt even at indirect sabotage of the front. The transport of food, munitions,
and so forth continued as usual; I verified this by inquiry afterwards. Above all,
a planned rising of the kind suggested would have needed months of preparation,
subversive propaganda among the militia, and so forth. But there was no sign or
rumour of any such thing. The fact that the militia at the front played no part in the
’rising’ should be conclusive. If the P.O.U.M. were really planning a coup d’état it is
inconceivable that they would not have used the ten thousand or so armed men who
were the only striking force they had.
It will be clear enough from this that the Communist thesis of a P.O.U.M. ’ris-
ing’ under Fascist orders rests on less than no evidence. I will add a few more
extracts from the Communist press. The Communist accounts of the opening in-
cident, the raid on the Telephone Exchange, are illuminating; they agree in nothing
except in putting the blame on the other side. It is noticeable that in the English
Communist papers the blame is put first upon the Anarchists and only later upon
the P.O.U.M. There is a fairly obvious reason for this. Not everyone in England has
heard of ’Trotskyism’, whereas every English-speaking person shudders at the name
of ’Anarchist’. Let it once be known that ’Anarchists’ are implicated, and the right
atmosphere of prejudice is established; after that the blame can safely be transferred
to the ’Trotskyists’. The Daily Worker begins thus (6 May):
A minority gang of Anarchists on Monday and Tuesday seized and attempted to
hold the telephone and telegram buildings, and started firing into the street.
There is nothing like starting off with a reversal of roles. The Civil Guards attack
a building held by the C.N.T.; so the C.N.T. are represented as attacking their own
building–attacking themselves, in fact. On the other hand, the Daily Worker of 11
May states:
The Left Catalan Minister of Public Security, Aiguade, and the United Socialist
General Commissar of Public Order, Rodrigue Salas, sent the armed republican po-
lice into the Telefonica building to disarm the employees there, most of them mem-
bers of C.N.T. unions.
This does not seem to agree very well with the first statement; nevertheless the
Daily Worker contains no admission that the first statement was wrong. The Daily
Worker of 11 May states that the leaflets of the Friends of Durruti, which were dis-
owned by the C.N.T., appeared on 4 May and 5 May, during the fighting. Inprecor (22
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May) states that they appeared on 3 May, before the fighting, and adds that ’in view
of these facts’ (the appearance of various leaflets):
The police, led by the Prefect of Police in person, occupied the central telephone
exchange in the afternoon of 3 May. The police were shot at while discharging their
duty. This was the signal for the provocateurs to begin shooting affrays all over the
city.
And here is Inprecor for 29 May:
At three o’clock in the afternoon the Commissar for Public Security, Comrade
Salas, went to the Telephone Exchange, which on the previous night had been oc-
cupied by 50 members of the P.O.U.M. and various uncontrollable elements.
This seems rather curious. The occupation of the Telephone Exchange by 50
P.O.U.M. members is what one might call a picturesque circumstance, and one
would have expected somebody to notice it at the time. Yet it appears that it was
discovered only three or four weeks later. In another issue of Inprecor the 50 P.O.U.M.
members become 50 P.O.U.M. militiamen. It would be difficult to pack together more
contradictions than are contained in these few short passages. At one moment the
C.N.T. are attacking the Telephone Exchange, the next they are being attacked there;
a leaflet appears before the seizure of the Telephone Exchange and is the cause of
it, or, alternatively, appears afterwards and is the result of it; the people in the Tele-
phone Exchange are alternatively C.N.T. members and P.O.U.M. members–and so
on. And in a still later issue of the Daily Worker (3 June) Mr J. R. Campbell informs
us that the Government only seized the Telephone Exchange because the barricades
were already erected!
For reasons of space I have taken only the reports of one incident, but the same
discrepancies run all through the accounts in the Communist press. In addition there
are various statements which are obviously pure fabrication. Here for instance is
something quoted by the Daily Worker (7 May) and said to have been issued by the
Spanish Embassy in Paris:
A significant feature of the uprising has been that the old monarchist flag was
flown from the balcony of various houses in Barcelona, doubtless in the belief that
those who took part in the rising had become masters of the situation.
The Daily Worker very probably reprinted this statement in good faith, but those re-
sponsible for it at the Spanish Embassy must have been quite deliberately lying. Any
Spaniard would understand the internal situation better than that. A monarchist flag
in Barcelona! It was the one thing that could have united the warring factions in a
moment. Even the Communists on the spot were obliged to smile when they read
about it. It is the same with the reports in the various Communist papers upon the
arms supposed to have been used by the P.O.U.M. during the ’rising’. They would
be credible only if one knew nothing whatever of the facts. In the Daily Worker of 17
May Mr Frank Pitcairn states:
There were actually all sorts of arms used by them in the outrage. There were the
arms which they have been stealing for months past, and hidden, and there were
arms such as tanks, which they stole from the barracks just at the beginning of the
rising. It is clear that scores of machine-guns and several thousand rifles are still in
their possession.
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Inprecor (29 May) also states:
On 3 May the P.O.U.M. had at its disposal some dozens of machine-guns and
several thousand rifles…On the Plaza de España the Trotskyists brought into action
batteries of ’75’ guns which were destined for the front in Aragón and which the
militia had carefully concealed on their premises.
Mr Pitcairn does not tell us how and when it became clear that the P.O.U.M. pos-
sessed scores of machine-guns and several thousand rifles. I have given an estimate
of the arms which were at three of the principal P.O.U.M. buildings–about eighty
rifles, a few bombs, and no machine-guns; i.e. about sufficient for the armed guards
which, at that time, all the political parties placed on their buildings. It seems strange
that afterwards, when the P.O.U.M. was suppressed and all its buildings seized,
these thousands of weapons never came to light; especially the tanks and field-guns,
which are not the kind of thing that can be hidden up the chimney. But what is re-
vealing in the two statements above is the complete ignorance they display of the
local circumstances. According to Mr Pitcairn the P.O.U.M. stole tanks ’from the bar-
racks’. He does not tell us which barracks. The P.O.U.M. militiamen who were in
Barcelona (now comparatively few, as direct recruitment to the party militias had
ceased) shared the Lenin Barracks with a considerably larger number of Popular
Army troops. Mr Pitcairn is asking us to believe, therefore, that the P.O.U.M. stole
tanks with the connivance of the Popular Army. It is the same with the ’premises’
on which the 75-mm. guns were concealed. There is no mention of where these
’premises’ were. Those batteries of guns, firing on the Plaza de España, appeared
in many newspaper reports, but I think we can say with certainty that they never
existed. As I mentioned earlier, I heard no artillery-fire during the fighting, though
the Plaza de España was only a mile or so away. A few days later I examined the
Plaza de España and could find no buildings that showed marks of shell-fire. And
an eye-witness who was in that neighbourhood throughout the fighting declares
that no guns ever appeared there. (Incidentally, the tale of the stolen guns may have
originated with Antonov-Ovseenko, the Russian Consul-General. He, at any rate,
communicated it to a well-known English journalist, who afterwards repeated it in
good faith in a weekly paper. Antonov-Ovseenko has since been ’purged’. How this
would affect his credibility I do not know.) The truth is, of course, that these tales
about tanks, field-guns, and so forth have only been invented because otherwise it
is difficult to reconcile the scale of the Barcelona fighting with the P.O.U.M.’s small
numbers. It was necessary to claim that the P.O.U.M. was wholly responsible for
the fighting; it was also necessary to claim that it was an insignificant party with no
following and ’numbered only a few thousand members’, according to Inprecor. The
only hope of making both statements credible was to pretend that the P.O.U.M. had
all the weapons of a modern mechanized army.
It is impossible to read through the reports in the Communist Press without real-
izing that they are consciously aimed at a public ignorant of the facts and have no
other purpose than to work up prejudice. Hence, for instance, such statements as
Mr Pitcairn’s in the Daily Worker of 11 May that the ’rising’ was suppressed by the
Popular Army. The idea here is to give outsiders the impression that all Catalonia
was solid against the ’Trotskyists’. But the Popular Army remained neutral through-
out the fighting; everyone in Barcelona knew this, and it is difficult to believe that
Mr Pitcairn did not know it too. Or again, the juggling in the Communist Press with
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the figures for killed and wounded, with the object of exaggerating the scale of the
disorders. Diaz, General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party, widely quoted
in the Communist Press, gave the numbers as 900 dead and 2500 wounded. The
Catalan Minister of Propaganda, who was hardly likely to underestimate, gave the
numbers as 400 killed and 1000 wounded. The Communist Party doubles the bid
and adds a few more hundreds for luck.
The foreign capitalist newspapers, in general, laid the blame for the fighting upon
the Anarchists, but there were a few that followed the Communist line. One of these
was the English News Chronicle, whose correspondent, Mr John Langdon-Davies,
was in Barcelona at the time. I quote portions of his article here:
A TROTSKYIST REVOLT
…This has not been an Anarchist uprising. It is a frustrated putsch of the ’Trotsky-
ist’ P.O.U.M., working through their controlled organizations, ’Friends of Durruti’
and Libertarian Youth…The tragedy began on Monday afternoon when the Govern-
ment sent armed police into the Telephone Building, to disarm the workers there,
mostly C.N.T. men. Grave irregularities in the service had been a scandal for some
time. A large crowd gathered in the Plaza de Cataluña outside, while the C.N.T.
men resisted, retreating floor by floor to the top of the building…The incident was
very obscure, but word went round that the Government was out against the An-
archists. The streets filled with armed men…By nightfall every workers’centre and
Government building was barricaded, and at ten o’clock the first volleys were fired
and the first ambulances began ringing their way through the streets. By dawn all
Barcelona was under fire…As the day wore on and the dead mounted to over a hun-
dred, one could make a guess at what was happening. The Anarchist C.N.T. and
Socialist U.G.T. were not technically ’out in the street’. So long as they remained
behind the barricades they were merely watchfully waiting, an attitude which in-
cluded the right to shoot at anything armed in the open street…(the) general bursts
were invariably aggravated by pacos–hidden solitary men, usually Fascists, shooting
from roof-tops at nothing in particular, but doing all they could to add to the gen-
eral panic…By Wednesday evening, however, it began to be clear who was behind
the revolt. All the walls had been plastered with an inflammatory poster calling
for an immediate revolution and for the shooting of Republican and Socialist lead-
ers. It was signed by the ’Friends of Durruti’. On Thursday morning the Anarchists
daily denied all knowledge or sympathy with it, but La Batalla, the P.O.U.M. paper,
reprinted the document with the highest praise. Barcelona, the first city of Spain, was
plunged into bloodshed by agents provocateurs using this subversive organization.
This does not agree very completely with the Communist versions I have quoted
above, but it will be seen that even as it stands it is self-contradictory. First the af-
fair is described as ’a Trotskyist revolt’, then it is shown to have resulted from a
raid on the Telephone building and the general belief that the Government was ’out
against’ the Anarchists. The city is barricaded and both C.N.T. and U.G.T. are be-
hind the barricades; two days afterwards the inflammatory poster (actually a leaflet)
appears, and this is declared by implication to have started the whole business–
effect preceding cause. But there is a piece of very serious misrepresentation here.
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Mr Langdon-Davies describes the Friends of Durruti and Libertarian Youth as ’con-
trolled organizations’ of the P.O.U.M. Both were Anarchist organizations and had
no connexion with the P.O.U.M. The Libertarian Youth was the youth league of the
Anarchists, corresponding to the J.S.U. of the P.S.U.C., etc. The Friends of Durruti
was a small organization within the F.A.I., and was in general bitterly hostile to the
P.O.U.M. So far as I can discover, there was no one who was a member of both. It
would be about equally true to say that the Socialist League is a ’controlled organi-
zation’ of the English Liberal Party. Was Mr Langdon-Davies unaware of this? If he
was, he should have written with more caution about this very complex subject.
I am not attacking Mr Langdon-Davies’s good faith; but admittedly he left
Barcelona as soon as the fighting was over, i.e. at the moment when he could have
begun serious inquiries, and throughout his report there are clear signs that he has
accepted the official version of a ’Trotskyist revolt’ without sufficient verification.
This is obvious even in the extract I have quoted. ’By nightfall’ the barricades are
built, and ’at ten o’clock’ the first volleys are fired. These are not the words of an
eye-witness. From this you would gather that it is usual to wait for your enemy
to build a barricade before beginning to shoot at him. The impression given is that
some hours elapsed between the building of the barricades and the firing of the first
volleys; whereas–naturally–it was the other way about. I and many others saw the
first volleys fired early in the afternoon. Again, there are the solitary men, ’usually
Fascists’, who are shooting from the roof-tops. Mr Langdon-Davies does not explain
how he knew that these men were Fascists. Presumably he did not climb on to the
roofs and ask them. He is simply repeating what he has been told and, as it fits in
with the official version, is not questioning it. As a matter of fact, he indicates one
probable source of much of his information by an incautious reference to the Minis-
ter of Propaganda at the beginning of his article. Foreign journalists in Spain were
hopelessly at the mercy of the Ministry of Propaganda, though one would think that
the very name of this ministry would be a sufficient warning. The Minister of Pro-
paganda was, of course, about as likely to give an objective account of the Barcelona
trouble as (say) the late Lord Carson would have been to give an objective account
of the Dublin rising of 1916.
I have given reasons for thinking that the Communist version of the Barcelona
fighting cannot be taken seriously. In addition I must say something about the gen-
eral charge that the P.O.U.M. was a secret Fascist organization in the pay of Franco
and Hitler.
This charge was repeated over and over in the Communist Press, especially from
the beginning of 1937 onwards. It was part of the world-wide drive of the official
Communist Party against ’Trotskyism’, of which the P.O.U.M. was supposed to be
representative in Spain.’Trotskyism’, according to Frente Rojo (the Valencia Commu-
nist paper) ’is not a political doctrine. Trotskyism is an official capitalist organiza-
tion, a Fascist terrorist band occupied in crime and sabotage against the people.’
The P.O.U.M. was a ’Trotskyist’ organization in league with the Fascists and part of
’Franco’s Fifth Column’. What was noticeable from the start was that no evidence
was produced in support of this accusation; the thing was simply asserted with an
air of authority. And the attack was made with the maximum of personal libel and
with complete irresponsibility as to any effects it might have upon the war. Com-
pared with the job of libelling the P.O.U.M., many Communist writers appear to
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have considered the betrayal of military secrets unimportant. In a February num-
ber of the Daily Worker, for instance, a writer (Winifred Bates) is allowed to state
that the P.O.U.M. had only half as many troops on its section of the front as it pre-
tended. This was not true, but presumably the writer believed it to be true. She and
the Daily Worker were perfectly willing, therefore, to hand to the enemy one of the
most important pieces of information that can be handed through the columns of
a newspaper. In the New Republic Mr Ralph Bates stated that the P.O.U.M. troops
were ’playing football with the Fascists in no man’s land’ at a time when, as a mat-
ter of fact, the P.O.U.M. troops were suffering heavy casualties and a number of my
personal friends were killed and wounded. Again, there was the malignant cartoon
which was widely circulated, first in Madrid and later in Barcelona, representing the
P.O.U.M. as slipping off a mask marked with the hammer and sickle and revealing a
face marked with the swastika. Had the Government not been virtually under Com-
munist control it would never have permitted a thing of this kind to be circulated in
wartime. It was a deliberate blow at the morale not only of the P.O.U.M. militia, but
of any others who happened to be near them; for it is not encouraging to be told that
the troops next to you in the line are traitors. As a matter of fact, I doubt whether
the abuse that was heaped upon them from the rear actually had the effect of de-
moralizing the P.O.U.M. militia. But certainly it was calculated to do so, and those
responsible for it must be held to have put political spite before anti-Fascist unity.
The accusation against the P.O.U.M. amounted to this: that a body of some scores
of thousands of people, almost entirely working class, besides numerous foreign
helpers and sympathizers, mostly refugees from Fascist countries, and thousands
of militia, was simply a vast spying organization in Fascist pay. The thing was op-
posed to common sense, and the past history of the P.O.U.M. was enough to make it
incredible. All the P.O.U.M. leaders had revolutionary histories behind them. Some
of them had been mixed up in the 1934 revolt, and most of them had been impris-
oned for Socialist activities under the Lerroux Government or the monarchy. In 1936
its then leader, Joaquin Maurin, was one of the deputies who gave warning in the
Cortes of Franco’s impending revolt. Some time after the outbreak of war he was
taken prisoner by the Fascists while trying to organize resistance in Franco’s rear.
When the revolt broke out the P.O.U.M. played a conspicuous part in resisting it,
and in Madrid, in particular, many of its members were killed in the street-fighting.
It was one of the first bodies to form columns of militia in Catalonia and Madrid. It
seems almost impossible to explain these as the actions of a party in Fascist pay. A
party in Fascist pay would simply have joined in on the other side.
Nor was there any sign of pro-Fascist activities during the war. It was arguable–
though finally I do not agree–that by pressing for a more revolutionary policy
the P.O.U.M. divided the Government forces and thus aided the Fascists. I think
any Government of reformist type would be justified in regarding a party like the
P.O.U.M. as a nuisance. But this is a very different matter from direct treachery.
There is no way of explaining why, if the P.O.U.M. was really a Fascist body, its mili-
tia remained loyal. Here were eight or ten thousand men holding important parts
of the line during the intolerable conditions of the winter of 1936-7. Many of them
were in the trenches four or five months at a stretch. It is difficult to see why they
did not simply walk out of the line or go over to the enemy. It was always in their
power to do so, and at times the effect might have been decisive. Yet they continued
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to fight, and it was shortly after the P.O.U.M. was suppressed as a political party,
when the event was fresh in everyone’s mind, that the militia–not yet redistributed
among the Popular Army–took part in the murderous attack to the east of Huesca
when several thousand men were killed in one or two days. At the very least one
would have expected fraternization with the enemy and a constant trickle of desert-
ers. But, as I have pointed out earlier, the number of desertions was exceptionally
small. Again, one would have expected pro-Fascist propaganda, ’defeatism’, and so
forth. Yet there was no sign of any such thing. Obviously there must have been Fas-
cist spies and agents provocateurs in the P.O.U.M.; they exist in all Left-wing parties;
but there is no evidence that there were more of them there than elsewhere.
It is true that some of the attacks in the Communist Press said, rather grudgingly,
that only the P.O.U.M. leaders were in Fascist pay, and not the rank and file. But this
was merely an attempt to detach the rank and file from their leaders. The nature of
the accusation implied that ordinary members, militiamen, and so forth, were all in
the plot together; for it was obvious that if Nin, Gorkin, and the others were really
in Fascist pay, it was more likely to be known to their followers, who were in contact
with them, than to journalists in London, Paris, and New York. And in any case,
when the P.O.U.M. was suppressed the Communist-controlled secret police acted on
the assumption that all were guilty alike, and arrested everyone connected with the
P.O.U.M. whom they could lay hands on, including even wounded men, hospital
nurses, wives of P.O.U.M. members, and in some cases, even children.
Finally, on 15-16 June, the P.O.U.M. was suppressed and declared an illegal or-
ganization. This was one of the first acts of the Negrin Government which came
into office in May. When the Executive Committee of the P.O.U.M. had been thrown
into jail, the Communist Press produced what purported to be the discovery of an
enormous Fascist plot. For a while the Communist Press of the whole world was
flaming with this kind of thing (Daily Worker, 21 June, summarizing various Spanish
Communist papers):
SPANISH TROTSKYISTS PLOT WITH FRANCO
Following the arrest of a large number of leading Trotskyists in Barcelona and else-
where…there became known, over the weekend, details of one of the most ghastly
pieces of espionage ever known in wartime, and the ugliest revelation of Trotskyist
treachery to date…Documents in the possession of the police, together with the full
confession of no less than 200 persons under arrest, prove, etc. etc.
What these revelations ’proved’ was that the P.O.U.M. leaders were transmitting
military secrets to General Franco by radio, were in touch with Berlin, and were
acting in collaboration with the secret Fascist organization in Madrid. In addition
there were sensational details about secret messages in invisible ink, a mysterious
document signed with the letter N. (standing for Nin), and so on and so forth.
But the final upshot was this: six months after the event, as I write, most of the
P.O.U.M. leaders are still in jail, but they have never been brought to trial, and the
charges of communicating with Franco by radio, etc., have never even been formu-
lated. Had they really been guilty of espionage they would have been tried and shot
in a week, as so many Fascist spies had been previously. But not a scrap of evidence
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was ever produced except the unsupported statements in the Communist Press. As
for the two hundred ’full confessions’, which, if they had existed, would have been
enough to convict anybody, they have never been heard of again. They were, in fact,
two hundred efforts of somebody’s imagination.
More than this, most of the members of the Spanish Government have disclaimed
all belief in the charges against the P.O.U.M. Recently the cabinet decided by five to
two in favour of releasing anti-Fascist political prisoners; the two dissentients being
the Communist ministers. In August an international delegation headed by James
Maxton M.P., went to Spain to inquire into the charges against the P.O.U.M. and
the disappearance of Andres Nin. Prieto, the Minister of National Defence, Irujo,
the Minister of Justice, Zugazagoitia, Minister of the Interior, Ortega y Gasset, the
Procureur-General, Prat Garcia, and others all repudiated any belief in the P.O.U.M.
leaders being guilty of espionage. Irujo added that he had been through the dossier
of the case, that none of the so-called pieces of evidence would bear examination,
and that the document supposed to have been signed by Nin was ’valueless’–i.e. a
forgery. Prieto considered the P.O.U.M. leaders to be responsible for the May fight-
ing in Barcelona, but dismissed the idea of their being Fascist spies. ’What is most
grave,’ he added, ’is that the arrest of the P.O.U.M. leaders was not decided upon
by the Government, and the police carried out these arrests on their own author-
ity. Those responsible are not the heads of the police, but their entourage, which
has been infiltrated by the Communists according to their usual custom.’ He cited
other cases of illegal arrests by the police. Irujo likewise declared that the police had
become ’quasi-independent’ and were in reality under the control of foreign Com-
munist elements. Prieto hinted fairly broadly to the delegation that the Government
could not afford to offend the Communist Party while the Russians were supplying
arms. When another delegation, headed by John McGovern M.P., went to Spain in
December, they got much the same answers as before, and Zugazagoitia, the Min-
ister of the Interior, repeated Prieto’s hint in even plainer terms. ’We have received
aid from Russia and have had to permit certain actions which we did not like.’ As
an illustration of the autonomy of the police, it is interesting to learn that even with
a signed order from the Director of Prisons and the Minister of Justice, McGovern
and the others could not obtain admission to one of the ’secret prisons’ maintained
by the Communist Party in Barcelona.15
I think this should be enough to make the matter clear. The accusation of espi-
onage against the P.O.U.M. rested solely upon articles in the Communist press and
the activities of the Communist-controlled secret police. The P.O.U.M. leaders, and
hundreds or thousands of their followers, are still in prison, and for six months past
the Communist press has continued to clamour for the execution of the ’traitors.’
But Negrin and the others have kept their heads and refused to stage a wholesale
massacre of ’Trotskyists’. Considering the pressure that has been put upon them, it
is greatly to their credit that they have done so. Meanwhile, in face of what I have
quoted above, it becomes very difficult to believe that the P.O.U.M. was really a Fas-
cist spying organization, unless one also believes that Maxton, McGovern, Prieto,
15For reports on the two delegations see Le Populaire (7 September), La Flèche (18 September),
report on the Maxton Delegation published by Independent News (219 Rue Saint-Denis, Paris), and
McGovern’s pamphlet Terror in Spain.
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Irujo, Zugazagoitia, and the rest are all in Fascist pay together.
Finally, as to the charge that the P.O.U.M. was ’Trotskyist’. This word is now flung
about with greater and greater freedom, and it is used in a way that is extremely
misleading and is often intended to mislead. It is worth stopping to define it. The
word Trotskyist is used to mean three distinct things:
(i) One who, like Trotsky, advocates ’world revolution’ as against ’Socialism in a
single country’. More loosely, a revolutionary extremist.
(ii) A member of the actual organization of which Trotsky is head.
(iii) A disguised Fascist posing as a revolutionary who acts especially by sabotage
in the U.S.S.R., but, in general, by splitting and undermining the Left-wing forces.
In sense (i) the P.O.U.M. could probably be described as Trotskyist. So can the
English I.L.P., the German S.A.P., the Left Socialists in France, and so on. But the
P.O.U.M. had no connexion with Trotsky or the Trotskyist (’Bolshevik-Leninist’) or-
ganization. When the war broke out the foreign Trotskyists who came to Spain (fif-
teen or twenty in number) worked at first for the P.O.U.M., as the party nearest to
their own viewpoint, but without becoming party-members; later Trotsky ordered
his followers to attack the P.O.U.M. policy, and the Trotskyists were purged from
the party offices, though a few remained in the militia. Nin, the P.O.U.M. leader
after Maurin’s capture by the Fascists, was at one time Trotsky’s secretary, but had
left him some years earlier and formed the P.O.U.M. by the amalgamation of vari-
ous Opposition Communists with an earlier party, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc.
Nin’s one-time association with Trotsky has been used in the Communist press to
show that the P.O.U.M. was really Trotskyist. By the same line of argument it could
be shown that the English Communist Party is really a Fascist organization, because
of Mr John Strachey’s one-time association with Sir Oswald Mosley.
In sense (ii), the only exactly defined sense of the word, the P.O.U.M. was cer-
tainly not Trotskyist. It is important to make this distinction, because it is taken for
granted by the majority of Communists that a Trotskyist in sense (ii) is invariably a
Trotskyist in sense (iii)–i.e. that the whole Trotskyist organization is simply a Fascist
spying-machine. ’Trotskyism’ only came into public notice in the time of the Rus-
sian sabotage trials, and to call a man a Trotskyist is practically equivalent to calling
him a murderer, agent provocateur, etc. But at the same time anyone who criticizes
Communist policy from a Left-wing standpoint is liable to be denounced as a Trot-
skyist. Is it then asserted that everyone professing revolutionary extremism is in
Fascist pay?
In practice it is or is not, according to local convenience. When Maxton went to
Spain with the delegation I have mentioned above, Verdad, Frente Rojo, and other
Spanish Communist papers instantly denounced him as a ’Trotsky-Fascist’, spy of
the Gestapo, and so forth. Yet the English Communists were careful not to repeat
this accusation. In the English Communist press Maxton becomes merely a ’reac-
tionary enemy of the working class’, which is conveniently vague. The reason, of
course, is simply that several sharp lessons have given the English Communist press
a wholesome dread of the law of libel. The fact that the accusation was not repeated
in a country where it might have to be proved is sufficient confession that it is a lie.
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It may seem that I have discussed the accusations against the P.O.U.M. at greater
length than was necessary. Compared with the huge miseries of a civil war, this
kind of internecine squabble between parties, with its inevitable injustices and false
accusations, may appear trivial. It is not really so. I believe that libels and press-
campaigns of this kind, and the habits of mind they indicate, are capable of doing
the most deadly damage to the anti-Fascist cause.
Anyone who has given the subject a glance knows that the Communist tactic of
dealing with political opponents by means of trumped-up accusations is nothing
new. Today the key-word is ’Trotsky-Fascist’; yesterday it was ’Social-Fascist’. It
is only six or seven years since the Russian State trials ’proved’ that the leaders of
the Second International, including, for instance, Leon Blum and prominent mem-
bers of the British Labour Party, were hatching a huge plot for the military invasion
of the U.S.S.R. Yet today the French Communists are glad enough to accept Blum
as a leader, and the English Communists are raising heaven and earth to get inside
the Labour Party. I doubt whether this kind of thing pays, even from a sectarian
point of view. And meanwhile there is no possible doubt about the hatred and dis-
sension that the ’Trotsky-Fascist’ accusation is causing. Rank-and-file Communists
everywhere are led away on a senseless witch-hunt after ’Trotskyists’, and parties
of the type of the P.O.U.M. are driven back into the terribly sterile position of being
mere anti-Communist parties. There is already the beginning of a dangerous split
in the world working-class movement. A few more libels against life-long Socialists,
a few more frame-ups like the charges against the P.O.U.M., and the split may be-
come irreconcilable. The only hope is to keep political controversy on a plane where
exhaustive discussion is possible. Between the Communists and those who stand
or claim to stand to the Left of them there is a real difference. The Communists
hold that Fascism can be beaten by alliance with sections of the capitalist class (the
Popular Front); their opponents hold that this manoeuvre simply gives Fascism new
breeding-grounds. The question has got to be settled; to make the wrong decision
may be to land ourselves in for centuries of semi-slavery. But so long as no argument
is produced except a scream of ’Trotsky-Fascist!’ the discussion cannot even begin.
It would be impossible for me, for instance, to debate the rights and wrongs of the
Barcelona fighting with a Communist Party member, because no Communist–that is
to say, no ’good’ Communist–could admit that I have given a truthful account of the
facts. If he followed his party line dutifully he would have to declare that I am ly-
ing or, at best, that I am hopelessly misled and that anyone who glanced at the Daily
Worker headlines a thousand miles from the scene of events knows more of what was
happening in Barcelona than I do. In such circumstances there can be no argument;
the necessary minimum of agreement cannot be reached. What purpose is served by
saying that men like Maxton are in Fascist pay? Only the purpose of making serious
discussion impossible. It is as though in the middle of a chess tournament one com-
petitor should suddenly begin screaming that the other is guilty of arson or bigamy.
The point that is really at issue remains untouched. Libel settles nothing.
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It must have been three days after the Barcelona fighting ended that we returned
to the front. After the fighting–more particularly after the slanging-match in the
newspapers–it was difficult to think about this war in quite the same naively idealis-
tic manner as before. I suppose there is no one who spent more than a few weeks in
Spain without being in some degree disillusioned. My mind went back to the news-
paper correspondent whom I had met my first day in Barcelona, and who said to me:
’This war is a racket the same as any other.’ The remark had shocked me deeply, and
at that time (December) I do not believe it was true; it was not true even now, in May;
but it was becoming truer. The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive
degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual
liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.
One could begin now to make some kind of guess at what was likely to happen.
It was easy to see that the Caballero Government would fall and be replaced by a
more Right-wing Government with a stronger Communist influence (this happened
a week or two later), which would set itself to break the power of the trade unions
once and for all. And afterwards, when Franco was beaten–and putting aside the
huge problems raised by the reorganization of Spain–the prospect was not rosy. As
for the newspaper talk about this being a ’war for democracy’, it was plain eyewash.
No one in his senses supposed that there was any hope of democracy, even as we
understand it in England or France, in a country so divided and exhausted as Spain
would be when the war was over. It would have to be a dictatorship, and it was
clear that the chance of a working-class dictatorship had passed. That meant that
the general movement would be in the direction of some kind of Fascism. Fascism
called, no doubt, by some politer name, and–because this was Spain–more human
and less efficient than the German or Italian varieties. The only alternatives were an
infinitely worse dictatorship by Franco, or (always a possibility) that the war would
end with Spain divided up, either by actual frontiers or into economic zones.
Whichever way you took it it was a depressing outlook. But it did not follow
that the Government was not worth fighting for as against the more naked and de-
veloped Fascism of Franco and Hitler. Whatever faults the post-war Government
might have, Franco’s regime would certainly be worse. To the workers–the town
proletariat–it might in the end make very little difference who won, but Spain is pri-
marily an agricultural country and the peasants would almost certainly benefit by a
Government victory. Some at least of the seized lands would remain in their posses-
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sion, in which case there would also be a distribution of land in the territory that had
been Franco’s, and the virtual serfdom that had existed in some parts of Spain was
not likely to be restored. The Government in control at the end of the war would at
any rate be anti-clerical and anti-feudal. It would keep the Church in check, at least
for the time being, and would modernize the country–build roads, for instance, and
promote education and public health; a certain amount had been done in this direc-
tion even during the war. Franco, on the other hand, in so far as he was not merely
the puppet of Italy and Germany, was tied to the big feudal landlords and stood for
a stuffy clerico-military reaction. The Popular Front might be a swindle, but Franco
was an anachronism. Only millionaires or romantics could want him to win.
Moreover, there was the question of the international prestige of Fascism, which
for a year or two past had been haunting me like a nightmare. Since 1930 the Fascists
had won all the victories; it was time they got a beating, it hardly mattered from
whom. If we could drive Franco and his foreign mercenaries into the sea it might
make an immense improvement in the world situation, even if Spain itself emerged
with a stifling dictatorship and all its best men in jail. For that alone the war would
have been worth winning.
This was how I saw things at the time. I may say that I now think much more
highly of the Negrin Government than I did when it came into office. It has kept
up the difficult fight with splendid courage, and it has shown more political tol-
erance than anyone expected. But I still believe that–unless Spain splits up, with
unpredictable consequences–the tendency of the post-war Government is bound to
be Fascistic. Once again I let this opinion stand, and take the chance that time will
do to me what it does to most prophets.
We had just reached the front when we heard that Bob Smillie, on his way back
to England, had been arrested at the frontier, taken down to Valencia, and thrown
into jail. Smillie had been in Spain since the previous October. He had worked for
several months at the P.O.U.M. office and had then joined the militia when the other
I.L.P. members arrived, on the understanding that he was to do three months at the
front before going back to England to take part in a propaganda tour. It was some
time before we could discover what he had been arrested for. He was being kept
incommunicado, so that not even a lawyer could see him. In Spain there is–at any
rate in practice–no habeas corpus, and you can be kept in jail for months at a stretch
without even being charged, let alone tried. Finally we learned from a released pris-
oner that Smillie had been arrested for ’carrying arms’. The ’arms’, as I happened
to know, were two hand-grenades of the primitive type used at the beginning of the
war, which he had been taking home to show off at his lectures, along with shell
splinters and other souvenirs. The charges and fuses had been removed from them–
they were mere cylinders of steel and completely harmless. It was obvious that this
was only a pretext and that he had been arrested because of his known connexion
with the P.O.U.M. The Barcelona fighting had only just ended and the authorities
were, at that moment, extremely anxious not to let anyone out of Spain who was in
a position to contradict the official version. As a result people were liable to be ar-
rested at the frontier on more or less frivolous pretexts. Very possibly the intention,
at the beginning, was only to detain Smillie for a few days. But the trouble is that, in
Spain, once you are in jail you generally stay there, with or without trial.
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We were still at Huesca, but they had placed us further to the right, opposite the
Fascist redoubt which we had temporarily captured a few weeks earlier. I was now
acting as teniente–corresponding to second-lieutenant in the British Army, I suppose–
in command of about thirty men, English and Spanish. They had sent my name in
for a regular commission; whether I should get it was uncertain. Previously the mili-
tia officers had refused to accept regular commissions, which meant extra pay and
conflicted with the equalitarian ideas of the militia, but they were now obliged to do
so. Benjamin had already been gazetted captain and Kopp was in process of being
gazetted major. The Government could not, of course, dispense with the militia offi-
cers, but it was not confirming any of them in a higher rank than major, presumably
in order to keep the higher commands for Regular Army officers and the new offi-
cers from the School of War. As a result, in our division, the 29th, and no doubt in
many others, you had the queer temporary situation of the divisional commander,
the brigade commanders, and the battalion commanders all being majors.
There was not much happening at the front. The battle round the Jaca road had
died away and did not begin again till mid June. In our position the chief trouble was
the snipers. The Fascist trenches were more than a hundred and fifty yards away, but
they were on higher ground and were on two sides of us, our line forming a right-
angle salient. The corner of the salient was a dangerous spot; there had always been
a toll of sniper casualties there. From time to time the Fascists let fly at us with a rifle-
grenade or some similar weapon. It made a ghastly crash–unnerving, because you
could not hear it coming in time to dodge–but was not really dangerous; the hole
it blew in the ground was no bigger than a wash-tub. The nights were pleasantly
warm, the days blazing hot, the mosquitoes were becoming a nuisance, and in spite
of the clean clothes we had brought from Barcelona we were almost immediately
lousy. Out in the deserted orchards in no man’s land the cherries were whitening
on the trees. For two days there were torrential rains, the dug-outs flooded, and the
parapet sank a foot; after that there were more days of digging out the sticky clay
with the wretched Spanish spades which have no handles and bend like tin spoons.
They had promised us a trench-mortar for the company; I was looking forward to
it greatly. At nights we patrolled as usual–more dangerous than it used to be, because
the Fascist trenches were better manned and they had grown more alert; they had
scattered tin cans just outside their wire and used to open up with the machine-guns
when they heard a clank. In the daytime we sniped from no man’s land. By crawling
a hundred yards you could get to a ditch, hidden by tall grasses, which commanded
a gap in the Fascist parapet. We had set up a rifle-rest in the ditch. If you waited
long enough you generally saw a khaki-clad figure slip hurriedly across the gap. I
had several shots. I don’t know whether I hit anyone–it is most unlikely; I am a very
poor shot with a rifle. But it was rather fun, the Fascists did not know where the
shots were coming from, and I made sure I would get one of them sooner or later.
However, the dog it was that died–a Fascist sniper got me instead. I had been about
ten days at the front when it happened. The whole experience of being hit by a bullet
is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail.
It was at the corner of the parapet, at five o’clock in the morning. This was always
a dangerous time, because we had the dawn at our backs, and if you stuck your
head above the parapet it was clearly outlined against the sky. I was talking to the
sentries preparatory to changing the guard. Suddenly, in the very middle of saying
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something, I felt–it is very hard to describe what I felt, though I remember it with
the utmost vividness.
Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There
seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a
tremendous shock–no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric
terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled
up to nothing. The sand-bags in front of me receded into immense distance. I fancy
you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning. I knew immediately
that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle
nearby that had gone off accidentally and shot me. All this happened in a space of
time much less than a second. The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was
falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did not
hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no
pain in the ordinary sense.
The American sentry I had been talking to had started forward. ’Gosh! Are you
hit?’ People gathered round. There was the usual fuss–’Lift him up! Where’s he hit?
Get his shirt open!’etc., etc. The American called for a knife to cut my shirt open. I
knew that there was one in my pocket and tried to get it out, but discovered that my
right arm was paralysed. Not being in pain, I felt a vague satisfaction. This ought
to please my wife, I thought; she had always wanted me to be wounded, which
would save me from being killed when the great battle came. It was only now that it
occurred to me to wonder where I was hit, and how badly; I could feel nothing, but
I was conscious that the bullet had struck me somewhere in the front of the body.
When I tried to speak I found that I had no voice, only a faint squeak, but at the
second attempt I managed to ask where I was hit. In the throat, they said. Harry
Webb, our stretcher-bearer, had brought a bandage and one of the little bottles of
alcohol they gave us for field-dressings. As they lifted me up a lot of blood poured
out of my mouth, and I heard a Spaniard behind me say that the bullet had gone
clean through my neck. I felt the alcohol, which at ordinary times would sting like
the devil, splash on to the wound as a pleasant coolness.
They laid me down again while somebody fetched a stretcher. As soon as I knew
that the bullet had gone clean through my neck I took it for granted that I was done
for. I had never heard of a man or an animal getting a bullet through the middle of
the neck and surviving it. The blood was dribbling out of the corner of my mouth.
’The artery’s gone,’ I thought. I wondered how long you last when your carotid
artery is cut; not many minutes, presumably. Everything was very blurry. There
must have been about two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. And
that too was interesting–I mean it is interesting to know what your thoughts would
be at such a time. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My
second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said
and done, suits me so well. I had time to feel this very vividly. The stupid mischance
infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it! To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in
this stale corner of the trenches, thanks to a moment’s carelessness! I thought, too, of
the man who had shot me–wondered what he was like, whether he was a Spaniard
or a foreigner, whether he knew he had got me, and so forth. I could not feel any
resentment against him. I reflected that as he was a Fascist I would have killed him if
I could, but that if he had been taken prisoner and brought before me at this moment
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I would merely have congratulated him on his good shooting. It may be, though,
that if you were really dying your thoughts would be quite different.
They had just got me on to the stretcher when my paralysed right arm came to life
and began hurting damnably. At the time I imagined that I must have broken it in
falling; but the pain reassured me, for I knew that your sensations do not become
more acute when you are dying. I began to feel more normal and to be sorry for
the four poor devils who were sweating and slithering with the stretcher on their
shoulders. It was a mile and a half to the ambulance, and vile going, over lumpy,
slippery tracks. I knew what a sweat it was, having helped to carry a wounded
man down a day or two earlier. The leaves of the silver poplars which, in places,
fringed our trenches brushed against my face; I thought what a good thing it was
to be alive in a world where silver poplars grow. But all the while the pain in my
arm was diabolical, making me swear and then try not to swear, because every time
I breathed too hard the blood bubbled out of my mouth.
The doctor re-bandaged the wound, gave me a shot of morphia, and sent me off to
Sietamo. The hospitals at Sietamo were hurriedly constructed wooden huts where
the wounded were, as a rule, only kept for a few hours before being sent on to Bar-
bastro or Lérida. I was dopey from morphia but still in great pain, practically unable
to move and swallowing blood constantly. It was typical of Spanish hospital meth-
ods that while I was in this state the untrained nurse tried to force the regulation
hospital meal–a huge meal of soup, eggs, greasy stew, and so forth–down my throat
and seemed surprised when I would not take it. I asked for a cigarette, but this
was one of the periods of tobacco famine and there was not a cigarette in the place.
Presently two comrades who had got permission to leave the line for a few hours
appeared at my bedside.
’Hullo! You’re alive, are you? Good. We want your watch and your revolver and
your electric torch. And your knife, if you’ve got one.’
They made off with all my portable possessions. This always happened when a
man was wounded–everything he possessed was promptly divided up; quite rightly,
for watches, revolvers, and so forth were precious at the front and if they went down
the line in a wounded man’s kit they were certain to be stolen somewhere on the way.
By the evening enough sick and wounded had trickled in to make up a few
ambulance-loads, and they sent us on to Barbastro. What a journey! It used to be said
that in this war you got well if you were wounded in the extremities, but always died
of a wound in the abdomen. I now realized why. No one who was liable to bleed
internally could have survived those miles of jolting over metal roads that had been
smashed to pieces by heavy lorries and never repaired since the war began. Bang,
bump, wallop! It took me back to my early childhood and a dreadful thing called
the Wiggle-Woggle at the White City Exhibition. They had forgotten to tie us into
the stretchers. I had enough strength in my left arm to hang on, but one poor wretch
was spilt on to the floor and suffered God knows what agonies. Another, a walking
case who was sitting in the corner of the ambulance, vomited all over the place. The
hospital in Barbastro was very crowded, the beds so close together that they were
almost touching. Next morning they loaded a number of us on to the hospital train
and sent us down to Lérida.
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I was five or six days in Lérida. It was a big hospital, with sick, wounded, and
ordinary civilian patients more or less jumbled up together. Some of the men in my
ward had frightful wounds. In the next bed to me there was a youth with black
hair who was suffering from some disease or other and was being given medicine
that made his urine as green as emerald. His bed-bottle was one of the sights of
the ward. An English-speaking Dutch Communist, having heard that there was an
Englishman in the hospital, befriended me and brought me English newspapers. He
had been terribly wounded in the October fighting, and had somehow managed
to settle down at Lérida hospital and had married one of the nurses. Thanks to
his wound, one of his legs had shrivelled till it was no thicker than my arm. Two
militiamen on leave, whom I had met my first week at the front, came in to see a
wounded friend and recognized me. They were kids of about eighteen. They stood
awkwardly beside my bed, trying to think of something to say, and then, as a way of
demonstrating that they were sorry I was wounded, suddenly took all the tobacco
out of their pockets, gave it to me, and fled before I could give it back. How typically
Spanish! I discovered afterwards that you could not buy tobacco anywhere in the
town and what they had given me was a week’s ration.
After a few days I was able to get up and walk about with my arm in a sling. For
some reason it hurt much more when it hung down. I also had, for the time being,
a good deal of internal pain from the damage I had done myself in falling, and my
voice had disappeared almost completely, but I never had a moment’s pain from the
bullet wound itself. It seems this is usually the case. The tremendous shock of a
bullet prevents sensation locally; a splinter of shell or bomb, which is jagged and
usually hits you less hard, would probably hurt like the devil. There was a pleasant
garden in the hospital grounds, and in it was a pool with gold-fishes and some small
dark grey fish–bleak, I think. I used to sit watching them for hours. The way things
were done at Lérida gave me an insight into the hospital system on the Aragón front–
whether it was the same on other fronts I do not know. In some ways the hospitals
were very good. The doctors were able men and there seemed to be no shortage of
drugs and equipment. But there were two bad faults on account of which, I have no
doubt, hundreds or thousands of men have died who might have been saved.
One was the fact that all the hospitals anywhere near the front line were used more
or less as casualty clearing-stations. The result was that you got no treatment there
unless you were too badly wounded to be moved. In theory most of the wounded
were sent straight to Barcelona or Tarragona, but owing to the lack of transport they
were often a week or ten days in getting there. They were kept hanging about at
Sietamo, Barbastro, Monzon, Lérida, and other places, and meanwhile they were
getting no treatment except an occasional clean bandage, sometimes not even that.
Men with dreadful shell wounds, smashed bones, and so forth, were swathed in a
sort of casing made of bandages and plaster of Paris; a description of the wound was
written in pencil on the outside, and as a rule the casing was not removed till the
man reached Barcelona or Tarragona ten days later. It was almost impossible to get
one’s wound examined on the way; the few doctors could not cope with the work,
and they simply walked hurriedly past your bed, saying: ’Yes, yes, they’ll attend to
you at Barcelona.’ There were always rumours that the hospital train was leaving
for Barcelona mañana. The other fault was the lack of competent nurses. Apparently
there was no supply of trained nurses in Spain, perhaps because before the war this
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work was done chiefly by nuns. I have no complaint against the Spanish nurses,
they always treated me with the greatest kindness, but there is no doubt that they
were terribly ignorant. All of them knew how to take a temperature, and some of
them knew how to tie a bandage, but that was about all. The result was that men
who were too ill to fend for themselves were often shamefully neglected. The nurses
would let a man remain constipated for a week on end, and they seldom washed
those who were too weak to wash themselves. I remember one poor devil with
a smashed arm telling me that he had been three weeks without having his face
washed. Even beds were left unmade for days together. The food in all the hospitals
was very good–too good, indeed. Even more in Spain than elsewhere it seemed to be
the tradition to stuff sick people with heavy food. At Lérida the meals were terrific.
Breakfast, at about six in the morning, consisted of soup, an omelette, stew, bread,
white wine, and coffee, and lunch was even larger–this at a time when most of the
civil population was seriously underfed. Spaniards seem not to recognize such a
thing as a light diet. They give the same food to sick people as to well ones–always
the same rich, greasy cookery, with everything sodden in olive oil.
One morning it was announced that the men in my ward were to be sent down to
Barcelona today. I managed to send a wire to my wife, telling her that I was coming,
and presently they packed us into buses and took us down to the station. It was only
when the train was actually starting that the hospital orderly who travelled with us
casually let fall that we were not going to Barcelona after all, but to Tarragona. I
suppose the engine-driver had changed his mind. ’Just like Spain!’ I thought. But
it was very Spanish, too, that they agreed to hold up the train while I sent another
wire, and more Spanish still that the wire never got there.
They had put us into ordinary third-class carriages with wooden seats, and many
of the men were badly wounded and had only got out of bed for the first time that
morning. Before long, what with the heat and the jolting, half of them were in a state
of collapse and several vomited on the floor. The hospital orderly threaded his way
among the corpse-like forms that sprawled everywhere, carrying a large goatskin
bottle full of water which he squirted into this mouth or that. It was beastly water; I
remember the taste of it still. We got into Tarragona as the sun was getting low. The
line runs along the shore a stone’s throw from the sea. As our train drew into the
station a troop-train full of men from the International Column was drawing out, and
a knot of people on the bridge were waving to them. It was a very long train, packed
to bursting-point with men, with field-guns lashed on the open trucks and more men
clustering round the guns. I remember with peculiar vividness the spectacle of that
train passing in the yellow evening light; window after window full of dark, smiling
faces, the long tilted barrels of the guns, the scarlet scarves fluttering–all this gliding
slowly past us against a turquoise-coloured sea.
’Extranjeros–foreigners,’ said someone. ’They’re Italians.’
Obviously they were Italians. No other people could have grouped themselves
so picturesquely or returned the salutes of the crowd with so much grace–a grace
that was none the less because about half the men on the train were drinking out
of up-ended wine bottles. We heard afterwards that these were some of the troops
who won the great victory at Guadalajara in March; they had been on leave and
were being transferred to the Aragón front. Most of them, I am afraid, were killed at
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Huesca only a few weeks later. The men who were well enough to stand had moved
across the carriage to cheer the Italians as they went past. A crutch waved out of the
window; bandaged forearms made the Red Salute. It was like an allegorical picture
of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men
sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one’s
heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get
rid of, that war is glorious after all.
The hospital at Tarragona was a very big one and full of wounded from all fronts.
What wounds one saw there! They had a way of treating certain wounds which I
suppose was in accordance with the latest medical practice, but which was peculiarly
horrible to look at. This was to leave the wound completely open and unbandaged,
but protected from flies by a net of butter-muslin, stretched over wires. Under the
muslin you would see the red jelly of a half-healed wound. There was one man
wounded in the face and throat who had his head inside a sort of spherical helmet
of butter-muslin; his mouth was closed up and he breathed through a little tube that
was fixed between his lips. Poor devil, he looked so lonely, wandering to and fro,
looking at you through his muslin cage and unable to speak. I was three or four
days at Tarragona. My strength was coming back, and one day, by going slowly,
I managed to walk down as far as the beach. It was queer to see the seaside life
going on almost as usual; the smart cafés along the promenade and the plump local
bourgeoisie bathing and sunning themselves in deck-chairs as though there had not
been a war within a thousand miles. Nevertheless, as it happened, I saw a bather
drowned, which one would have thought impossible in that shallow and tepid sea.
Finally, eight or nine days after leaving the front, I had my wound examined. In
the surgery where newly-arrived cases were examined, doctors with huge pairs of
shears were hacking away the breast-plates of plaster in which men with smashed
ribs, collar-bones, and so forth had been cased at the dressing-stations behind the
line; out of the neck-hole of the huge clumsy breast-plate you would see protruding
an anxious, dirty face, scrubby with a week’s beard. The doctor, a brisk, handsome
man of about thirty, sat me down in a chair, grasped my tongue with a piece of rough
gauze, pulled it out as far as it would go, thrust a dentist’s mirror down my throat,
and told me to say ’Eh!’ After doing this till my tongue was bleeding and my eyes
running with water, he told me that one vocal cord was paralysed.
’When shall I get my voice back?’ I said.
’Your voice? Oh, you’ll never get your voice back,’ he said cheerfully.
However, he was wrong, as it turned out. For about two months I could not speak
much above a whisper, but after that my voice became normal rather suddenly, the
other vocal cord having ’compensated’. The pain in my arm was due to the bullet
having pierced a bunch of nerves at the back of the neck. It was a shooting pain
like neuralgia, and it went on hurting continuously for about a month, especially at
night, so that I did not get much sleep. The fingers of my right hand were also semi-
paralysed. Even now, five months afterwards, my forefinger is still numb–a queer
effect for a neck wound to have.
The wound was a curiosity in a small way and various doctors examined it with
much clicking of tongues and ’Qué suerte! Qué suerte!’ One of them told me with
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an air of authority that the bullet had missed the artery by ’about a millimetre’. I
don’t know how he knew. No one I met at this time–doctors, nurses, practicantes,
or fellow-patients–failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and
survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be
even luckier not to be hit at all.
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In Barcelona, during all those last weeks I spent there, there was a peculiar evil feel-
ing in the air–an atmosphere of suspicion, fear, uncertainty, and veiled hatred. The
May fighting had left ineradicable after-effects behind it. With the fall of the Ca-
ballero Government the Communists had come definitely into power, the charge of
internal order had been handed over to Communist ministers, and no one doubted
that they would smash their political rivals as soon as they got a quarter of a chance.
Nothing was happening as yet, I myself had not even any mental picture of what was
going to happen; and yet there was a perpetual vague sense of danger, a conscious-
ness of some evil thing that was impending. However little you were actually con-
spiring, the atmosphere forced you to feel like a conspirator. You seemed to spend
all your time holding whispered conversations in corners of cafés and wondering
whether that person at the next table was a police spy.
Sinister rumours of all kinds were flying round, thanks to the Press censorship.
One was that the Negrin-Prieto Government was planning to compromise the war.
At the time I was inclined to believe this, for the Fascists were closing in on Bilbao
and the Government was visibly doing nothing to save it. Basque flags were dis-
played all over the town, girls rattled collecting-boxes in the cafés, and there were
the usual broadcasts about ’heroic defenders’, but the Basques were getting no real
assistance. It was tempting to believe that the Government was playing a double
game. Later events have proved that I was quite wrong here, but it seems probable
that Bilbao could have been saved if a little more energy had been shown. An of-
fensive on the Aragón front, even an unsuccessful one, would have forced Franco to
divert part of his army; as it was the Government did not begin any offensive action
till it was far too late–indeed, till about the time when Bilbao fell. The C.N.T. was
distributing in huge numbers a leaflet saying: ’Be on your guard!’ and hinting that
’a certain Party’ (meaning the Communists) was plotting a coup d’état. There was
also a widespread fear that Catalonia was going to be invaded. Earlier, when we
went back to the front, I had seen the powerful defences that were being constructed
scores of miles behind the front line, and fresh bomb-proof shelters were being dug
all over Barcelona. There were frequent scares of air-raids and sea-raids; more often
than not these were false alarms, but every time the sirens blew the lights all over
the town blacked out for hours on end and timid people dived for the cellars. Police
spies were everywhere. The jails were still crammed with prisoners left over from
the May fighting, and others–always, of course, Anarchist and P.O.U.M. adherents–
were disappearing into jail by ones and twos. So far as one could discover, no one
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was ever tried or even charged–not even charged with anything so definite as ’Trot-
skyism’; you were simply flung into jail and kept there, usually incommunicado. Bob
Smillie was still in jail in Valencia. We could discover nothing except that neither the
I.L.P. representative on the spot nor the lawyer who had been engaged, was permit-
ted to see him. Foreigners from the International Column and other militias were
getting into jail in larger and larger numbers. Usually they were arrested as desert-
ers. It was typical of the general situation that nobody now knew for certain whether
a militiaman was a volunteer or a regular soldier. A few months earlier anyone en-
listing in the militia had been told that he was a volunteer and could, if he wished,
get his discharge papers at any time when he was due for leave. Now it appeared
that the Government had changed its mind, a militiaman was a regular soldier and
counted as a deserter if he tried to go home. But even about this no one seemed cer-
tain. At some parts of the front the authorities were still issuing discharges. At the
frontier these were sometimes recognized, sometimes not; if not, you were promptly
thrown into jail. Later the number of foreign ’deserters’ in jail swelled into hundreds,
but most of them were repatriated when a fuss was made in their own countries.
Bands of armed Assault Guards roamed everywhere in the streets, the Civil
Guards were still holding cafés and other buildings in strategic spots, and many of
the P.S.U.C. buildings were still sandbagged and barricaded. At various points in the
town there were posts manned by Civil Guards of Carabineros who stopped passers-
by and demanded their papers. Everyone warned me not to show my P.O.U.M. mili-
tiaman’s card but merely to show my passport and my hospital ticket. Even to be
known to have served in the P.O.U.M. militia was vaguely dangerous. P.O.U.M. mili-
tiamen who were wounded or on leave were penalized in petty ways–it was made
difficult for them to draw their pay, for instance. La Batalla was still appearing, but
it was censored almost out of existence, and Solidaridad and the other Anarchist pa-
pers were also heavily censored. There was a new rule that censored portions of a
newspaper must not be left blank but filled up with other matter; as a result it was
often impossible to tell when something had been cut out.
The food shortage, which had fluctuated throughout the War, was in one of its bad
stages. Bread was scarce and the cheaper sorts were being adulterated with rice; the
bread the soldiers were getting in the barracks was dreadful stuff like putty. Milk
and sugar were very scarce and tobacco almost non-existent, except for the expen-
sive smuggled cigarettes. There was an acute shortage of olive oil, which Spaniards
use for half a dozen different purposes. The queues of women waiting to buy olive
oil were controlled by mounted Civil Guards who sometimes amused themselves by
backing their horses into the queue and trying to make them tread on the women’s
toes. A minor annoyance of the time was the lack of small change. The silver had
been withdrawn and as yet no new coinage had been issued, so that there was noth-
ing between the ten-centime piece and the note for two and a half pesetas, and all
notes below ten pesetas were very scarce.16 For the poorest people this meant an
aggravation of the food shortage. A woman with only a ten-peseta note in her pos-
session might wait for hours in a queue outside the grocery and then be unable to
buy anything after all because the grocer had no change and she could not afford to
spend the whole note.
16The purchasing value of the peseta was about fourpence.
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It is not easy to convey the nightmare atmosphere of that time–the peculiar un-
easiness produced by rumours that were always changing, by censored newspapers,
and the constant presence of armed men. It is not easy to convey it because, at the
moment, the thing essential to such an atmosphere does not exist in England. In
England political intolerance is not yet taken for granted. There is political persecu-
tion in a petty way; if I were a coal-miner I would not care to be known to the boss
as a Communist; but the ’good party man’, the gangster-gramophone of continen-
tal politics, is still a rarity, and the notion of ’liquidating’ or ’eliminating’ everyone
who happens to disagree with you does not yet seem natural. It seemed only too
natural in Barcelona. The ’Stalinists’ were in the saddle, and therefore it was a mat-
ter of course that every ’Trotskyist’ was in danger. The thing everyone feared was
a thing which, after all, did not happen–a fresh outbreak of street-fighting, which,
as before, would be blamed on the P.O.U.M. and the Anarchists. There were times
when I caught my ears listening for the first shots. It was as though some huge evil
intelligence were brooding over the town. Everyone noticed it and remarked upon
it. And it was queer how everyone expressed it in almost the same words: ’The at-
mosphere of this place–it’s horrible. Like being in a lunatic asylum.’ But perhaps I
ought not to say everyone. Some of the English visitors who flitted briefly through
Spain, from hotel to hotel, seem not to have noticed that there was anything wrong
with the general atmosphere. The Duchess of Atholl writes, I notice (Sunday Express,
17 October 1937):
I was in Valencia, Madrid, and Barcelona…perfect order prevailed in all three
towns without any display of force. All the hotels in which I stayed were not only
’normal’ and ’decent’, but extremely comfortable, in spite of the shortage of butter
and coffee.
It is a peculiarity of English travellers that they do not really believe in the exis-
tence of anything outside the smart hotels. I hope they found some butter for the
Duchess of Atholl.
I was at the Sanatorium Maurin, one of the sanatoria run by the P.O.U.M. It was
in the suburbs near Tibidabo, the queer-shaped mountain that rises abruptly be-
hind Barcelona and is traditionally supposed to have been the hill from which Satan
showed Jesus the countries of the earth (hence its name). The house had previously
belonged to some wealthy bourgeois and had been seized at the time of the revolu-
tion. Most of the men there had either been invalided out of the line or had some
wound that had permanently disabled them–amputated limbs, and so forth. There
were several other Englishmen there: Williams, with a damaged leg, and Stafford
Cottman, a boy of eighteen, who had been sent back from the trenches with sus-
pected tuberculosis, and Arthur Clinton, whose smashed left arm was still strapped
on to one of those huge wire contraptions, nicknamed aeroplanes, which the Span-
ish hospitals were using. My wife was still staying at the Hotel Continental, and I
generally came into Barcelona in the daytime. In the morning I used to attend the
General Hospital for electrical treatment of my arm. It was a queer business–a series
of prickly electric shocks that made the various sets of muscles jerk up and down–but
it seemed to do some good; the use of my fingers came back and the pain grew some-
what less. Both of us had decided that the best thing we could do was to go back to
England as soon as possible. I was extremely weak, my voice was gone, seemingly
for good, and the doctors told me that at best it would be several months before I
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was fit to fight. I had got to start earning some money sooner or later, and there did
not seem much sense in staying in Spain and eating food that was needed for other
people. But my motives were mainly selfish. I had an overwhelming desire to get
away from it all; away from the horrible atmosphere of political suspicion and ha-
tred, from streets thronged by armed men, from air-raids, trenches, machine-guns,
screaming trams, milkless tea, oil cookery, and shortage of cigarettes–from almost
everything that I had learnt to associate with Spain.
The doctors at the General Hospital had certified me medically unfit, but to get my
discharge I had to see a medical board at one of the hospitals near the front and then
go to Sietamo to get my papers stamped at the P.O.U.M. militia headquarters. Kopp
had just come back from the front, full of jubilation. He had just been in action and
said that Huesca was going to be taken at last. The Government had brought troops
from the Madrid front and were concentrating thirty thousand men, with aeroplanes
in huge numbers. The Italians I had seen going up the line from Tarragona had
attacked on the Jaca road but had had heavy casualties and lost two tanks. However,
the town was bound to fall, Kopp said. (Alas! It didn’t. The attack was a frightful
mess-up and led to nothing except an orgy of lying in the newspapers.) Meanwhile
Kopp had to go down to Valencia for an interview at the Ministry of War. He had a
letter from General Pozas, now commanding the Army of the East–the usual letter,
describing Kopp as a ’person of all confidence’ and recommending him for a special
appointment in the engineering section (Kopp had been an engineer in civil life). He
left for Valencia the same day as I left for Sietamo–15 June.
It was five days before I got back to Barcelona. A lorry-load of us reached Sietamo
about midnight, and as soon as we got to the P.O.U.M. headquarters they lined us
up and began handling out rifles and cartridges, before even taking our names. It
seemed that the attack was beginning and they were likely to call for reserves at any
moment. I had my hospital ticket in my pocket, but I could not very well refuse
to go with the others. I kipped down on the ground, with a cartridge-box for a
pillow, in a mood of deep dismay. Being wounded had spoiled my nerve for the time
being–I believe this usually happens–and the prospect of being under fire frightened
me horribly. However, there was a bit of mañana, as usual, we were not called out
after all, and next morning I produced my hospital ticket and went in search of my
discharge. It meant a series of confused, tiresome journeys. As usual they bandied
one to and fro from hospital to hospital–Sietamo, Barbastro, Monzon, then back to
Sietamo to get my discharge stamped, then down the line again via Barbastro and
Lérida–and the convergence of troops on Huesca had monopolized all the transport
and disorganized everything. I remember sleeping in queer places–once in a hospital
bed, but once in a ditch, once on a very narrow bench which I fell off in the middle
of the night, and once in a sort of municipal lodging-house in Barbastro. As soon as
you got away from the railroad there was no way of travelling except by jumping
chance lorries. You had to wait by the roadside for hours, sometimes three or four
hours at a stretch, with knots of disconsolate peasants who carried bundles full of
ducks and rabbits, waving to lorry after lorry. When finally you struck a lorry that
was not chock full of men, loaves of bread, or ammunition-boxes the bumping over
the vile roads wallowed you to pulp. No horse has ever thrown me so high as those
lorries used to throw me. The only way of travelling was to crowd all together and
cling to one another. To my humiliation I found that I was still too weak to climb on
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to a lorry without being helped.
I slept a night at Monzón Hospital, where I went to see my medical board. In
the next bed to me there was an Assault Guard, wounded over the left eye. He
was friendly and gave me cigarettes. I said: ’In Barcelona we should have been
shooting one another,’ and we laughed over this. It was queer how the general spirit
seemed to change when you got anywhere near the front line. All or nearly all of
the vicious hatred of the political parties evaporated. During all the time I was at
the front I never once remember any P.S.U.C. adherent showing me hostility because
I was P.O.U.M. That kind of thing belonged in Barcelona or in places even remoter
from the war. There were a lot of Assault Guards in Sietamo. They had been sent
on from Barcelona to take part in the attack on Huesca. The Assault Guards were
a corps not intended primarily for the front, and many of them had not been under
fire before. Down in Barcelona they were lords of the street, but up here they were
Quintos (rookies) and palled up with militia children of fifteen who had been in the
line for months.
At Monzón Hospital the doctor did the usual tongue-pulling and mirror-thrusting
business, assured me in the same cheerful manner as the others that I should never
have a voice again, and signed my certificate. While I waited to be examined there
was going on inside the surgery some dreadful operation without anaesthetics–why
without anaesthetics I do not know. It went on and on, scream after scream, and
when I went in there were chairs flung about and on the floor were pools of blood
and urine.
The details of that final journey stand out in my mind with strange clarity. I was
in a different mood, a more observing mood, than I had been in for months past. I
had got my discharge, stamped with the seal of the 29th Division, and the doctor’s
certificate in which I was ’declared useless’. I was free to go back to England; con-
sequently I felt able, almost for the first time, to look at Spain. I had a day to put
in to Barbastro, for there was only one train a day. Previously I had seen Barbastro
in brief glimpses, and it had seemed to me simply a part of the war–a grey, muddy,
cold place, full of roaring lorries and shabby troops. It seemed queerly different
now. Wandering through it I became aware of pleasant tortuous streets, old stone
bridges, wine shops with great oozy barrels as tall as a man, and intriguing semi-
subterranean shops where men were making cartwheels, daggers, wooden spoons,
and goatskin water-bottles. I watched a man making a skin bottle and discovered
with great interest, what I had never known before, that they are made with the fur
inside and the fur is not removed, so that you are really drinking distilled goat’s
hair. I had drunk out of them for months without knowing this. And at the back of
the town there was a shallow jade-green river, and rising out of it a perpendicular
cliff of rock, with houses built into the rock, so that from your bedroom window you
could spit straight into the water a hundred feet below. Innumerable doves lived in
the holes in the cliff. And in Lérida there were old crumbling buildings upon whose
cornices thousands upon thousands of swallows had built their nests, so that at a
little distance the crusted pattern of nests was like some florid moulding of the ro-
coco period. It was queer how for nearly six months past I had had no eyes for such
things. With my discharge papers in my pocket I felt like a human being again, and
also a little like a tourist. For almost the first time I felt that I was really in Spain,
in a country that I had longed all my life to visit. In the quiet back streets of Lérida
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and Barbastro I seemed to catch a momentary glimpse, a sort of far-off rumour of
the Spain that dwells in everyone’s imagination. White sierras, goatherds, dungeons
of the Inquisition, Moorish palaces, black winding trains of mules, grey olive trees
and groves of lemons, girls in black mantillas, the wines of Málaga and Alicante,
cathedrals, cardinals, bull-fights, gypsies, serenades–in short, Spain. Of all Europe it
was the country that had had most hold upon my imagination. It seemed a pity that
when at last I had managed to come here I had seen only this north-eastern corner,
in the middle of a confused war and for the most part in winter.
It was late when I got back to Barcelona, and there were no taxis. It was no use
trying to get to the Sanatorium Maurin, which was right outside the town, so I made
for the Hotel Continental, stopping for dinner on the way. I remember the conver-
sation I had with a very fatherly waiter about the oak jugs, bound with copper, in
which they served the wine. I said I would like to buy a set of them to take back to
England. The waiter was sympathetic. ’Yes, beautiful, were they not? But impos-
sible to buy nowadays. Nobody was manufacturing them any longer–nobody was
manufacturing anything. This war–such a pity!’ We agreed that the war was a pity.
Once again I felt like a tourist. The waiter asked me gently, had I liked Spain; would
I come back to Spain? Oh, yes, I should come back to Spain. The peaceful quality
of this conversation sticks in my memory, because of what happened immediately
afterwards.
When I got to the hotel my wife was sitting in the lounge. She got up and came
towards me in what struck me as a very unconcerned manner; then she put an arm
round my neck and, with a sweet smile for the benefit of the other people in the
lounge, hissed in my ear:
’Get out!’
’What?’
’Get out of here at once!’
’What?’
’Don’t keep standing here! You must get outside quickly!’
’What? Why? What do you mean?’
She had me by the arm and was already leading me towards the stairs. Half-way
down we met a Frenchman–I am not going to give his name, for though he had no
connexion with the P.O.U.M. he was a good friend to us all during the trouble. He
looked at me with a concerned face.
’Listen! You mustn’t come in here. Get out quickly and hide yourself before they
ring up the police.’
And behold! at the bottom of the stairs one of the hotel staff, who was a P.O.U.M.
member (unknown to the management, I fancy), slipped furtively out of the lift and
told me in broken English to get out. Even now I did not grasp what had happened.
’What the devil is all this about?’ I said, as soon as we were on the pavement.
’Haven’t you heard?’
’No. Heard what? I’ve heard nothing.’
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’The P.O.U.M.’s been suppressed. They’ve seized all the buildings. Practically
everyone’s in prison. And they say they’re shooting people already.’
So that was it. We had to have somewhere to talk. All the big cafés on the Ram-
blas were thronged with police, but we found a quiet café in a side street. My wife
explained to me what had happened while I was away.
On 15 June the police had suddenly arrested Andres Nin in his office, and the
same evening had raided the Hotel Falcon and arrested all the people in it, mostly
militiamen on leave. The place was converted immediately into a prison, and in a
very little while it was filled to the brim with prisoners of all kinds. Next day the
P.O.U.M. was declared an illegal organization and all its offices, book-stalls, sanato-
ria, Red Aid centres, and so forth were seized. Meanwhile the police were arresting
everyone they could lay hands on who was known to have any connexion with the
P.O.U.M.Within a day or two all or almost all of the forty members of the Executive
Committee were in prison. Possibly one or two had escaped into hiding, but the
police were adopting the trick (extensively used on both sides in this war) of seizing
a man’s wife as a hostage if he disappeared. There was no way of discovering how
many people had been arrested. My wife had heard that it was about four hundred
in Barcelona alone. I have since thought that even at that time the numbers must
have been greater. And the most fantastic people had been arrested. In some cases
the police had even gone to the length of dragging wounded militiamen out of the
hospitals.
It was all profoundly dismaying. What the devil was it all about? I could under-
stand their suppressing the P.O.U.M., but what were they arresting people for? For
nothing, so far as one could discover. Apparently the suppression of the P.O.U.M.
had a retrospective effect; the P.O.U.M. was now illegal, and therefore one was break-
ing the law by having previously belonged to it. As usual, none of the arrested peo-
ple had been charged. Meanwhile, however, the Valencia Communist papers were
flaming with the story of a huge ’Fascist plot’, radio communication with the enemy,
documents signed in invisible ink, etc., etc. I have dealt with this story earlier. The
significant thing was that it was appearing only in the Valencia papers; I think I am
right in saying that there was not a single word about it, or about the suppression
of the P.O.U.M., in any Barcelona papers, Communist, Anarchist, or Republican. We
first learned the precise nature of the charges against the P.O.U.M. leaders not from
any Spanish paper but from the English papers that reached Barcelona a day or two
later. What we could not know at this time was that the Government was not respon-
sible for the charge of treachery and espionage, and that members of the Government
were later to repudiate it. We only vaguely knew that the P.O.U.M. leaders, and pre-
sumably all the rest of us, were accused of being in Fascist pay. And already the
rumours were flying round that people were being secretly shot in jail. There was a
lot of exaggeration about this, but it certainly happened in some cases, and there is
not much doubt that it happened in the case of Nin. After his arrest Nin was trans-
ferred to Valencia and thence to Madrid, and as early as 21 June the rumour reached
Barcelona that he had been shot. Later the rumour took a more definite shape: Nin
had been shot in prison by the secret police and his body dumped into the street.
This story came from several sources, including Federica Montsenys, an ex-member
of the Government. From that day to this Nin has never been heard of alive again.
When, later, the Government were questioned by delegates from various countries,
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they shilly-shallied and would say only that Nin had disappeared and they knew
nothing of his whereabouts. Some of the newspapers produced a tale that he had
escaped to Fascist territory. No evidence was given in support of it, and Irujo, the
Minister of Justice, later declared that the Espagne news-agency had falsified his of-
ficial communiqué.17 In any case it is most unlikely that a political prisoner of Nin’s
importance would be allowed to escape. Unless at some future time he is produced
alive, I think we must take it that he was murdered in prison.
The tale of arrests went on and on, extending over months, until the number of
political prisoners, not counting Fascists, swelled into thousands. One noticeable
thing was the autonomy of the lower ranks of the police. Many of the arrests were
admittedly illegal, and various people whose release had been ordered by the Chief
of Police were re-arrested at the jail gate and carried off to ’secret prisons’. A typical
case is that of Kurt Landau and his wife. They were arrested about 17 June, and
Landau immediately ’disappeared’. Five months later his wife was still in jail, un-
tried and without news of her husband. She declared a hunger-strike, after which
the Minister of Justice, sent word to assure her that her husband was dead. Shortly
afterwards she was released, to be almost immediately re-arrested and flung into
prison again. And it was noticeable that the police, at any rate at first, seemed com-
pletely indifferent as to any effect their actions might have upon the war. They were
quite ready to arrest military officers in important posts without getting permission
beforehand. About the end of June Jose Rovira, the general commanding the 29th
Division, was arrested somewhere near the front line by a party of police who had
been sent from Barcelona. His men sent a delegation to protest at the Ministry of
War. It was found that neither the Ministry of War, nor Ortega, the Chief of Police,
had even been informed of Rovira’s arrest. In the whole business the detail that most
sticks in my throat, though perhaps it is not of great importance, is that all news of
what was happening was kept from the troops at the front. As you will have seen,
neither I nor anyone else at the front had heard anything about the suppression of
the P.O.U.M. All the P.O.U.M. militia headquarters, Red Aid centres, and so forth
were functioning as usual, and as late as 20 June and as far down the line as Lérida,
only about 100 miles from Barcelona, no one had heard what was happening. All
word of it was kept out of the Barcelona papers (the Valencia papers, which were
running the spy stories, did not reach the Aragón front), and no doubt one reason
for arresting all the P.O.U.M. militiamen on leave in Barcelona was to prevent them
from getting back to the front with the news. The draft with which I had gone up
the line on 15 June must have been about the last to go. I am still puzzled to know
how the thing was kept secret, for the supply lorries and so forth were still passing
to and fro; but there is no doubt that it was kept secret, and, as I have since learned
from a number of others, the men in the front line heard nothing till several days
later. The motive for all this is clear enough. The attack on Huesca was beginning,
the P.O.U.M. militia was still a separate unit, and it was probably feared that if the
men knew what was happening they would refuse to fight. Actually nothing of the
kind happened when the news arrived. In the intervening days there must have
been numbers of men who were killed without ever learning that the newspapers in
the rear were calling them Fascists. This kind of thing is a little difficult to forgive. I
17See the reports of the Maxton delegation which I referred to in Chapter 11.
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know it was the usual policy to keep bad news from the troops, and perhaps as a rule
that is justified. But it is a different matter to send men into battle and not even tell
them that behind their backs their party is being suppressed, their leaders accused
of treachery, and their friends and relatives thrown into prison.
My wife began telling me what had happened to our various friends. Some of
the English and other foreigners had got across the frontier. Williams and Stafford
Cottman had not been arrested when the Sanatorium Maurin was raided, and were
in hiding somewhere. So was John Mc-Nair, who had been in France and had re-
entered Spain after the P.O.U.M. was declared illegal–a rash thing to do, but he had
not cared to stay in safety while his comrades were in danger. For the rest it was
simply a chronicle of ’They’ve got so and so’ and ’They’ve got so and so’. They
seemed to have ’got’ nearly everyone. It took me aback to hear that they had also
’got’ George Kopp.
’What! Kopp? I thought he was in Valencia.’
It appeared that Kopp had come back to Barcelona; he had a letter from the Min-
istry of War to the colonel commanding the engineering operations on the eastern
front. He knew that the P.O.U.M. had been suppressed, of course, but probably it
did not occur to him that the police could be such fools as to arrest him when he was
on his way to the front on an urgent military mission. He had come round to the
Hotel Continental to fetch his kit-bags; my wife had been out at the time, and the
hotel people had managed to detain him with some lying story while they rang up
the police. I admit I was angry when I heard of Kopp’s arrest. He was my personal
friend, I had served under him for months, I had been under fire with him, and I
knew his history. He was a man who had sacrificed everything–family, nationality,
livelihood–simply to come to Spain and fight against Fascism. By leaving Belgium
without permission and joining a foreign army while he was on the Belgian Army
reserve, and, earlier, by helping to manufacture munitions illegally for the Spanish
Government, he had piled up years of imprisonment for himself if he should ever
return to his own country. He had been in the line since October 1936, had worked
his way up from militiaman to major, had been in action I do not know how many
times, and had been wounded once. During the May trouble, as I had seen for my-
self, he had prevented fighting locally and probably saved ten or twenty lives. And
all they could do in return was to fling him into jail. It is waste of time to be angry,
but the stupid malignity of this kind of thing does try one’s patience.
Meanwhile they had not ’got’ my wife. Although she had remained at the Conti-
nental the police had made no move to arrest her. It was fairly obvious that she was
being used as a decoy duck. A couple of nights earlier, however, in the small hours
of the morning, six of the plain-clothes police had invaded our room at the hotel and
searched it. They had seized every scrap of paper we possessed, except, fortunately,
our passports and cheque-book. They had taken my diaries, all our books, all the
press-cuttings that had been piling up for months past (I have often wondered what
use those press-cuttings were to them), all my war souvenirs, and all our letters. (In-
cidentally, they took away a number of letters I had received from readers. Some of
them had not been answered, and of course I have not the addresses. If anyone who
wrote to me about my last book, and did not get an answer, happens to read these
lines, will he please accept this as an apology?) I learned afterwards that the police
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had also seized various belongings that I had left at the Sanatorium Maurin. They
even carried off a bundle of my dirty linen. Perhaps they thought it had messages
written on it in invisible ink.
It was obvious that it would be safer for my wife to stay at the hotel, at any rate
for the time being. If she tried to disappear they would be after her immediately. As
for myself, I should have to go straight into hiding. The prospect revolted me. In
spite of the innumerable arrests it was almost impossible for me to believe that I was
in any danger. The whole thing seemed too meaningless. It was the same refusal to
take this idiotic onslaught seriously that had led Kopp into jail. I kept saying, but
why should anyone want to arrest me? What had I done? I was not even a party
member of the P.O.U.M. Certainly I had carried arms during the May fighting, but
so had (at a guess) forty or fifty thousand people. Besides, I was badly in need of
a proper night’s sleep. I wanted to risk it and go back to the hotel. My wife would
not hear of it. Patiently she explained the state of affairs. It did not matter what I
had done or not done. This was not a round-up of criminals; it was merely a reign of
terror. I was not guilty of any definite act, but I was guilty of ’Trotskyism’. The fact
that I had served in the P.O.U.M. militia was quite enough to get me into prison. It
was no use hanging on to the English notion that you are safe so long as you keep
the law. Practically the law was what the police chose to make it. The only thing to
do was to lie low and conceal the fact that I had anything to do with the P.O.U.M. We
went through the papers in my pockets. My wife made me tear up my militiaman’s
card, which had P.O.U.M. on it in big letters, also a photo of a group of militiamen
with a P.O.U.M. flag in the background; that was the kind of thing that got you
arrested nowadays. I had to keep my discharge papers, however. Even these were
a danger, for they bore the seal of the 29th Division, and the police would probably
know that the 29th Division was the P.O.U.M.; but without them I could be arrested
as a deserter.
The thing we had got to think of now was getting out of Spain. There was no sense
in staying here with the certainty of imprisonment sooner or later. As a matter of fact
both of us would greatly have liked to stay, just to see what happened. But I foresaw
that Spanish prisons would be lousy places (actually they were a lot worse than
I imagined), once in prison you never knew when you would get out, and I was in
wretched health, apart from the pain in my arm. We arranged to meet next day at the
British Consulate, where Cottman and McNair were also coming. It would probably
take a couple of days to get our passports in order. Before leaving Spain you had to
have your passport stamped in three separate places–by the Chief of Police, by the
French Consul, and by the Catalan immigration authorities. The Chief of Police was
the danger, of course. But perhaps the British Consul could fix things up without
letting it be known that we had anything to do with the P.O.U.M. Obviously there
must be a list of foreign ’Trotskyist’ suspects, and very likely our names were on it,
but with luck we might get to the frontier before the list. There was sure to be a lot
of muddle and mañana. Fortunately this was Spain and not Germany. The Spanish
secret police had some of the spirit of the Gestapo, but not much of its competence.
So we parted. My wife went back to the hotel and I wandered off into the darkness
to find somewhere to sleep. I remember feeling sulky and bored. I had so wanted a
night in bed! There was nowhere I could go, no house where I could take refuge. The
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P.O.U.M. had practically no underground organization. No doubt the leaders had al-
ways realized that the party was likely to be suppressed, but they had never expected
a wholesale witch-hunt of this description. They had expected it so little, indeed,
that they were actually continuing the alterations to the P.O.U.M. buildings (among
other things they were constructing a cinema in the Executive Building, which had
previously been a bank) up to the very day when the P.O.U.M. was suppressed. Con-
sequently the rendezvous and hiding-places which every revolutionary party ought
to possess as a matter of course did not exist. Goodness knows how many people–
people whose homes had been raided by the police–were sleeping in the streets that
night. I had had five days of tiresome journeys, sleeping in impossible places, my
arm was hurting damnably, and now these fools were chasing me to and fro and I
had got to sleep on the ground again. That was about as far as my thoughts went.
I did not make any of the correct political reflections. I never do when things are
happening. It seems to be always the case when I get mixed up in war or politics–I
am conscious of nothing save physical discomfort and a deep desire for this damned
nonsense to be over. Afterwards I can see the significance of events, but while they
are happening I merely want to be out of them–an ignoble trait, perhaps.
I walked a long way and fetched up somewhere near the General Hospital. I
wanted a place where I could lie down without some nosing policeman finding me
and demanding my papers. I tried an air-raid shelter, but it was newly dug and
dripping with damp. Then I came upon the ruins of a church that had been gutted
and burnt in the revolution. It was a mere shell, four roofless walls surrounding piles
of rubble. In the half-darkness I poked about and found a kind of hollow where I
could lie down. Lumps of broken masonry are not good to lie on, but fortunately it
was a warm night and I managed to get several hours’ sleep.
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The worst of being wanted by the police in a town like Barcelona is that everything
opens so late. When you sleep out of doors you always wake about dawn, and none
of the Barcelona cafés opens much before nine. It was hours before I could get a cup
of coffee or a shave. It seemed queer, in the barber’s shop, to see the Anarchist notice
still on the wall, explaining that tips were prohibited. ’The Revolution has struck off
our chains,’ the notice said. I felt like telling the barbers that their chains would soon
be back again if they didn’t look out.
I wandered back to the centre of the town. Over the P.O.U.M. buildings the red
flags had been torn down, Republican flags were floating in their place, and knots of
armed Civil Guards were lounging in the doorways. At the Red Aid centre on the
corner of the Plaza de Cataluña the police had amused themselves by smashing most
of the windows. The P.O.U.M. book-stalls had been emptied of books and the notice-
board farther down the Ramblas had been plastered with an anti-P.O.U.M. cartoon–
the one representing the mask and the Fascist face beneath. Down at the bottom of
the Ramblas, near the quay, I came upon a queer sight; a row of militiamen, still
ragged and muddy from the front, sprawling exhaustedly on the chairs placed there
for the bootblacks. I knew who they were–indeed, I recognized one of them. They
were P.O.U.M. militiamen who had come down the line on the previous day to find
that the P.O.U.M. had been suppressed, and had had to spend the night in the streets
because their homes had been raided. Any P.O.U.M. militiaman who returned to
Barcelona at this time had the choice of going straight into hiding or into jail–not a
pleasant reception after three or four months in the line.
It was a queer situation that we were in. At night one was a hunted fugitive, but
in the daytime one could live an almost normal life. Every house known to harbour
P.O.U.M. supporters was–or at any rate was likely to be–under observation, and it
was impossible to go to a hotel or boarding-house, because it had been decreed that
on the arrival of a stranger the hotel-keeper must inform the police immediately.
Practically this meant spending the night out of doors. In the daytime, on the other
hand, in a town the size of Barcelona, you were fairly safe. The streets were thronged
by Civil Guards, Assault Guards, Carabineros, and ordinary police, besides God
knows how many spies in plain clothes; still, they could not stop everyone who
passed, and if you looked normal you might escape notice. The thing to do was to
avoid hanging round P.O.U.M. buildings and going to cafés and restaurants where
the waiters knew you by sight. I spent a long time that day, and the next, in having a
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bath at one of the public baths. This struck me as a good way of putting in the time
and keeping out of sight. Unfortunately the same idea occurred to a lot of people,
and a few days later–after I left Barcelona–the police raided one of the public baths
and arrested a number of ’Trotskyists’ in a state of nature.
Half-way up the Ramblas I ran into one of the wounded men from the Sanatorium
Maurin. We exchanged the sort of invisible wink that people were exchanging at
that time, and managed in an unobtrusive way to meet in a café farther up the street.
He had escaped arrest when the Maurin was raided, but, like the others, had been
driven into the street. He was in shirt-sleeves–had had to flee without his jacket–and
had no money. He described to me how one of the Civil Guards had torn the large
coloured portrait of Maurin from the wall and kicked it to pieces. Maurin (one of the
founders of the P.O.U.M.) was a prisoner in the hands of the Fascists and at that time
was believed to have been shot by them.
I met my wife at the British Consulate at ten o’clock. McNair and Cottman turned
up shortly afterwards. The first thing they told me was that Bob Smillie was dead.
He had died in prison at Valencia–of what, nobody knew for certain. He had been
buried immediately, and the I.L.P. representative on the spot, David Murray, had
been refused permission to see his body.
Of course I assumed at once that Smillie had been shot. It was what everyone
believed at the time, but I have since thought that I may have been wrong. Later
the cause of his death was given out as appendicitis, and we heard afterwards from
another prisoner who had been released that Smillie had certainly been ill in prison.
So perhaps the appendicitis story was true. The refusal to let Murray see his body
may have been due to pure spite. I must say this, however. Bob Smillie was only
twenty-two years old and physically he was one of the toughest people I have met.
He was, I think, the only person I knew, English or Spanish, who went three months
in the trenches without a day’s illness. People so tough as that do not usually die of
appendicitis if they are properly looked after. But when you saw what the Spanish
jails were like–the makeshift jails used for political prisoners–you realized how much
chance there was of a sick man getting proper attention. The jails were places that
could only be described as dungeons. In England you would have to go back to
the eighteenth century to find anything comparable. People were penned together
in small rooms where there was barely space for them to lie down, and often they
were kept in cellars and other dark places. This was not as a temporary measure–
there were cases of people being kept four and five months almost without sight
of daylight. And they were fed on a filthy and insufficient diet of two plates of
soup and two pieces of bread a day. (Some months later, however, the food seems
to have improved a little.) I am not exaggerating; ask any political suspect who
was imprisoned in Spain. I have had accounts of the Spanish jails from a number
of separate sources, and they agree with one another too well to be disbelieved;
besides, I had a few glimpses into one Spanish jail myself. Another English friend
who was imprisoned later writes that his experiences in jail ’make Smillie’s case
easier to understand’. Smillie’s death is not a thing I can easily forgive. Here was
this brave and gifted boy, who had thrown up his career at Glasgow University in
order to come and fight against Fascism, and who, as I saw for myself, had done his
job at the front with faultless courage and willingness; and all they could find to do
with him was to fling him into jail and let him die like a neglected animal. I know
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that in the middle of a huge and bloody war it is no use making too much fuss over
an individual death. One aeroplane bomb in a crowded street causes more suffering
than quite a lot of political persecution. But what angers one about a death like this
is its utter pointlessness. To be killed in battle–yes, that is what one expects; but to
be flung into jail, not even for any imaginary offence, but simply owing to dull blind
spite, and then left to die in solitude–that is a different matter. I fail to see how this
kind of thing–and it is not as though Smillie’s case were exceptional–brought victory
any nearer.
My wife and I visited Kopp that afternoon. You were allowed to visit prisoners
who were not incommunicado, though it was not safe to do so more than once or
twice. The police watched the people who came and went, and if you visited the
jails too often you stamped yourself as a friend of ’Trotskyists’ and probably ended
in jail yourself. This had already happened to a number of people.
Kopp was not incommunicado and we got a permit to see him without difficulty.
As they led us through the steel doors into the jail, a Spanish militiaman whom I
had known at the front was being led out between two Civil Guards. His eye met
mine; again the ghostly wink. And the first person we saw inside was an American
militiaman who had left for home a few days earlier; his papers were in good or-
der, but they had arrested him at the frontier all the same, probably because he was
still wearing corduroy breeches and was therefore identifiable as a militiaman. We
walked past one another as though we had been total strangers. That was dread-
ful. I had known him for months, had shared a dug-out with him, he had helped to
carry me down the line when I was wounded; but it was the only thing one could
do. The blue-clad guards were snooping everywhere. It would be fatal to recognize
too many people.
The so-called jail was really the ground floor of a shop. Into two rooms each mea-
suring about twenty feet square, close on a hundred people were penned. The place
had the real eighteenth-century Newgate Calendar appearance, with its frowsy dirt,
its huddle of human bodies, its lack of furniture–just the bare stone floor, one bench,
and a few ragged blankets–and its murky light, for the corrugated steel shutters had
been drawn over the windows. On the grimy walls revolutionary slogans–’Visca
P.O.U.M.!’ ’Viva la Revolucion!’ and so forth–had been scrawled. The place had
been used as a dump for political prisoners for months past. There was a deafen-
ing racket of voices. This was the visiting hour, and the place was so packed with
people that it was difficult to move. Nearly all of them were of the poorest of the
working-class population. You saw women undoing pitiful packets of food which
they had brought for their imprisoned men-folk. There were several of the wounded
men from the Sanatorium Maurin among the prisoners. Two of them had amputated
legs; one of them had been brought to prison without his crutch and was hopping
about on one foot. There was also a boy of not more than twelve; they were even
arresting children, apparently. The place had the beastly stench that you always get
when crowds of people are penned together without proper sanitary arrangements.
Kopp elbowed his way through the crowd to meet us. His plump fresh-coloured
face looked much as usual, and in that filthy place he had kept his uniform neat
and had even contrived to shave. There was another officer in the uniform of the
Popular Army among the prisoners. He and Kopp saluted as they struggled past
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one another; the gesture was pathetic, somehow. Kopp seemed in excellent spirits.
’Well, I suppose we shall all be shot,’ he said cheerfully. The word ’shot’ gave me a
sort of inward shudder. A bullet had entered my own body recently and the feeling
of it was fresh in my memory; it is not nice to think of that happening to anyone
you know well. At that time I took it for granted that all the principal people in the
P.O.U.M., and Kopp among them, would be shot. The first rumour of Nin’s death
had just filtered through, and we knew that the P.O.U.M. were being accused of
treachery and espionage. Everything pointed to a huge frame-up trial followed by
a massacre of leading ’Trotskyists.’ It is a terrible thing to see your friend in jail and
to know yourself impotent to help him. For there was nothing that one could do;
useless even to appeal to the Belgian authorities, for Kopp had broken the law of his
own country by coming here. I had to leave most of the talking to my wife; with
my squeaking voice I could not make myself heard in the din. Kopp was telling us
about the friends he had made among the other prisoners, about the guards, some
of whom were good fellows, but some of whom abused and beat the more timid
prisoners, and about the food, which was ’pig-wash’. Fortunately we had thought
to bring a packet of food, also cigarettes. Then Kopp began telling us about the
papers that had been taken from him when he was arrested. Among them was his
letter from the Ministry of War, addressed to the colonel commanding engineering
operations in the Army of the East. The police had seized it and refused to give it
back; it was said to be lying in the Chief of Police’s office. It might make a very great
difference if it were recovered.
I saw instantly how important this might be. An official letter of that kind, bearing
the recommendation of the Ministry of War and of General Pozas, would establish
Kopp’s bona fides. But the trouble was to prove that the letter existed; if it were
opened in the Chief of Police’s office one could be sure that some nark or other would
destroy it. There was only one person who might possibly be able to get it back, and
that was the officer to whom it was addressed. Kopp had already thought of this,
and he had written a letter which he wanted me to smuggle out of the jail and post.
But it was obviously quicker and surer to go in person. I left my wife with Kopp,
rushed out, and, after a long search, found a taxi. I knew that time was everything.
It was now about half past five, the colonel would probably leave his office at six,
and by tomorrow the letter might be God knew where–destroyed, perhaps, or lost
somewhere in the chaos of documents that was presumably piling up as suspect after
suspect was arrested. The colonel’s office was at the War Department down by the
quay. As I hurried up the steps the Assault Guard on duty at the door barred the way
with his long bayonet and demanded ’papers’. I waved my discharge ticket at him;
evidently he could not read, and he let me pass, impressed by the vague mystery of
’papers’. Inside, the place was a huge complicated warren running round a central
courtyard, with hundreds of offices on each floor; and, as this was Spain, nobody had
the vaguest idea where the office I was looking for was. I kept repeating: ’El coronel
—-, jefe de ingenieros, Ejercito de Este!’ People smiled and shrugged their shoulders
gracefully. Everyone who had an opinion sent me in a different direction; up these
stairs, down those, along interminable passages which turned out to be blind alleys.
And time was slipping away. I had the strangest sensation of being in a nightmare:
the rushing up and down flights of stairs, the mysterious people coming and going,
the glimpses through open doors of chaotic offices with papers strewn everywhere
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and typewriters clicking; and time slipping away and a life perhaps in the balance.
However, I got there in time, and slightly to my surprise I was granted a hearing.
I did not see Colonel —-, but his aide-de-camp or secretary, a little slip of an officer
in smart uniform, with large and squinting eyes, came out to interview me in the
ante-room. I began to pour forth my story. I had come on behalf of my superior
officer. Major Jorge Kopp, who was on an urgent mission to the front and had been
arrested by mistake. The letter to Colonel —- was of a confidential nature and should
be recovered without delay. I had served with Kopp for months, he was an officer
of the highest character, obviously his arrest was a mistake, the police had confused
him with someone else, etc., etc., etc. I kept piling it on about the urgency of Kopp’s
mission to the front, knowing that this was the strongest point. But it must have
sounded a strange tale, in my villainous Spanish which elapsed into French at every
crisis. The worst was that my voice gave out almost at once and it was only by violent
straining that I could produce a sort of croak. I was in dread that it would disappear
altogether and the little officer would grow tired of trying to listen to me. I have
often wondered what he thought was wrong with my voice–whether he thought I
was drunk or merely suffering from a guilty conscience.
However, he heard me patiently, nodded his head a great number of times, and
gave a guarded assent to what I said. Yes, it sounded as though there might have
been a mistake. Clearly the matter should be looked into. Mañana–. I protested. Not
mañana! The matter was urgent; Kopp was due at the front already. Again the officer
seemed to agree. Then came the question I was dreading:
’This Major Kopp–what force was he serving in?’
The terrible word had to come out: ’In the P.O.U.M. militia.’
’P.O.U.M.!’
I wish I could convey to you the shocked alarm in his voice. You have got to
remember how the P.O.U.M. was regarded at that moment. The spy-scare was at its
height; probably all good Republicans did believe for a day or two that the P.O.U.M.
was a huge spying organization in German pay. To have to say such a thing to an
officer in the Popular Army was like going into the Cavalry Club immediately after
the Red Letter scare and announcing yourself a Communist. His dark eyes moved
obliquely across my face. Another long pause, then he said slowly:
’And you say you were with him at the front. Then you were serving in the
P.O.U.M. militia yourself?’
’Yes.’
He turned and dived into the colonel’s room. I could hear an agitated conversa-
tion. ’It’s all up,’ I thought. We should never get Kopp’s letter back. Moreover I had
had to confess that I was in the P.O.U.M. myself, and no doubt they would ring up
the police and get me arrested, just to add another Trotskyist to the bag. Presently,
however, the officer reappeared, fitting on his cap, and sternly signed to me to fol-
low. We were going to the Chief of Police’s office. It was a long way, twenty minutes’
walk. The little officer marched stiffly in front with a military step. We did not ex-
change a single word the whole way. When we got to the Chief of Police’s office a
crowd of the most dreadful-looking scoundrels, obviously police narks, informers,
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and spies of every kind, were hanging about outside the door. The little officer went
in; there was a long, heated conversation. You could hear voices furiously raised;
you pictured violent gestures, shrugging of the shoulders, hangings on the table.
Evidently the police were refusing to give the letter up. At last, however, the officer
emerged, flushed, but carrying a large official envelope. It was Kopp’s letter. We
had won a tiny victory–which, as it turned out, made not the slightest difference.
The letter was duly delivered, but Kopp’s military superiors were quite unable to
get him out of jail.
The officer promised me that the letter should be delivered. But what about Kopp?
I said. Could we not get him released? He shrugged his shoulders. That was another
matter. They did not know what Kopp had been arrested for. He would only tell me
that the proper inquiries would be made. There was no more to be said; it was time
to part. Both of us bowed slightly. And then there happened a strange and moving
thing. The little officer hesitated a moment, then stepped across, and shook hands
with me.
I do not know if I can bring home to you how deeply that action touched me. It
sounds a small thing, but it was not. You have got to realize what was the feeling of
the time–the horrible atmosphere of suspicion and hatred, the lies and rumours cir-
culating everywhere, the posters screaming from the hoardings that I and everyone
like me was a Fascist spy. And you have got to remember that we were standing out-
side the Chief of Police’s office, in front of that filthy gang of tale-bearers and agents
provocateurs, any one of whom might know that I was ’wanted’ by the police. It was
like publicly shaking hands with a German during the Great War. I suppose he had
decided in some way that I was not really a Fascist spy; still, it was good of him to
shake hands.
I record this, trivial though it may sound, because it is somehow typical of Spain–
of the flashes of magnanimity that you get from Spaniards in the worst of circum-
stances. I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories
of Spaniards. I only twice remember even being seriously angry with a Spaniard,
and on each occasion, when I look back, I believe I was in the wrong myself. They
have, there is no doubt, a generosity, a species of nobility, that do not really belong to
the twentieth century. It is this that makes one hope that in Spain even Fascism may
take a comparatively loose and bearable form. Few Spaniards possess the damnable
efficiency and consistency that a modern totalitarian state needs. There had been a
queer little illustration of this fact a few nights earlier, when the police had searched
my wife’s room. As a matter of fact that search was a very interesting business, and
I wish I had seen it, though perhaps it is as well that I did not, for I might not have
kept my temper.
The police conducted the search in the recognized Ogpu or Gestapo style. In the
small hours of the morning there was a pounding on the door, and six men marched
in, switched on the light, and immediately took up various positions about the room,
obviously agreed upon beforehand. They then searched both rooms (there was a
bathroom attached) with inconceivable thoroughness. They sounded the walls, took
up the mats, examined the floor, felt the curtains, probed under the bath and the
radiator, emptied every drawer and suitcase and felt every garment and held it up
to the light. They impounded all papers, including the contents of the waste-paper
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basket, and all our books into the bargain. They were thrown into ecstasies of suspi-
cion by finding that we possessed a French translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. If that
had been the only book they found our doom would have been sealed. It is obvious
that a person who reads Mein Kampf must be a Fascist. The next moment, however,
they came upon a copy of Stalin’s pamphlet, Ways of Liquidating Trotskyists and other
Double Dealers, which reassured them somewhat. In one drawer there was a number
of packets of cigarette papers. They picked each packet to pieces and examined each
paper separately, in case there should be messages written on them. Altogether they
were on the job for nearly two hours. Yet all this time they never searched the bed. My
wife was lying in bed all the while; obviously there might have been half a dozen
sub-machine-guns under the mattress, not to mention a library of Trotskyist docu-
ments under the pillow. Yet the detectives made no move to touch the bed, never
even looked underneath it. I cannot believe that this is a regular feature of the Ogpu
routine. One must remember that the police were almost entirely under Communist
control, and these men were probably Communist Party members themselves. But
they were also Spaniards, and to turn a woman out of bed was a little too much for
them. This part of the job was silently dropped, making the whole search meaning-
less.
That night McNair, Cottman, and I slept in some long grass at the edge of a derelict
building-lot. It was a cold night for the time of year and no one slept much. I remem-
ber the long dismal hours of loitering about before one could get a cup of coffee. For
the first time since I had been in Barcelona I went to have a look at the cathedral–a
modern cathedral, and one of the most hideous buildings in the world. It has four
crenellated spires exactly the shape of hock bottles. Unlike most of the churches
in Barcelona it was not damaged during the revolution–it was spared because of its
’artistic value’, people said. I think the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it
up when they had the chance, though they did hang a red and black banner between
its spires. That afternoon my wife and I went to see Kopp for the last time. There
was nothing that we could do for him, absolutely nothing, except to say good-bye
and leave money with Spanish friends who would take him food and cigarettes. A
little while later, however, after we had left Barcelona, he was placed incommunicado
and not even food could be sent to him. That night, walking down the Ramblas, we
passed the Café Moka, which the Civil Guards were still holding in force. On an
impulse I went in and spoke to two of them who were leaning against the counter
with their rifles slung over their shoulders. I asked them if they knew which of their
comrades had been on duty here at the time of the May fighting. They did not know,
and, with the usual Spanish vagueness, did not know how one could find out. I
said that my friend Jorge Kopp was in prison and would perhaps be put on trial for
something in connexion with the May fighting; that the men who were on duty here
would know that he had stopped the fighting and saved some of their lives; they
ought to come forward and give evidence to that effect. One of the men I was talk-
ing to was a dull, heavy-looking man who kept shaking his head because he could
not hear my voice in the din of the traffic. But the other was different. He said he
had heard of Kopp’s action from some of his comrades; Kopp was buen chico (a good
fellow). But even at the time I knew that it was all useless. If Kopp were ever tried,
it would be, as in all such trials, with faked evidence. If he has been shot (and I am
afraid it is quite likely), that will be his epitaph: the buen chico of the poor Civil Guard
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who was part of a dirty system but had remained enough of a human being to know
a decent action when he saw one.
It was an extraordinary, insane existence that we were leading. By night we were
criminals, but by day we were prosperous English visitors–that was our pose, any-
way. Even after a night in the open, a shave, a bath, and a shoe-shine do wonders
with your appearance. The safest thing at present was to look as bourgeois as possi-
ble. We frequented the fashionable residential quarter of the town, where our faces
were not known, went to expensive restaurants, and were very English with the
waiters. For the first time in my life I took to writing things on walls. The passage-
ways of several smart restaurants had ’Visca P.O.U.M.!’ scrawled on them as large
as I could write it. All the while, though I was technically in hiding, I could not
feel myself in danger. The whole thing seemed too absurd. I had the ineradicable
English belief that ’they’ cannot arrest you unless you have broken the law. It is a
most dangerous belief to have during a political pogrom. There was a warrant out
for McNair’s arrest, and the chances were that the rest of us were on the list as well.
The arrests, raids, searchings were continuing without pause; practically everyone
we knew, except those who were still at the front, was in jail by this time. The police
were even boarding the French ships that periodically took off refugees and seizing
suspected ’Trotskyists’.
Thanks to the kindness of the British consul, who must have had a very trying
time during that week, we had managed to get our passports into order. The sooner
we left the better. There was a train that was due to leave for Port Bou at half past
seven in the evening and might normally be expected to leave at about half past
eight. We arranged that my wife should order a taxi beforehand and then pack her
bags, pay her bill, and leave the hotel at the last possible moment. If she gave the
hotel people too much notice they would be sure to send for the police. I got down
to the station at about seven to find that the train had already gone–it had left at ten
to seven. The engine-driver had changed his mind, as usual. Fortunately we man-
aged to warn my wife in time. There was another train early the following morning.
McNair, Cottman, and I had dinner at a little restaurant near the station and by cau-
tious questioning discovered that the restaurant-keeper was a C.N.T. member and
friendly. He let us a three-bedded room and forgot to warn the police. It was the first
time in five nights that I had been able to sleep with my clothes off.
Next morning my wife slipped out of the hotel successfully. The train was about
an hour late in starting. I filled in the time by writing a long letter to the Ministry of
War, telling them about Kopp’s case–that without a doubt he had been arrested by
mistake, that he was urgently needed at the front, that countless people would testify
that he was innocent of any offence, etc., etc., etc. I wonder if anyone read that letter,
written on pages torn out of a note-book in wobbly handwriting (my fingers were
still partly paralysed) and still more wobbly Spanish. At any rate, neither this letter
nor anything else took effect. As I write, six months after the event, Kopp (if he has
not been shot) is still in jail, untried and uncharged. At the beginning we had two
or three letters from him, smuggled out by released prisoners and posted in France.
They all told the same story–imprisonment in filthy dark dens, bad and insufficient
food, serious illness due to the conditions of imprisonment, and refusal of medical
attention. I have had all this confirmed from several other sources, English and
French. More recently he disappeared into one of the ’secret prisons’ with which it
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CHAPTER 14
seems impossible to make any kind of communication. His case is the case of scores
or hundreds of foreigners and no one knows how many thousands of Spaniards.
In the end we crossed the frontier without incident. The train had a first class and
a dining-car, the first I had seen in Spain. Until recently there had been only one class
on the trains in Catalonia. Two detectives came round the train taking the names of
foreigners, but when they saw us in the dining-car they seemed satisfied that we
were respectable. It was queer how everything had changed. Only six months ago,
when the Anarchists still reigned, it was looking like a proletarian that made you
respectable. On the way down from Perpignan to Cerberes a French commercial
traveller in my carriage had said to me in all solemnity: ’You mustn’t go into Spain
looking like that. Take off that collar and tie. They’ll tear them off you in Barcelona.’
He was exaggerating, but it showed how Catalonia was regarded. And at the fron-
tier the Anarchist guards had turned back a smartly dressed Frenchman and his wife,
solely–I think–because they looked too bourgeois. Now it was the other way about;
to look bourgeois was the one salvation. At the passport office they looked us up
in the card-index of suspects, but thanks to the inefficiency of the police our names
were not listed, not even McNair’s. We were searched from head to foot, but we pos-
sessed nothing incriminating, except my discharge-papers, and the carabineros who
searched me did not know that the 29th Division was the P.O.U.M. So we slipped
through the barrier, and after just six months I was on French soil again. My only
souvenirs of Spain were a goatskin water-bottle and one of those tiny iron lamps
in which the Aragón peasants burn olive oil-lamps almost exactly the shape of the
terra-cotta lamps that the Romans used two thousand years ago–which I had picked
up in some ruined hut, and which had somehow got stuck in my luggage.
After all, it turned out that we had come away none too soon. The very first news-
paper we saw announced McNair’s arrest for espionage. The Spanish authorities
had been a little premature in announcing this. Fortunately, ’Trotskyism’ is not ex-
traditable.
I wonder what is the appropriate first action when you come from a country at
war and set foot on peaceful soil. Mine was to rush to the tobacco-kiosk and buy
as many cigars and cigarettes as I could stuff into my pockets. Then we all went to
the buffet and had a cup of tea, the first tea with fresh milk in it that we had had
for many months. It was several days before I could get used to the idea that you
could buy cigarettes whenever you wanted them. I always half-expected to see the
tobacconists’ doors barred and the forbidding notice ’No hay tabaco’ in the window.
McNair and Cottman were going on to Paris. My wife and I got off the train at
Banyuls, the first station up the line, feeling that we would like a rest. We were
not too well received in Banyuls when they discovered that we had come from
Barcelona. Quite a number of times I was involved in the same conversation: ’You
come from Spain? Which side were you fighting on? The Government? Oh!’–and
then a marked coolness. The little town seemed solidly pro-Franco, no doubt be-
cause of the various Spanish Fascist refugees who had arrived there from time to
time. The waiter at the café I frequented was a pro-Franco Spaniard and used to give
me lowering glances as he served me with an aperitif. It was otherwise in Perpig-
nan, which was stiff with Government partisans and where all the different factions
were caballing against one another almost as in Barcelona. There was one café where
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CHAPTER 14
the word ’P.O.U.M.’ immediately procured you French friends and smiles from the
waiter.
I think we stayed three days in Banyuls. It was a strangely restless time. In this
quiet fishing-town, remote from bombs, machine-guns, food-queues, propaganda,
and intrigue, we ought to have felt profoundly relieved and thankful. We felt noth-
ing of the kind. The things we had seen in Spain did not recede and fall into propor-
tion now that we were away from them; instead they rushed back upon us and were
far more vivid than before. We thought, talked, dreamed incessantly of Spain. For
months past we had been telling ourselves that ’when we get out of Spain’ we would
go somewhere beside the Mediterranean and be quiet for a little while and perhaps
do a little fishing, but now that we were here it was merely a bore and a disappoint-
ment. It was chilly weather, a persistent wind blew off the sea, the water was dull
and choppy, round the harbour’s edge a scum of ashes, corks, and fish-guts bobbed
against the stones. It sounds like lunacy, but the thing that both of us wanted was
to be back in Spain. Though it could have done no good to anybody, might indeed
have done serious harm, both of us wished that we had stayed to be imprisoned
along with the others. I suppose I have failed to convey more than a little of what
those months in Spain meant to me. I have recorded some of the outward events,
but I cannot record the feeling they have left me with. It is all mixed up with sights,
smells, and sounds that cannot be conveyed in writing: the smell of the trenches, the
mountain dawns stretching away into inconceivable distances, the frosty crackle of
bullets, the roar and glare of bombs; the clear cold light of the Barcelona mornings,
and the stamp of boots in the barrack yard, back in December when people still be-
lieved in the revolution; and the food-queues and the red and black flags and the
faces of Spanish militiamen; above all the faces of militiamen–men whom I knew in
the line and who are now scattered Lord knows where, some killed in battle, some
maimed, some in prison–most of them, I hope, still safe and sound. Good luck to
them all; I hope they win their war and drive all the foreigners out of Spain, Ger-
mans, Russians, and Italians alike. This war, in which I played so ineffectual a part,
has left me with memories that are mostly evil, and yet I do not wish that I had
missed it. When you have had a glimpse of such a disaster as this–and however it
ends the Spanish war will turn out to have been an appalling disaster, quite apart
from the slaughter and physical suffering–the result is not necessarily disillusion-
ment and cynicism. Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not
less but more belief in the decency of human beings. And I hope the account I have
given is not too misleading. I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be
completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have
seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a
partisan. In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now:
beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused
by my having seen only one corner of events. And beware of exactly the same things
when you read any other book on this period of the Spanish war.
Because of the feeling that we ought to be doing something, though actually there
was nothing we could do, we left Banyuls earlier than we had intended. With ev-
ery mile that you went northward France grew greener and softer. Away from the
mountain and the vine, back to the meadow and the elm. When I had passed through
Paris on my way to Spain it had seemed to me decayed and gloomy, very different
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CHAPTER 14
from the Paris I had known eight years earlier, when living was cheap and Hitler
was not heard of. Half the cafés I used to know were shut for lack of custom, and
everyone was obsessed with the high cost of living and the fear of war. Now, after
poor Spain, even Paris seemed gay and prosperous. And the Exhibition was in full
swing, though we managed to avoid visiting it.
And then England–southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the
world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully
recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage under
your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in
Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the
doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The indus-
trial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the
earth’s surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood:
the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great
shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows,
the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the
huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar
streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler
hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen–all sleeping
the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never
wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.
THE END
138

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14

Essay 1

How does Orwell – as an outsider – navigate the ideas and realities of war in Spain? Does his perspective provide any unique insights into the character of the Spanish Civil War? And finally why, according to Orwell, does fascism triumph?

The Thesis Statement=
CSC
Context
Subject
Claim
What, or who is the primary subject of this essay?
What is the context?
What is your claim?
While this essay will feature summarization, its success will hinge on your critical interpretation/argument.

The Thesis Statement, cont.
Writing is thinking.
Consider writing your thesis statement last.
Use an outline of your ideas to arrange your writing.

Example: Find the context, subject, and claim
The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII signaled to the USSR that the U.S. was the dominant military force on the planet.
In the post-WWII decades, “white flight” from American cities into the suburbs was underwritten by racially tinged zoning practices and federal lending programs that favored white consumers.

The Introductory Paragraph
The basic points in your essay should be found in the introductory paragraph.
Your thesis should be included in the introduction, usually near the end of the paragraph.
For this essay, you want to get to your argument/arguments quickly. Three-to-four pages is very short. Avoid long, flowery intro and/or over summarization

Structure
Use topic sentences to arrange your paragraphs
Each of the body paragraphs should further the claims made in your thesis.
Paragraphs should be joined by transition statements

Conclusion
For this essay, you need to provide a brief final paragraph that reiterates your thesis and the points made in your essay .
The conclusion should provide a “take away” for the reader

Revision
Avoid starting your essay the night before it is due.
Revise and edit your essay carefully. I will grade on grammar and punctuation as well as critical content.
Consider reading your essay aloud and revising accordingly before submitting it.

Plagiarism
Plagiarism will result in a zero on your essay.
Plagiarism cases will be turned over to the SCAIP (Student Conduct and Academic Integrity Programs).
According to the SCAIP website, plagiarism is:
The appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit. This includes the copying of language, structure, or ideas of another and attributing (explicitly or implicitly) the work to one’s own efforts. Plagiarism means using another’s work without giving credit (https://conduct.ucr.edu/policies/academic-integrity-policies-and-procedures#plagiarism)

Citation
For this essay, citation is straightforward. All you need is a copy of Homage to Catalonia.
Use parenthetical citation (MLA format). See: MLA parenthetical citation at: https://owl.purdue.edu/

Paraphrase or direct citation

Paraphrase Example
After several months in Spain, Orwell learned that there was a rift between the anarchists and the communists (Orwell 98).

Direct citation example
Even as the Spanish Civil War was still raging, Orwell realized that it was difficult to “write accurately” about political events because of the “lack of non-propagandist documents”(231).

Works Cited Page
Please note which copy you are using (first edition, 2016 edition, etc.) in a works cited page. This will help me to track down direct quotes or paraphrasing while assessing your essay.
If you use any outside sources, these need to be included in your works cited page.

Format
Name and Course #
Post paper to Safe Assignment
Use 12-point font
Times New Roman
Double Spaced
Provide a title
One-Inch margins
Note: I will be out of town on Thursday, Jan. 30. Please put your printed paper in my mailbox (LUCE) anytime before four P.M. on Thursday. I will have a colleague collect the papers on Friday morning. If you cannot get to my mailbox, slide your essay under my office door at HMNSS 2304.

Group Activity
Working in groups of 2-4, discuss the differences between the ideas and the realities that Orwell observed in Spain. Be specific. It might be useful to consider the following:
What was the complicated political situation that Orwell recorded upon his return to Barcelona in May 1937?
What was the function of propaganda and how did it differ from the actual aims of various groups on the ground.
Terms to consider: Anarchist, Socialist, Communist, Proletariat, Bourgeoise, Stalinist, Trotskyist