Title:      Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Author:     George Orwell
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0201111.txt
Edition:    1
Language:   English
Character set encoding:     Latin-1(ISO-8859-1)--8 bit
Date first posted:          December 2002
Date most recently updated: December 2002

Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
file.

This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at
http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Author:     George Orwell





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 efface 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, Ingles. Y tu?'

'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 meeting 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 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 revolutionary parties; almost
every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were
being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe 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 'Senior' or 'Don' or
even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' and 'Thou', and said
'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias'. Tipping was forbidden by law; 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 bellowing
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
number 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, 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
ballads 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 revolution. In every comer you came upon piles of smashed
furniture, broken saddles, brass cavalry-helmets, empty sabre-scabbards, and
decaying food. There was frightful 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 population 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 porron. A porron 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, and it
can be passed from hand to hand. I went on strike and demanded a drinking-cup as
soon as I saw a porron 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 received 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, others 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 conceivable 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 circumstances. 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 newspaper 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
'instruction'. 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 'Senor'.
'What! Senor? Who is that calling me Senor? 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 instruction 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 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 Espana. 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:

'To se manejar fusil. Mo se manejar ametralladora. Quiero apprender
ametralladora. Quando vamos apprender ametralladora?'

The answer was always a harassed smile and a promise that there should be
machine-gun instruction manana. Needless to say manana 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 I 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 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 already 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 militiaman'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
Aragonese 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
circumstances. 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: 'Mas 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
manana--'tomorrow' (literally, 'the morning'). Whenever it is conceivably
possible, the business of today is put off until manana. 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, mananas, 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 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
harassed, 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 shouting 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 enthusiasm, 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 diarrhoea.
The train crawled out of Catalonia and on to the plateau of Aragon at the normal
wartime speed of something under twenty kilometres an hour.




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 Aragonese 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
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, various 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 overalls. 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
shovelling 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 deserters 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 maricoon (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 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
harvest. 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 thinking 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 admit, 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
narrow 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 everywhere. 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 fortified 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 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 speaking 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, making 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 children 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
position. 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 parapet. 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 indescribably disappointed. We were nowhere near them!
At that range our rifles were completely 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 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.




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 conceivable, 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 Aragon 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 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). The scenery was stupendous, if you could forget that every
mountain--top was occupied 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
ourselves 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. Behind 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, obviously 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 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 Aragon
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 circumstances 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 resisted. Later it became the fashion to
decry the militias, and therefore to pretend 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 undisciplined 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 discipline 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
bullying 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 invoked 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
comradeship. 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 discipline 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. Individual 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 victories, 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
apparent 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 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 memories 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 eagerly on tiny twigs of wood. Three people searching for a
couple of hours could collect 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 mountain-side; 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 unburnable. 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 under 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
uncomfortably 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
permanently 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 doing 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 possible 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 militiaman 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 obvious 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 matter of fact the stagnation on the Aragon 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 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 approximately 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
because 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 reserved 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, 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 constructed 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
electric 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 nature, such as Cultura--progreso, or Seremos--invencibles, and
it was often impossible to get illiterate sentries to remember these
highfalutin' words. One night, I remember, the password was Cataluna--eroica,
and a moonfaced peasant lad named Jaime Domenech approached me, greatly puzzled,
and asked me to explain.

'Eroica--what does eroica 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! Cataluna!'

'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.




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 position 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 portholes 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 somewhat closer to us here, perhaps three or four hundred
yards away. Their nearest position was exactly opposite ours, with a machine-gun
nest whose loopholes constantly 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, on the backs of mules or
little persecuted donkeys. For some reason the Aragon 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 Espana! 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 position men, usually machine-gunners, were told
off for shouting-duty and provided with megaphones. Generally they shouted a
set-piece, full of revolutionary sentiments 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 difficult 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. Sometimes, 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 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 bombing,
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
Aragon, announcing the fall of Malaga.

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 Malaga. 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.

When the Fascists told us that Malaga 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 civilian 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
Malaga 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.




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 revolutionary 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 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 political 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 expectation, 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 feudalism. 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 England, 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 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. [Note 1, below] Moreover, the one step that could save the immediate situation,
the arming of the workers, was only taken unwillingly and in response to violent
popular 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.

[Note 1. Quiroga, Barrios, and Giral. The first two refused to distribute arms
to the trade unions.]

Meanwhile the workers had weapons in their hands, and at this stage they
refrained 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 collectivization 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 almost untouched, and others where
they existed side by side with revolutionary committees. 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 industries.
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 possible. 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 publicity 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 undoubtedly 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 revolutionary groups which exist in all countries, the whole world
was determined, upon preventing revolution in Spain. In particular the Communist
Party, with Soviet 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, represented 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 reorganization. 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 anti-revolutionary policy, talked about 'our glorious
revolution'. And meanwhile the Communist press in foreign countries was shouting
that there was no sign of revolution 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 people were fighting for social
revolution, or for anything other than bourgeois democracy, 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 foreign 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.
Obviously 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 ordinary 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 Government and the Generalite
de Cataluna (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 Anarchists). The
Catalan Generalite was for a while virtually superseded by an anti-Fascist
Defence Committee [Note 2, below] 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; finally, a year after the outbreak of war and revolution,
there remained a Government composed entirely of Right-wing Socialists, Liberals,
and Communists.

[Note 2. Comite Central de Milicias Antifascistas.
Delegates were chosen in proportion to the membership 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).]

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
reasons, 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 substance, '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 Generalite, 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 importance, 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. [Note 3, below] Thirdly, by proclaiming
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 peasants 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 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 necessary
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 Anarchists, 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 local 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 redistributed
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. Obviously 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 revolutionary 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 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 anti-revolutionary force. The whole of Comintern
policy is now subordinated (excusably, considering 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 Secretary of the French Communist Party, was declaring that
the French workers would never be bamboozled into fighting against their German
comrades; [Note 4, below] he is now one of the loudest-lunged patriots
in France. The clue to the behaviour of the Communist 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, ostensibly, 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 undoubtedly influenced by the
fact that France, Russia's ally, would strongly object to a revolutionary
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.
[Note 5, below]

[Note 3. This was why there were so few Russian arms on
the Aragon front, where the troops were predominantly 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-machine-gun.]

[Note 4. In the Chamber of Deputies, March 1935.]

[Note 5. For 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.]

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 implied 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. members, 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 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
mattered, the P.S.U.C., the P.O.U.M., and the C.N.T.-F.A.I., loosely described
as the Anarchists. 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 Cataluna) 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 Communist 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 organization. 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 Collectivization 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 under 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
importance of winning the war. The P.O.U.M. (Partido Obrero de Unificacion
Marxista) was one of those dissident Communist parties which have appeared in
many countries 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 and partly of an earlier party, the Workers' and
Peasants' Bloc. Numerically it was a small party, [Note 6, below] with not
much influence outside Catalonia, and chiefly important because it contained an
unusually high proportion of politically conscious members. In Catalonia its
chief stronghold was Lerida. 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:

[Note 6. The 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 probably 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 over-estimates its own
numbers.]

'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 alternative 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. Meanwhile 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
'Anarchists' 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. Especially since the beginning of the war they
had moved more in the direction of ordinary 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 democracy. They accepted the
P.O.U.M. slogan: 'The war and the revolution are inseparable', though they were
less dogmatic about it. Roughly speaking, the C.N.T.-F.A.I. stood for: (i)
Direct control over industry by the workers engaged in each industry, e.g.
transport, the textile factories, etc.; (2) Government by local committees and
resistance to all forms of centralized authoritarianism; (3) Uncompromising
hostility 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 hatred 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 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 equality. 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
Anarchists, 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 different. 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 disastrous 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 attract 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
newspapers 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 Communists, they had no footing in any press outside
their own country, and inside Spain 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 hundreds 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, especially 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 Communists 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 dishonest as that of the Right. [Note 7, below] 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 murderers, 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.

[Note 7. I 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.]

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 Fascists. 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 domestic 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 January and I did not go on leave till late April; and all
this time--indeed, till later--in the strip of Aragon 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 breathing 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 iso