The war that made Orwell

In other words, he thought he had found what he had been looking for in Part Two of Wigan Pier: a socialism that did not need its ‘sleek little professors’ to tell it what it was. He intuited the same instincts in the Spanish working class which he had found in the English. In Lancashire and Yorkshire he believed he had found the real England in a class of men whose loyalty was not to something abstract, as it tended to be with intellectuals; or to something he could hardly comprehend, as it was with the Burmese; or to something unknowable, as it was with the tramps—but a loyalty to each other, face to face, here and now, without question, whatever the odds. And so it was with the Catalans, except they were not only loyal, they were armed and loyal. The English miners were a class in themselves. The Spanish militias, on the other hand, were a class for themselves. Having saved the Republic from ‘Black’ Spain, the land of colonels, priests, and landowners, they now seemed ready to establish Red Spain, a land fit for workers and peasants. Here began Orwell’s first lesson in Revolution:

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; every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying 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 unceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Senor’ 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.

He saw action twice. First in early April as part of a wider Republican drive—as reported in the New Leader at the beginning of this book. Orwell’s own account of the action is in chapter 7 of Homage to Catalonia and is a masterpiece. If the attack was part of the revolution, he is saying, no politician could possibly comprehend it because we who made the attack could not comprehend it either. Their rifles jam, their bombs stick, they crawl on their bellies sick with fear there, and they crawl on their bellies sick with fear back, and they achieve nothing in between but casualties. None of this was predictable before the attack. None of it made sense after. Orwell gets back to his lines, quite incongruously remembering only ‘the bare misery of the Fascist dug outs’. They are told by their superiors that the attack was a great success, but he hardly believes it. They always said such things.

He never made of the war more than a matter of being there. When he looked back, what mattered most was ‘first of all the physical memories, the sounds, the smells, and the surfaces of things’. The rest was a question of getting through it with all the experience, instinct, and common sense you could cup in your hands. If you have no heavy weaponry and face an enemy who has machine-guns, there are only three things you can do. You can dig in at 400 yards. You can advance and get mown down. Or you can make pointless small-scale night-attacks of the sort described. The common-sense alternative to all this, and what matters most, apart from a weapon that doesn’t jam, was firewood, food, tobacco, candles, warm blankets, good boots, and a daily alternative to the boredom and the vermin. Always drawn to the little platoons and the little platoons to him, his comrades made him their corporal. After 115 days away, Eileen remembered him back from the front. ‘He arrived completely ragged, almost bare-foot, a little lousy, dark brown and looking really well. For the previous 12 hours he had been in trains consuming anis, muscatel out of anis bottles, sardines and chocolate.’

No sooner was Orwell back in Barcelona than he was in action again. This time, however, he found himself fighting his own side. After months of left factionalism in government circles, a new Republican army was on the streets of Barcelona while the old Caballero regime was falling apart in Valencia. By the middle of May, after perhaps 500 had died in what Orwell later referred to as a ‘dust up’ between the army and the militias, Juan Negrin was in, Caballero was out, and the POUM was on its way out.

Internecine struggles had been simmering all winter. They boiled over on 25 April, after Caballero dismissed the Communist-controlled defence committee of Madrid and fighting broke out between Anarchists and Communists in the Catalan border town of Puigcerda, and Roldan Cortada, a well-known Communist, was assassinated in Barcelona. When Orwell arrived back on the 26th mass rallies were taking place in memory of Cortada, while Anarchist suspects were being rounded up. Orwell was due to return to the front in a matter of days, but opted to stay put while the POUM militia—officially subordinate to the mass Catalan Anarchist trade union the CNT, but fiercely independent too—stood its ground and refused to surrender its weapons. Fighting broke out in and around the Telephone Exchange on 3 May, after police tried to dislodge telephone workers who had been carrying out their duties in a conscientious Anarchist fashion.

He looked on amazed at the sudden turn of events. While the POUM was fighting Fascists at the front, the Republic was fighting, or at any rate hassling, the POUM in its own backyard. ‘Anti-Fascism’ was a Communist concept subject to an array of Soviet interpretations, but this was ridiculous. Loyal to his comrades, and loyal to the anti-Fascist cause as he saw it, Orwell took his rifle, an old Mauser, up onto a cinema roof overlooking the Ramblas and loitered there looking for a kill. In so doing, as a well-educated man at the heart of a revolution, he mused that he should feel part of history. But he never did. ‘At such times the physical details always outweighed everything else’:

When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick—one never does when a shot goes home . . . In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down...he sagged to his knees. (‘Shooting an Elephant’, New Writing, 1936)

Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all around me, and I felt a tremendous shock—no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing. The sand bags in front of me receded into immense distance...The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling. (Homage to Catalonia, 1938)

He was lucky to survive. As he said, Spanish marksmanship saved his life a few times. It took eight days to move him down the line from field stations to hospitals to a sanatorium in Barcelona where, after two weeks’ convalescence, he was released. Released, but as a soldier not discharged, and by no means at liberty. For its part in resisting the May demilitarization the POUM was being accused of treason in the press, and on 16 June, the day after a sick and heavily bandaged Orwell set out back to the front to secure his discharge papers, the government finally declared it an illegal organization, raiding its offices and closing its newspaper, La Batalla. Security police and others were making arrests. POUM’s leader, Andres Nin, was taken on the same day, and held in a Communist private prison, or checa, where he was tortured, possibly with some government knowledge (though it was still early for the Negrin government which had only been in power three days). Other comrades, including Georges Kopp, formerly commandant of the Lenin division, and Bob Smillie, from Orwell’s old platoon, had also been arrested, Kopp on 20 June.

It took no time for Republican security forces to identify Orwell and his wife as spies. On 18 June, the same day her husband was issued with a medical discharge and safe passage by the 29th Army Division, security men raided Eileen’s room at the hotel. She stayed in bed, concealing their ILP papers. When Orwell got back from the front on the 20th the Blairs expected to be arrested at any minute. Because Eileen was clearly the bait, she stayed at the hotel while Orwell slept rough. They pestered the British Consulate for visas and looked for a way out, while at considerable risk to themselves they also went to see Kopp in jail, where they lobbied on his behalf. To no avail. Kopp spent eighteen months in prison. Bob Smillie was already dead—murdered, or allowed to die in custody, whichever way it was.

On 23 June, along with Stafford Cottman, another British volunteer from Orwell’s old platoon, and the ILP official John McNair, the Blairs left Barcelona by train, posing as war tourists. If they had been caught they would most certainly have been arrested. Three weeks after crossing over into France a full indictment was published against them for High Treason and Espionage: ‘One must consider them ILP agents of the POUM.’ ‘Eric Blair took part in the events of May.’ It seems they had been spied upon by men they took to be their comrades. Here ended Orwell’s second lesson in Revolution.

Man to man

Orwell claimed later that he had gone to Spain knowing nothing of Spanish politics and with no idea what kind of war he was joining. He saw it as a war against Fascism and that was that. But this was not quite true. The Road to Wigan Pier is not exactly politically innocent, and there are strong similarities in the stance he took against left-wing intellectuals in that book and the stance he took against them in Homage to Catalonia. In other words, he was keen to write a book about Spain just as he had written one about England, and just as he drew powerful conclusions from his English experience, so he drew them from his Spanish, with exactly the same reversals of expectation. He goes to Wigan with grave doubts about capitalism, and leaves it with grave doubts about socialism. He goes to Spain an out-and-out anti-Fascist, and leaves it an out-and-out anti-Communist. Orwell’s politics was developing now as a matter of truth to action. The miners had shown him a better England and made him a better man. The Spanish people had saved the Republic and shown him a new Spain. Twice he had seen the truth for himself. Now he was going to act on it.

Homage to Catalonia is told in the first person. It rarely speculates beyond that, but equally there is hardly a sentence which does not carry some wider nuance. Consider how his description of the attempt to save Georges Kopp turns from a matter of first-person fact into the wider significance of why it matters at all. The narrative starts, ‘My wife and I visited Kopp that afternoon’. They try to retrieve from the police documents that had been taken from Kopp and might serve to save his life. An army officer helps. He is entirely sympathetic, if entirely proper, in his response to Major Kopp. The police, by contrast, are corrupt. Having retrieved the army documents but having failed, nevertheless, to obtain Kopp’s release, Orwell and the army officer accept the situation, bow slightly to each other, ‘and then there happened a strange and moving thing, the little officer hesitated a moment, then stepped across, and shook hands with me’. Orwell says he records this encounter because, ‘trivial though it may sound . . . it is somehow typical of Spain’.

Note the ‘somehow’. As in Orwell’s exchange with the militiaman at the start of the book, the passage may be rooted in chance encounters and quicksilver reporting, but it is also reaching out with a wider meaning, a meaning which in a lesser writer or a lazier journalist would look tendentious. Encounters like this are repeated all through; they are his homage. Orwell is feeling his way not only towards an anti-politics politics, but also towards an anti-literary literariness that ultimately becomes his house style. I have not got the time to make the story into literature, he seems to be saying. But he only seems to be saying it. In Orwell, the writer always beats the journalist to the story.

Rather than identify ‘Orwell’ as like them, we do better to identify a coming generation of journalists as like him. Always a better essayist than a novelist, in Homage to Catalonia he is a book-length essayist trying to capture the intimacy of the first-person novelist. Jenni Calder has called this ‘the necessity of action’ in his writing. The style was not entirely original. Documentary film-makers had been trying to do first person for ten years or more. Social investigators had been taking readers into London slum life for well over fifty, and a few before that. Modern war reporting had relied on personal witness for even longer. Orwell’s notebooks bulged with cuttings and pamphlets and duplicates. He had always been an immediate, there-and-then kind of guy; keen to know, find out, explain, move on. His nieces and nephews remembered him that way. So did the Peters brothers—‘A walk was a mixture of energy, adventure and matters of fact. The world, we felt, was just like this.’ So did the boys he taught at prep school. He was a good teacher. His flatmates, schoolfriends, and Spanish comrades too, all remembered him as someone who ‘always reacted to situations’, was ‘awfully personal’, and who wanted to get involved and understand people. ‘He was not, I repeat, not a snob.’

You might say, therefore, that even though he hardly ever worked to deadlines from the front, there was something of the journalist in him. But you might also say that a man who went in search of the truth was bound to react strongly when his own side told lies, not only against himself but against his wife and comrades too, as a matter of course. Orwell felt trashed by Republican Spain. Fascism could never have hurt him like this, because he had no interest in Fascists. It was as if in Barcelona his taste for life and his taste for art and politics came together, once at the outset to be exalted, once at the end to be disgusted. In defence of the Revolution and against those who had betrayed it, Orwell found his voice. No English journalist, with the possible exception of Hazlitt or Cobbett, had been so personally driven or self-possessed.

So, in his urge to tell it like it was whatever the cost, Orwell had a lot of the journalist in him. But the theory was that the modern press had learned not only to invent ‘the masses’, but to comfort and deceive them too. The first British instance was generally thought to be the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), a literary war with Kipling taking special briefings from the generals while Edgar Wallace (Daily Mail ), Henry Nevinson (Daily Chronicle), Winston Churchill (Morning Post), and J. A. Hobson (Manchester Guardian) reported back from the action. South Africa was a unique war in British history. For the first time, a tight relationship between pressmen and politicians was apparent. In the United States, Walter Lippman talked in 1922 of ‘the manufacture of consent’ out of newspaper stereotypes and fictions, while Norman Angell talked in 1914 and again in 1926 of the newspaper industry’s daily drive for ‘the quickest reaction from the very largest number’. In Great Britain, Harold Lasswell warned in 1927 against too much emotion in the press— though not without admiration for newspapermen’s ‘terse, vivid’ style and rapid storytelling. Orwell’s first published pieces, as we have seen, followed these sociological lines by addressing the twin problem of state censorship in Britain and mass commercialization of the press in France. The view from the left was that in the capitalist news kingdoms of the world—pioneered by Northcliffe in England and Hearst in the United States—everything was bland and mass-manipulated. This view was endorsed by the press lords themselves. But there were countervailing developments too, in particular a growing personal and professional commitment among journalists to getting as close to what was happening as possible, and telling it in their own name, whatever the cost. Long before Orwell, therefore, and in a way which suited his dissent from the orthodoxies of both the right (mass news is popular opinion) and left (mass news is manipulation), ‘being there’ in order to tell the truth had grown to be part of the journalist’s trade. By the time he was thinking of going to Spain, ‘with some notion of writing newspaper articles’, the greatest living practitioner of the trade was Ernest Hemingway.

Orwell also had much in common with two other great left-wing American writer-reporters—Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck. He, like them, never saw himself as anything more than a jobbing writer and shared something of their ‘ordinary Joe’ prose style. Steinbeck would come to be seen as ‘uniquely American’, just as Orwell would come to be seen as uniquely English. More than Hemingway perhaps, and along with two other belly-to-earth Americans, Miller and Faulkner, Sinclair, Steinbeck, and Orwell were committed to trying to tell the truth about ordinary lives. Miller’s Avenue Clichy, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Sinclair’s Packingtown, Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley, and Orwell’s Aragon Front all came out of being there and getting it right. Orwell never could and never did write a novel as good as The Grapes of Wrath, but Steinbeck’s taste for ‘the shock of first hand observation’ and ‘complex, self-contained, imaginative worlds’ matched Orwell’s politics, and Sinclair’s Chicago Union stockyards prefigured twentieth-century totalitarian genocides not a world away from "Nineteen Eighty-Four." All these writers knew how very small worlds could contain very big ones. Orwell got out of Spain believing that it was just a rehearsal for the next big war to come. Along with civilian bombing, mass mobilization, and the inexorable shift towards total government and a new kind of politics, he was convinced that another key feature of war would be how intellectuals would seek to deceive the masses. Not for the first time, he was taking his arguments, as well as picking his fights, from the left, on the left. Determined to tell the truth about Spain, at the same time he was sympathetic to the Left Book Club line that in the age of the masses the truth was impossible:

This is highly charged writing, but the truth is that Orwell might have spent a little less time responding to his own experience and a little more time thinking carefully about the art of the politically possible. To begin with, not all Communists at home or abroad shared his sense of urgency. They thought that ‘The Revolution’ (an almost mystical act of transmutation that would solve the problem of class) could wait on the forces of History (capital ‘H’ and inevitably moving in the direction of Communism). In the meantime, the Communist International had a regional struggle to pursue and trusted Russia’s big battalions to help them pursue it. If that involved Popular Front policies, so be it. If it involved ‘all the usual war-stuff ’, so be it.

Moreover, in Spain the situation was more complicated than Orwell allowed. The Spanish Communist Party had assumed a key role in government, but it would be wrong to suppose that all Spanish Communists were intellectuals, or bureaucrats, or that the PCE was the only party in the history of the Spanish left to declare its rivals traitors. Even if the International Brigades were Communist-controlled, their soldiers were there like Orwell was there, to fight the enemy, not each other. International Brigade Communists had been street-fighting Franco in Madrid while Orwell had been safely tucked up in his grocery. The British battalion of the XV Brigade, formed in January 1937 (which Orwell tried to join), took hammerings at every battle it fought—at Jarama in February 1937, at Brunette in July 1937, at Aragon in August 1937, and at Ebro in July 1938. And long before Spanish Communists got their way (May–June 1937) the Second Republic had been born in sectarian conflict not only between left and right, but between left and left—between regionalists and centralists, syndicalists and socialists, liberals and Leninists, and all varieties of Leninist, including the two factions which had clashed at the heart of Orwell’s politics—the pro-Anarquista POUM and the pro-Moscovita PCE.

These rivalries had frequently been violent in word and deed. The POUM and Catalan and Spanish Communists had been at each other’s throats since at least December 1936, and government agencies in Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia had been trying to disarm the militias and normalize due process since before that. At times the Republic could look like a war of all on all. That it saw far fewer extra-judicial killings than the Nationalist territories was only because Franco and his friends were better at it. Not only that, there had been clashes between left republican governments and those they saw as their natural supporters, the workers, almost from the beginning of the Second Republic—at Castiblanco in 1931, at Arnedo in 1932, at Llobregat in 1932, and in the sickening burnings and shootings of the ‘Casas Viejas’ incident of 8 January 1933, which led to the withdrawal of Anarchist support for the government and the return to government of the right. When a right-wing government used a colonial army to trample the Asturias in 1934, they were only improving upon an incipient republican taste for rising and repression amply played out two years later.

The Second Republic had never been able to keep its house in order. That it included ‘at least twelve different leftist and liberal revolutionary or reform projects’ shows the scale of its problems. The wonder was not that it handled these projects badly but that it dared handle them at all. Given that, and given that in May 1937 it was surrendering territory and losing the war, it was not unreasonable for Negrin’s new government to want to try again to assert its authority, disarm the militias, and build a new army. The Communist 5th Regiment’s motto, ‘Discipline, Hierarchy, Organization’, may have been a touch excessive, but we get the point. From Negrin’s point of view doing away with private revolutionary patrols, crossings, checkpoints, holding centres, safe houses, paseos, persons missing, persons dead, paramilitaries, all that, was not only worth a try, it was ‘crucial to the constitutional credibility of the government’ and the winning of the war. Violations of the democratic state, after all, were the actions of the right. The intimidation of civil society, after all, was how Franco’s Africanistas did it. That Communist politicians pressed for order and discipline in order to scatter rivals in their way was clearly dangerous for Anarchists and Trotskyists, particularly in view of what was going on in the Soviet Union, but it could not have been unexpected. The Soviet Union was the only country actively supporting the Republic in men and arms, and it had been their battle tanks, not militia rifles, which had stopped Franco in his tracks outside Madrid in November 1936. After that, the Republic’s few victories—at Jarama in February and at Guadalajara in March 1937—could not have been won without Soviet armour. Franco had plenty of German materiel and a hefty Italian army of occupation on his side, and before he ran into the Russians his colonial army had swept up from the south in less than four weeks. While the British, French, and Americans stood aside, the Republic took what it could and paid for it in gold and in the channelling of Soviet aid through the PCE. Against this, the POUM strategy of continuing to look to the militias and incontrolats while fighting an increasingly capable enemy at the front and an increasingly complicated workers’ revolution to the rear looked like so much wishful thinking. According to one historian at least, it ‘would have brought disaster’.