Homage to Catalonia
by George Orwell
1938
IN THE Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I
saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers’ table.
He was a tough-looking youth of twenty-five or six, with
reddish-yellow hair and powerful shoulders. His peaked leather cap was pulled
fiercely over one eye. He was standing in profile to me, his chin on his
breast, gazing with a puzzled frown at a map which one of the officers had open
on the table. Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man
who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend—the kind of face
you would expect in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist.
There were both candour and ferocity in it; also the pathetic reverence that
illiterate people have for their supposed superiors. Obviously he could not
make head or tail of the map; obviously he regarded map-reading as a stupendous
intellectual feat. I hardly know why, but I have seldom seen anyone—any man, I
mean—to whom I have taken such an immediate liking. While they were talking
round the table some remark brought it out that I was a foreigner. The Italian
raised his head and said quickly:
‘Italiano?’
I answered in my bad Spanish: ‘No, Inglés. Y tú?’
‘Italiano.’
As we went out he stepped across the room and gripped my
hand very hard. Queer, the affection you can feel for a stranger! It was as
though his spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in bridging the gulf of
language and tradition and 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 ‘Señor’ 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 sé manejar fusil. Mo sé manejar ametralladora. Quiero
apprender ametralladora. Quándo vamos apprender ametralladora?’
The answer was always a harassed smile and a promise that
there should be machine-gun instruction mañana. Needless to saymañana never
came. Several days passed and the recruits learned to march in step and spring
to attention almost smartly, but if they knew which end of a rifle the bullet
came out of, that was all they knew. One day an armed Carabinero strolled up to
us when we were halting and allowed us to examine his rifle. It turned out that
in the whole of my section no one except myself even knew how to load the
rifle, much less how to take aim.
All this time I was having the usual struggles with the
Spanish language. Apart from myself there was only one Englishman at the
barracks, and nobody even among the officers spoke a word of French. Things
were not made easier for me by the fact that when my companions spoke to one
another they generally spoke in Catalan. The only way I could get along was to
carry everywhere a small dictionary which I whipped out of my pocket in moments
of crisis. But I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries.
How easy it is to make friends in Spain! Within a day or two there was a score
of militiamen who called me by my Christian name, showed me the ropes, and
overwhelmed me with hospitality. I am not writing a 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: ‘Más valientes que nosotros’—‘Braver than we are!’ Of course
I demurred, whereupon they explained that the French knew more of the art of
war—were more expert with bombs, machine-guns, and so forth. Yet the remark was
significant. An Englishman would cut his hand off sooner than say a thing like
that.
Every foreigner who served in the militia spent his first
few weeks in learning to love the Spaniards and in being exasperated by certain
of their characteristics. In the front line my own exasperation sometimes
reached the pitch of fury. The Spaniards are good at many things, but not at
making war. All foreigners alike are appalled by their inefficiency, above all
their maddening unpunctuality. The one Spanish word that no foreigner can avoid
learning is mañana—‘tomorrow’ (literally, ‘the morning’). Whenever it is
conceivably possible, the business of today is put off until mañana. This
is so notorious that even the Spaniards themselves make jokes about it. In
Spain nothing, from a meal to a battle, ever happens at the appointed time. As
a general rule things happen too late, but just occasionally—just so that you
shan’t even be able to depend on their happening late—they happen too early. A
train which is due to leave at eight will normally leave at any time between
nine and ten, but perhaps once a week, thanks to some private whim of the
engine-driver, it leaves at half past seven. Such things can be a little
trying. In theory I rather admire the Spaniards for not sharing our Northern
time-neurosis; but unfortunately I share it myself.
After endless rumours, mañanas, and delays we were
suddenly ordered to the front at two hours’ notice, when much of our equipment
was still unissued. There were terrible tumults in the quartermaster’s store;
in the end numbers of men had to leave without their full equipment. The
barracks had promptly filled with women who seemed to have sprung up from the
ground and were helping their men-folk to roll their blankets and pack their
kit-bags. It was rather humiliating that I had to be 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.
[…]
