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The book begins with Orwell describing the camaraderie of the atmosphere in
revolutionary Spain during 1937. He asserts that Barcelona appeared to have been "a town where the
working class were in the saddle": a large number of businesses had been collectivised, "the Anarchists" (referring to the Spanish CNT and FAI) were "in control",
tipping was prohibited by workers
themselves, and servile forms of speech, such as "Señor" or "Don",
were abandoned. He goes on to describe events at the Lenin Barracks (formerly the Lepanto Barracks)
where militiamen were given "what was comically called 'instruction'" in
preparation for fighting at the front.
Most of the remainder of this chapter is devoted to describing the faults of
the POUM workers' militia, as he saw them,
half-complaining about the sometimes frustrating tendency of Spaniards to put
things off until "mañana" (tomorrow), noting his struggles with Spanish (aggravated
by the local use of Catalan) and praising the friendliness and
generosity of the majority of Spaniards he met. Orwell leads us on to the next
chapter by describing the "conquering-hero stuff"—parades through the streets
and cheering crowds—that the militiamen experienced at the time he was sent to
the Aragón front.
Orwell arrives in Alcubierre
(in January 1937) to witness the squalid conditions, aggravated by the village's
proximity to the civil war front. He then mentions the arrival of various "Fascist deserters" and the poor weaponry
that the militiamen in that area of the front received. Rifles weren't handed
out until their third day in the village. The chapter ends on his centuria's arrival at trenches near Zaragoza and the first time a bullet
nearly hit him. He adds that, to his own dismay, he ducked.
The narration begins as a description of the—perhaps unique—mundaneness of trench warfare, the
sneaking about in the mist and on night patrols. Here he praises the Spanish militias: for their relative social equality, for
their holding of the front while the army was trained in the rear, and for the
"democratic 'revolutionary' type
of discipline" which he says is
"more reliable than might be expected." This democratic and egalitarian approach
remained intact on the front, he said, even while it was being almost
systematically destroyed behind the lines by the Stalinist-controlled government,
police and press during that year.
Throughout the chapter, Orwell describes the various shortages and problems at
the front—firewood, tobacco, and adequate munitions—as well as the danger of
accidents inherent in a badly trained and poorly armed group of soldiers.
After some three weeks at the front, Orwell and the other English militiaman
in his unit, Williams, join a contingent of fellow Englishmen sent out by the Independent Labour Party to a position
at Monte Oscuro, closer to Zaragosa. At this position, he witnesses the
sometimes propagandistic
shouting between the Fascist and Socialist trenches and hears of the fall of Málaga.
In February, he is sent with the other POUM militiamen 50 miles to Huesca; he mentions the running joke phrase
"Tomorrow we'll have coffee in Huesca," attributed to the general commanding the
government troops who made one of many failed assaults on the town.
Orwell complains, in chapter five, that on the eastern side of Huesca, where
he was stationed, nothing ever seemed to happen—except the onslaught of spring,
and, with it, lice. He was
in a ("so-called") hospital at Monflorite for ten days at the end of March
1937 with "a poisoned hand." He describes rats that "really were as big as cats, or nearly" (in his
famous Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell's
character Winston Smith
has a phobia of rats that Orwell himself shared to some degree). He makes a
reference here to the lack of orthodox "religious feeling," telling us that the
Roman Catholic Church was to the Spanish
"a racket, pure and simple." He muses that Christianity may have, to some
extent, been replaced by Anarchism. The latter portion of the chapter briefly
details various operations in which Orwell took part: silently advancing the
Loyalist frontline by night, for example.
One of these operations, which in chapter five had been postponed, was a
"holding attack" on Huesca, designed to draw the Fascist troops away from an
Anarchist attack on "the Jaca road." It is
described herein. Orwell notes the offensive of that night where his group of
fifteen captured a Fascist position, but then retreated to their lines with
captured rifles and ammunition. The diversion was successful in drawing troops
from the Anarchist attack.
This chapter reads like an interlude. Orwell shares his memories of the 115
days he spent on the war front, including a recognition that his political ideas
were changing slowly. By the time he left Spain, he had become a "convinced
democratic Socialist."
Herein Orwell details noteworthy changes in the social and political
atmosphere when he returns to Barcelona after more than three months at the
front. He describes a lack of revolutionary atmosphere and the class division
that he had thought would not reappear, i.e., with visible division between rich
and poor and the return of servile language. Orwell had been determined to leave
the POUM, and confesses here that he "would have liked to join the Anarchists,"
but instead sought a recommendation to join the International
Column, so that he could go to the Madrid front. The latter half of this chapter
is devoted to describing the conflict between the Anarchist CNT and the
Socialist UGT and the resulting cancellation
of the May Day demonstration and the
build-up to the street fighting of the Barcelona May Days.
Orwell relates his involvement in the Barcelona street fighting that began on
3rd of May when the Government Assault Guards tried to take the
telephone exchange from the CNT workers who controlled it. For his part, Orwell
acted as part of the POUM, guarding a POUM-controlled building. Although he
realises that he is fighting on the side of the working class, Orwell describes
his dismay at coming back to Barcelona on leave from the front only to get mixed
up in street fighting. In his second appendix to the book, Orwell discusses the
political issues at stake in the May 1937 Barcelona fighting, as he saw them at
the time and later on, looking back.
Here he begins with musings on how the Spanish Civil War might turn out. Orwell
predicts that the "tendency of the post-war Government... is bound to be
Fascistic." He returns to the front, where he is shot through the throat by a
sniper, an injury that takes
him out of the war. After spending some time in a hospital in Lleida, he was moved to Tarragona where his wound was finally examined more
than a week after he'd left the front.
Orwell tells us of his various movements between hospitals in Siétamo, Barbastro, and Monzón while getting his discharge papers stamped,
after being declared medically unfit. He returns to Barcelona only to find that
the POUM had been "suppressed": it had been declared illegal the very day he had
left to obtain discharge papers and POUM members were being arrested without
charge. He sleeps that night in the ruins of a church; he cannot go back to his
hotel because of the danger of arrest.
This chapter explores the political persecution he encountered with regard to
his and his wife's visit to Georges Kopp, unit commander of the ILP Contingent while Kopp
was incarcerated in a Spanish makeshift jail. Having done all he could to free
Kopp, ineffectively and at great personal risk, Orwell decides to leave Spain.
Crossing the Pyrenees frontier,
"thanks to the inefficiency of the police," he and his wife arrived in France
"without incident."
 Copyright(c) 2007
- 2012. All rights reserved.
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