Orwell (13 page)

The book opens in December 1936 as Orwell enlists in the militia and experiences for the first time the “special atmosphere” of revolutionary spirit in Barcelona.
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After the briefest and most ineffectual “training,” he is sent to the front in early January and remains there until the parapet attack. He returns to Barcelona on April 26 to find the Civil War has become triangular, with the Communists and Socialists fighting each other as well as the Fascists, and spends most of his leave involved in street fighting for the Socialists. He returns to the front on May 10, disillusioned though awakened, and is shot through the throat ten days later. He spends the next month first in various hospitals and then seeking his discharge papers, and returns to Barcelona for the last time on June 20 to discover his militia-party outlawed and his life in danger. Though pursued by the police, he attempts to rescue Kopp and barely escapes to France on June 23.

The political chapters, like chapter 8 and the end of chapter 14, are reflective and establish an effective contrast to the action. These chapters serve as interludes which place Orwell's experiences in perspective: chapter 5 separates the five chapters on the Aragon front (chapters 2–4, 6–7) and explains the stalemate that has been described in the earlier chapters (the Loyalist armies are divided and cannot mount and sustain an offensive); chapter 11 explains the reasons for the street fighting narrated in the previous chapter. Though the subject of
Homage
is war, Orwell insists “it could be quite impossible to write about the Spanish War from a purely military angle. It was above all things a political war.”
⁴
The vital connection between personal narration and political reporting of the war is skillfully emphasized by the description of his retreat from the parapet and retreat from the Hotel Continental, where the police are searching for him. Both events are narrated in brief staccato dialogue: the repetition of a curt but urgent command and a puzzled response by Orwell—“Get out of it!” / “Why?” (97) and “Get out of here
at once!”
/ “What?” (204)—are followed by his halting movement in the ordered direction.

Like the structure, the atmosphere of
Homage
is compounded of contrasts and antitheses. In its political and military aspects it resembles
Nostromo
, in which history is nothing more than “stories of political outrage; friends, relatives, ruined, imprisoned, killed in the battles of senseless civil wars, barbarously executed in ferocious proscriptions…. Oppression, inefficiency, fatuous methods, treachery, and savage brutality [ruled].”
⁵
As Bernanos writes of his painful Civil War experiences: “The tragedy of Spain is a foretaste of the tragedy of the universe. It is the shattering proof of the unhappy
condition of men of good will in modern society, which little by little eliminates them, as a by-product that can be turned to no good account.”
⁶

These “men of good will” are always the victims of war, and it is from this traditional viewpoint that Orwell narrates his war memoir. He specifically compares the Spanish to the Great War—“it was a bad copy of 1914–18, a positional war of trenches, artillery, raids, snipers, mud, barbed wire, lice and stagnation,” and defines his tradition by comparing books on both wars. In “Inside the Whale” (1940), Orwell criticizes the Spanish war books for “their shocking dullness and badness,” and states that “almost all of them, right-wing or left-wing, are written from a political angle, by cocksure partisans telling you what to think.”
Homage to Catalonia
, on the other hand, is distinguished from these books by its truthfulness and objectivity and by its frank portrayal of Orwell's helplessness and confusion. Though more polemical and positive than books about the Great War,
Homage
belongs in that tradition because of its sensitive portrayal of a sympathetic victim. For those books were also

written by common soldiers or junior officers who did not even pretend to understand what the whole thing was about. Books like
All Quiet on the Western Front, Le Feu, A Farewell to Arms, Death of a Hero, Good-Bye to All That, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
and A
Subaltern on the Somme
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were written not by propagandists but by
victims.
They are saying, in effect, “What the hell is this about? God knows. All we can do is to endure.” … They are the records of something completely meaningless, a nightmare happening in a void. That was not actually the truth about the war, but it was the truth about the individual reaction. The soldier advancing into a machine-gun barrage or standing waist-deep in a flooded trench knew only that here was an appalling experience in which he was all but helpless. He was likelier to make a good book out of his helplessness and his ignorance than out of a pretended power to see the whole thing in perspective.

In squalid misery and unspeakable horror, Orwell's experiences on the Aragon front surpassed anything he had previously endured in Burma
⁸
or Wigan or while “down and out.” He insists that in war “the physical details always outweigh everything else” (139), and he is constantly submerged in an atmosphere of “filth and chaos,” “excrement and decay,” “boredom and discomfort”—in “mud, lice, hunger, cold.” The “nightmare” feeling is constantly stressed and rats appear frequently. During the parapet attack he feels “a deep horror at everything: the chaos, the darkness, the frightful
din, the slithering to and fro in the mud” (95). When he is wounded, he finds the medical treatment almost as crude as in the days of Hogarth and Smollett. When he returns to Barcelona he finds the suspicion and hostility “sickening and disillusioning.”
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For Orwell, helpless and confused, war is a trial by ordeal that ends with his wound and his flight. The most interesting things about his narrative are his startling honesty and the accuracy of his psychological responses, portrayed in an exciting and vivid, yet detached style. Orwell admits that he is often frightened: when going to the front, the first time under fire and especially after his wound when he loses his nerve completely. He confesses that he is ineffectual in combat, deceived in a crisis, absurd as a smuggler, self-indulgent on leave. Yet this seems to generalize his experiences (we would be the same) and to engage our sympathies as he becomes a kind of military Everyman who embodies “the fate of most soldiers in most wars” (103). Though a soldier, he is always a sensitive humanist, who observes, “It was the first time in my life that I had fired a gun at a human being” (21). When he is under fire he reacts with instinctive and futile gestures: he ducks, he claps his hand over his cheek, “as though one's hand could stop a bullet!—but I had a horror of being hit in the face” (91). Instead, he is shot through the neck and, like Joyce Cary who was wounded in the German Cameroons in 1915, manages to reflect in the midst of the horrible experience. Cary recalls, “I got a bullet that scraped my mastoid, and of course it felt as if my brains were blown to pieces, and it knocked me right out. And I just sat down to think: ‘Well, this is it, and it is easy.'”
¹⁰
Similarly, Orwell observes,

Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being
at the centre
of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock—no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing…. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off accidentally and shot me. All this happened in a space of time much less than a second. The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense. (185)
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Orwell's wound is carefully foreshadowed by those of his wounded comrades, a series of ghastly creatures who pass through the book like scenes from
Goya's
Disasters of War
and evoke Orwell's sympathy: “I saw one poor devil, his breeches dark with blood, flung out of his stretcher and gasping in agony” (83). “There was the roar of the explosion and then, instantly, a diabolical outcry of screams and groans…. Poor wretch, poor wretch! I felt a vague sorrow as I heard him screaming” (96–97). “There was one man wounded in the face and throat who had his head inside a sort of spherical helmet of butter-muslin…. He looked so lonely, wandering to and fro” (192).

When the injured men are sent back to the hospitals, “the ambulances filed down the abominable road to Sietamo, killing the badly wounded with their joltings” (75–76); and when Orwell is shot he endures the horrors of the same ride: “no one who was liable to bleed internally could have survived those miles of jolting” (188). The tender pity in these passages is similar to the feeling in “How the Poor Die”; in Donne's words, Orwell felt “any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind.”

Strangely enough, war, for Orwell, is not all futility and suffering. He reverts at times to the self-conscious, adventurous and Boy Scout attitude of the Eton officers, where sniping and whizzing bullets are “rather fun,” patrols and trenches are “not bad fun in a way,” and building barricades is “a strange and wonderful sight.” Here the boyish naïveté in combat, a kind of playful whistling in the dark, is the military correlative of Orwell's political innocence. But as the political realities darken his vision, the fighting does not seem quite so much “fun” as before. In a crucial way,
Homage
is a
Bildungsroman der Realpolitik
, for Orwell moves a great distance from “[The fall of Malaga] set up in my mind the first vague doubt about this war in which, hitherto, the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple” (45) to “The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency” (180).

Like all victims, Orwell is immersed in immediate events and confused about the political situation, and his perspective is not clarified until his political awareness gradually develops. “There is no such thing as a genuinely non-political literature,” writes Orwell in 1946, “and least of all in an age like our own, when fears, hatreds and loyalties of a directly political kind are near to the surface of everyone's consciousness.” And he adds in the same year, a writer's “subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in.” One of the primary obligations of the political writer is to be honest, to establish the truth; and Orwell writes of
Homage
, “I happened to know, what very few people in England had been allowed to know, that innocent men were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that I should never have written the book.”
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Orwell came to know this truth by a series of accidents. He describes his connection with POUM, the Unified Marxist Workers' Party, “the most extreme of the revolutionary parties,” in the recently published “Notes on the Spanish Militias”: “Just before leaving England I rang up the ILP [Independent Labour Party], with which I had some slight connections, mainly personal, and asked them to give me some kind of recommendation. They sent me a letter … to John. McNair at Barcelona…. [I] produce[d] my letter to McNair (whom I did not know) and through this I joined the POUM militia…. At that time I was only rather dimly aware of the differences between the political parties…. Had I a complete understanding of the situation I should have probably joined the CNT militia.”
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Hugh Thomas writes of POUM that “many joined this party believing that it represented a mean between, the indiscipline of the Anarchists and the strictness of the PSUC [Socialists]. Foreigners in Barcelona joined the POUM in the romantic supposition that it indeed embodied a magnificent Utopian aspiration.”
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Though Orwell idealistically affirms, “There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all” (153),
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he also states: “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” (47). As Orwell gradually realizes, the real struggle is between revolution and counterrevolution, between the Comintern and the Spanish Left-wing parties. The Russian government tried to prevent revolution in Spain,
¹⁶
just as it had done in China ten years earlier.
¹⁷

The retrogression of Barcelona from a revolutionary to a bourgeois to a totalitarian city is paralleled by the decline of the POUM party. First, writes Orwell, it “was an accepted party and supplied a minister to the Catalan Government; later it was expelled from the Government; then it was denounced as Trotskyist; then it was suppressed, every member that the police could lay their hands on being flung in jail.” Trotsky in Russia, Snowball in
Animal Farm
, suffered a similar fate.

There is considerable confusion in
Homage
(Orwell tells what happens, but not
why)
, because he, like everyone else, did not understand why the Communists destroyed their Socialist allies.
¹⁸
And his bewilderment continued beyond 1943 when he says, “As to the Russians, their motives in the Spanish war are completely inscrutable.” This confusion results because the Russian policy was both contradictory and ineffectual. As Isaac Deutscher writes: “Stalin's desire [was] to preserve for the Spanish Popular Front its republican respectability and to avoid antagonizing the British and French Governments. He saved nobody's respectability and he antagonized everybody. Conservative opinion in the west, not interested in the internecine
struggle of the Spanish left and confused by the intricacies of Stalin's policy, blamed Stalin as the chief fomenter of revolution.”
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