George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" Chapters 1-7 274 words

The little church that adjoined it, its walls perforated by shell-holes, had its floor inches deep in dung.

Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there was a shortage of coal, sugar, and petrol, and a really serious shortage of bread.

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.

Two Fascists, greyish figurines in the distance, were scrambling up the naked hill-side opposite.

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

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.

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.

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.

I remember feeling a deep horror at everything: the chaos, the darkness, the frightful din, the slithering to and fro in the mud, the struggles with the bursting sand-bags--all the time encumbered with my rifle, which I dared not put down for fear

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.

The ones at La Granja itself really were as big as cats, or nearly; great bloated brutes that waddled over the beds of muck, too impudent even to run away unless you shot at them.

A rumour--one of those mysterious rumours that are endemic in war--flew round that hot coffee with brandy in it was about to be served out.

My centuria slept in one of the stables, under the stone mangers where the names of the cavalry chargers were still inscribed.

War, to me, meant roaring projectiles and skipping shards of steel; above all it meant mud, lice, hunger, and cold.

As for the kaleidoscope of political parties and trade unions, with their tiresome names-- P.S.U.C.,

I grabbed my rifle and slithered up to my post, which was at the top of the position, beside the machine-gun.

The best strategic opportunity of the war was flung away in the vain hope of placating French and British capitalism.

They had a low trajectory and a very high velocity, so that you heard the cartridge explosion, the whizz, and the shell-burst almost simultaneously.

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.

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.

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.

It was no sinecure, especially at first.

Obviously the Spanish Church will come back (as the saying goes, night and the Jesuits always return), but there is no doubt that at the outbreak of the revolution it collapsed and was smashed up to an extent that would be unthinkable even for the mori

Douglas Thompson, with a wounded arm dangling useless at his side, was leaning against the parapet and firing one-handed at the flashes.

Jorge knelt down, fumbled in his pocket.

(Even a year later it was computed that the Anarcho-Syndicalists in Catalonia possessed 30,000 rifles.)

I remember saying in an oracular manner: 'We can hold this place for half an hour, not more.'

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

The new sentries were no sooner in the trench than they began firing a terrific fusillade at nothing in particular.

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.

With difficulty and much gesticulation we explained what we were doing and got them to help us in building the barricade.

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.

Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.

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.

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-box

Also they kept their polemics mainly to newspaper articles.

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.

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.

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 the

'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.

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.

I remember my feelings almost of horror when I first came upon one of these things in a derelict hut in no man's land.

If we had time to deploy now all was well.

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

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.

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.

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 bourge

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.

Later events have obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or 1905, for that matter.

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.

Once again in water up to your waist, with the filthy, slimy mud oozing over your boot-tops.

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.

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.

On perhaps one grave in four or five there was a small cross or a perfunctory reference to Heaven; this had usually been chipped off by some industrious atheist with a chisel.

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.

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.

Even at this period the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards long.

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.

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.

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.

It is typical of the utter vagueness in which the Spanish agrarian revolution is wrapped that I could not even discover for certain whether the land here was collectivized or whether the peasants had simply divided it up among themselves.

Practically--i.e. in the form of society aimed at--the difference is mainly one of emphasis, but it is quite irreconcilable.

As everyone knows, with a hostile population at your back it is impossible to keep an army in the field without an equally large army to guard your communications, suppress sabotage, etc.

I think the pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate their pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice.

Our water, what there was of it, came from miles away, on the backs of mules or little persecuted donkeys.

The palpable truth is that no attempt was made to foment a rising in Morocco, because to do so would have meant putting a revolutionary construction on the war.

But on the sodden ground it was almost impossible to move quietly.

I admit I was amazed and scandalized when I first saw it done.

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.

The ones at La Granja itself really were as big as cats, or nearly; great bloated brutes that waddled over the beds of muck, too impudent even to run away unless you shot at them.

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 wou

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.

Various people tried to dissuade me, but no one attempted to interfere.

In every comer you came upon piles of smashed furniture, broken saddles, brass cavalry-helmets, empty sabre-scabbards, and decaying food.

The first necessity, to convince the Moors of the Government's good faith, would have been to proclaim Morocco liberated.

Monflorite was the usual huddle of mud and stone houses, with narrow tortuous alleys that had been churned by lorries till they looked like the craters of the moon.

Their shells are really a kind of winged torpedo, shaped like the darts thrown in public-houses and about the size of a quart bottle; they go off with a devilish metallic crash, as of some monstrous globe of brittle steel being shattered on an anvil

Seven hours lying in a horrible marsh, in reedy-smelling water into which one's body subsided gradually deeper and deeper: the reedy smell, the numbing cold, the stars immovable in the black sky, the harsh croaking of the frogs.

That night the Fascists made a sort of abortive attack.

The blue in the sky was softer, the air grew suddenly balmy.

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.

The inter-party feud was annoying and even disgusting, but it appeared to me as a domestic squabble.

Their shells are really a kind of winged torpedo, shaped like the darts thrown in public-houses and about the size of a quart bottle; they go off with a devilish metallic crash, as of some monstrous globe of brittle steel being shattered on an anvi

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.

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.

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.

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 prostitu

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.

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.

They accepted the P.O.U.M. slogan: 'The war and the revolution are inseparable', though they were less dogmatic about it.

'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.

There were the two batteries of Russian 75-mm. guns which fired from close in our rear and which somehow evoked in my mind the picture of a fat man hitting a golf-ball.

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 fift

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.

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.

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.

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.

Somebody shepherded us through morasses of mud into a mule-stable where we dug ourselves down into the chaff and promptly fell asleep.

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.

The English had got into the habit of saying that this wasn't a war, it was a bloody pantomime.

(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 polic

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 Fa

There was utter darkness and diabolical noise.

War, to me, meant roaring projectiles and skipping shards of steel; above all it meant mud, lice, hunger, and cold.

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.

I cowered behind a bush that suddenly seemed very small, and tried to cock my rifle without noise.

(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

The normal military punishments existed, but they were only invoked for very serious offences.

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.

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

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.

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.

On the Government side, in the party militias, the shouting of propaganda to undermine the enemy morale had been developed into a regular technique.

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.

I started after him, prodding my bayonet ineffectually into the darkness.

Momentarily you could see every sand-bag in the lurid light.

There were both candour and ferocity in it; also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors.

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.

Out of the darkness a plaintive voice suggested: 'Couldn't we arrange for the Fascists to wear white armlets instead?'

Up here, in the hills round Zaragoza, it was simply the mingled boredom and discomfort of stationary warfare.

Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared.

They were big sand-bags, weighing a hundredweight each and it took every ounce of your strength to prise them loose; and then the rotten sacking split and the damp earth cascaded all over you, down your neck and up your sleeves.

Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform.

The palpable truth is that no attempt was made to foment a rising in Morocco, because to do so would have meant putting a revolutionary construction on the war.

You are wondering all the while just where the bullet will nip you, and it gives your whole body a most unpleasant sensitiveness.

When you are creeping at that pace you are aware as an ant might be of the enormous variations in the ground; the splendid patch of smooth grass here, the evil patch of sticky mud there, the tall rustling reeds that have got to be avoided, the heap

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

The way in which the working class in the democratic countries could really have helped her Spanish comrades was by industrial action--strikes and boycotts.

Once the U.S.S.R. had intervened the triumph of the Communist Party was assured.

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 win

There was a little shell-fire, but it was extraordinarily ineffectual.

Occasionally we gave it a rifle-volley and then slipped into cover before the machine-guns could locate us.

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

A deserter told us afterwards that five Fascist sentries were shot for negligence.

The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing.

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 live

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.

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.

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.

All the horses had been seized and sent to the front, but the whole place still smelt of horse-piss and rotten oats.

The Government may swing to the Left again, the Moors may revolt of their own accord, England may decide to buy Italy out, the war may be won by straightforward military means--there is no knowing.

Obviously he could not make head or tail of the map; obviously he regarded map-reading as a stupendous intellectual feat.

our own machine-gun jammed, as it always did jam with those vile cartridges, and the ramrod was lost in the impenetrable darkness.

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.

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.

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.

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 bou

Then a vicious swirl of bullets, and everyone had flung himself on his knees and was frantically digging, deepening the trench and scooping out small shelters in the side.

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.

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.

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.

I oiled my ten Mexican cartridges, dirtied my bayonet (the things give your position away if they flash too much), and packed up a hunk of bread, three inches of red sausage, and a cigar which my wife had sent from Barcelona and which I had been hoardi

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

Although they were 150 mm. they only made a crater about six feet wide by four deep, and at least one in four failed to explode.

The truth was that the shells were hopelessly old; someone picked up a brass fuse-cap stamped with the date, and it was 1917.

This was the common drill-ground of all the party militias, besides the Carabineros and the first contingents of the newly formed Popular Army.

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.

The filthy brutes came swarming out of the ground on every side.

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.

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.

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 mountain

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.

Among the Spaniards it was the same, and most of the newspapers we saw made the inter-party feud their chief feature.

Kopp and Benjamin squatting behind us with a man who had a wireless receiving-box strapped to his shoulders.

The centuria was an untrained mob composed mostly of boys in their teens.

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.

Through the din I heard an English voice behind me say quietly: 'I'm hit.'

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.

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.

For this sector of the front the entire artillery consisted of four trench-mortars with fifteen rounds for each gun.

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.

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.

All the horses had been seized and sent to the front, but the whole place still smelt of horse-piss and rotten oats.

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.

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 mountain

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.

It was beastly water, hardly more transparent than milk.

It was our first casualty, and, characteristically, self--inflicted.

The answer was always a harassed smile and a promise that there should be machine-gun instruction manana.

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'.

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.

Obviously the Spanish Church will come back (as the saying goes, night and the Jesuits always return), but there is no doubt that at the outbreak of the revolution it collapsed and was smashed up to an extent that would be unthinkable even for the

His account of the Government rations was apt to be a little imaginative.'

Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform.

'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.

Machine-gun nests that the Fascists had placed at strategic spots were smashed by rushing taxis at them at sixty miles an hour.

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.

All foreigners alike are appalled by their inefficiency, above all their maddening unpunctuality.

Later on the famine of matches and candles made life a misery.

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 both candour and ferocity in it; also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors.

The winter barley was a foot high, crimson buds were forming on the cherry trees (the line here ran through deserted orchards and vegetable gardens), and if you searched the ditches you could find violets and a kind of wild hyacinth like a poor spe

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.

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.

To my dismay I found that we were taught nothing about the use of weapons.

In the far distance the monstrous peaks of the Pyrenees, where the snow never melts, seemed to float upon nothing.

A general 'bourgeoisification', a deliberate destruction of the equalitarian spirit of the first few months of the revolution, was taking place.

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.

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 Popular Army that replaced the militias was midway between the two types.)

The Fascist parapet was visible now, a dim black mound, looming high above us.

In every comer you came upon piles of smashed furniture, broken saddles, brass cavalry-helmets, empty sabre-scabbards, and decaying food.

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.

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.

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.

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 part

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.

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'.

Later, when the Anarchists made their attacks on the Jaca road, our job was to make 'holding attacks' and force the Fascists to divert troops from the other side.

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 mornin

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 difficult

Practically--i.e. in the form of society aimed at--the difference is mainly one of emphasis, but it is quite irreconcilable.

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.

Nothing will convince a Spaniard, at least a young Spaniard, that fire-arms are dangerous.

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.

Beside the cold the other discomforts seemed petty.

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.

It was rather fun wandering about the dark valleys with the stray bullets flying high overhead like redshanks whistling.

It was easy, for instance, to rally the wealthier peasants against the collectivization policy of the Anarchists.

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 consiste

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.

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.

But when Franco tried to overthrow a mildly Left-wing Government the Spanish people, against all expectation, had risen against him.

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.

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 cannot convey to you the depth of my desire to get there.

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.

He was bareheaded and seemed to have nothing on except a blanket which he was clutching round his shoulders.

Swarms of militiamen in shabby uniforms wandered up and down the streets, trying to keep warm.

It is based on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of a bourgeois conscript army is based ultimately on fear.

They were simply remote black insects whom one occasionally saw hopping to and fro.

Beyond Huesca there were more hills of the same formation as our own, streaked with a pattern of snow which altered day by day.

We filed through the gap in the parapet and waded through another irrigation ditch.

It was the first talk I had heard of treachery or divided aims.

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.

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

When we were not eating, sleeping, on guard, or on fatigue-duty we were in the valley behind the position, scrounging for fuel.

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.

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 fift

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.

It was our first casualty, and, characteristically, self--inflicted.

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.

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 part

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 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.

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.

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.

Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there was a shortage of coal, sugar, and petrol, and a really serious shortage of bread.

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.

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.

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 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.

For years past the so-called democratic countries had been surrendering to Fascism at every step.

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.

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.