George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" Chapters 8-14 302 words

They have been systematically denigrated, and, as I know by my own experience, it is almost impossible to get anyone to print anything in their defence.

The workers' militias were to be broken' up and redistributed among the Popular Army.

Bread was scarce and the cheaper sorts were being adulterated with rice; the bread the soldiers were getting in the barracks was dreadful stuff like putty.

Most of the men there had either been invalided out of the line or had some wound that had permanently disabled them--amputated limbs, and so forth.

If they had been good party-men they would, I suppose, have urged me to change sides, or even have pinioned me and taken away the bombs of which my pockets were full; instead they merely commiserated with me for having to spend my leave in doing gu

They were part of the regular armoury of the building, but to bring them into the street was to contravene the Government's order, and if we were caught with them in our hands we should certainly be arrested--worse, the rifles would be confiscated.

Sometimes the rattle of rifle and machine-gun fire was punctuated by the crash of hand-grenades.

As a matter of fact, I doubt whether the abuse that was heaped upon them from the rear actually had the effect of demoralizing the P.O.U.M. militia.

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.

As usual, completely innocent people were being arrested owing to police bungling.

Those responsible are not the heads of the police, but their entourage, which has been infiltrated by the Communists according to their usual custom.'

When we got to the Hotel Falcon, which was at the bottom of the Ramblas, a crowd of people was seething in the entrance-hall; there was a great confusion, nobody seemed to know what we were expected to do, and nobody was armed except the handful of

The P.O.U.M. was declared to be a disguised Fascist organization, and a cartoon representing the P.O.U.M. as a figure slipping off a mask marked with the hammer and sickle and revealing a hideous, maniacal face marked with the swastika, was being c

My salient memories of that time are the heat of the midday sun, and working half-naked with sand--bags punishing one's shoulders which were already flayed by the sun; and the lousiness of our clothes and boots, which were literally dropping to pie

Irujo added that he had been through the dossier of the case, that none of the so-called pieces of evidence would bear examination, and that the document supposed to have been signed by Nin was 'valueless'--i.e. a forgery.

The younger militia boys, who seemed to regard the whole affair as a kind of picnic, were prowling round and trying to wheedle or steal rifles from anyone who had them.

Let it once be known that 'Anarchists' are implicated, and the right atmosphere of prejudice is established; after that the blame can safely be transferred to the 'Trotskyists'.

In the surgery where newly-arrived cases were examined, doctors with huge pairs of shears were hacking away the breast-plates of plaster in which men with smashed ribs, collar-bones, and so forth had been cased at the dressing-stations behind the line; ou

They formed a kind of interregnum in my life, quite different from anything that had gone before and perhaps from anything that is to come, and they taught me things that I could not have learned in any other way.

The food shortage, which had fluctuated throughout the War, was in one of its bad stages.

Politically conscious people were far more aware of the internecine struggle between Anarchist and Communist than of the fight against Franco.

It was infuriating.

It took me back to my early childhood and a dreadful thing called the Wiggle-Woggle at the White City Exhibition.

To be marching up the street behind red flags inscribed with elevating slogans, and then to be bumped off from an upper window by some total stranger with a sub-machine-gun-- that is not my idea of a useful way to die.

For the Spanish militias, while they lasted, were a sort of microcosm of a classless society.

During that first week, before the street-fighting began, I had several preoccupations which interacted upon one another in a curious way.

'Smart' clothes were an abnormality, nobody cringed or took tips, waiters and flower-women and bootblacks looked you in the eye and called you 'comrade'.

For a while the Communist Press of the whole world was flaming with this kind of thing (Daily Worker, 21 June, summarizing various Spanish Communist papers):
SPANISH TROTSKYISTS PLOT WITH FRANCO
Following the arrest of a large number of lea

I began to feel more normal and to be sorry for the four poor devils who were sweating and slithering with the stretcher on their shoulders.

Chapter 11

IT will never be possible to get a completely accurate and unbiased account of the Barcelona fighting, because the necessary records do not exist.

Kopp had just come back from the front, full of jubilation.

But on every wall the Government agents had stencilled: 'We need a Popular Army', and over the radio and in the Communist Press there was a ceaseless and sometimes very malignant jibing against the militias, who were described as ill-trained, undis

The Catalan Minister of Propaganda, who was hardly likely to underestimate, gave the numbers as 400 killed and 1000 wounded.

They were part of the regular armoury of the building, but to bring them into the street was to contravene the Government's order, and if we were caught with them in our hands we should certainly be arrested--worse, the rifles would be confiscated.

It was beastly while it was happening, but it is a good patch for my mind to browse upon.

They were a crude type of bomb, ignited by rubbing a sort of match at the top and very liable to go off of their own accord.

They were smuggled away by train or lorry at five o'clock in the morning.

The same night my wife and I were woken by a fusillade of shots from the Plaza de Cataluna, a hundred or two hundred yards away.

There was one man wounded in the face and throat who had his head inside a sort of spherical helmet of butter-muslin; his mouth was closed up and he breathed through a little tube that was fixed between his lips.

The P.O.U.M., acting in cooperation with well-known criminal elements, and with certain other deluded persons in the Anarchist organizations planned, organized, and led the attack in the rearguard, accurately timed to coincide with the

I had not grasped that this was mainly a mixture of hope and camouflage.

Nothing was happening except an occasional casualty from a sniper's bullet and the sporadic artillery-fire and air-raids on Huesca.

Apart from the expensiveness of everything, there were recurrent shortages of this and that, which, of course, always hit the poor rather than the rich.

It is a horrible thing to have to enter into the details of inter-party polemics; it is like diving into a cesspool.

Up at our end of the Ramblas, round the Plaza de Cataluna, the position was so complicated that it would have been quite unintelligible if every building had not flown a party flag.

The train, already full of militiamen when it left Barbastro, was invaded by more and more peasants at every station on the line; peasants with bundles of vegetables, with terrified fowls which they carried head--downwards, with sacks which looped and

Nevertheless, as it happened, I saw a bather drowned, which one would have thought impossible in that shallow and tepid sea.

Mr Pitcaim is asking us to believe, therefore, that the P.O.U.M. stole tanks with the connivance of the Popular Army.

But it was significant that all over Spain voluntary enlistment had dwindled from about January onwards.

I dimly foresaw that when the fighting ended the entire blame would be laid upon the P.O.U.M., which was the weakest party and therefore the most suitable scapegoat.

Once again it was an ordinary city, a little pinched and chipped by war, but with no outward sign of working-class predominance.

The Popular Front might be a swindle, but Franco was an anachronism.

The office upstairs was ceaselessly besieged by a crowd of people who were demanding rifles and being told that there were none left.

There were some ugly wrangles in the hotel lounge.

The war was only six months old or thereabouts when the Spanish Government had to resort to conscription, which would be natural in a foreign war, but seems anomalous in a civil war.

Two Spanish militia officers did the same, and the three of them walked slowly up to the doorway where the Civil Guards were huddling.

They had never been in favour of insurrection until the war against Franco was won; on the other hand the workers had come into the streets, and the P.O.U.M. leaders took the rather pedantic Marxist line that when the workers are on the streets it

However little you were actually conspiring, the atmosphere forced you to feel like a conspirator.

The stupid mischance infuriated me.

But the final upshot was this: six months after the event, as I write, most of the P.O.U.M. leaders are still in jail, but they have never been brought to trial, and the charges of communicating with Franco by radio, etc., have never even been form

He kept pointing in an agitated manner at two unexploded bombs that were lying on the pavement.

The essential point is that all this time I had been isolated--for at the front one was almost completely isolated from the outside world: even of what was happening in Barcelona one had only a dim conception--among people who could roughly but not

Everywhere you met with the same perfunctory remark:' This war--terrible, isn't it?

Forage-caps, zipper jackets, Sam Browne belts, hunting-knives, water-bottles, revolver-holsters were displayed in every window.

But the final upshot was this: six months after the event, as I write, most of the P.O.U.M. leaders are still in jail, but they have never been brought to trial, and the charges of communicating with Franco by radio, etc., have never even been formulat

It is a frustrated putsch of the 'Trotskyist' P.O.U.M., working through their controlled organizations, 'Friends of Durruti' and Libertarian Youth.

But I still believe that--unless Spain splits up, with unpredictable consequences--the tendency of the post-war Government is bound to be Fascistic.

The restaurants and hotels seemed to have little difficulty in getting whatever they wanted, but in the working-class quarters the queues for bread, olive oil, and other necessaries were hundreds of yards long.

They were gnarled, rustic-looking men, shepherds or labourers from the olive groves, perhaps, with faces deeply stained by the ferocious suns of farther south.

Inside the hotel, among the heterogeneous mob who for the most part had not dared to put their noses out of doors, a horrible atmosphere of suspicion had grown up.

So long as they remained behind the barricades they were merely watchfully waiting, an attitude which included the right to shoot at anything armed in the open street. . . (the) general bursts were invariably aggravated by pacos--hidden

After several months of discomfort I had a ravenous desire for decent food and wine, cocktails, American cigarettes, and so forth, and I admit to having wallowed in every luxury that I had money to buy.

Since February the entire armed forces had theoretically been incorporated in the Popular Army, and the militias were, on paper, reconstructed along Popular Army lines, with differential pay-rates, gazetted rank, etc., etc.

This led to scuffles with armed Anarchists, and one or two people were killed.

As usual they bandied one to and fro from hospital to hospital--Sietamo, Barbastro, Monzon, then back to Sietamo to get my discharge stamped, then down the line again via Barbastro and Lerida--and the convergence of troops on Huesca had monopolized

And underneath this there was the irreconcilable difference between Communists and Anarchists, which was bound to lead to some kind of struggle sooner or later.

The meaning of this was obvious to everyone; and it was also obvious that the next move would be the taking over of some of the key industries controlled by the C.N.T. In addition there was a certain amount of resentment among the working classes because

The P.S.U.C. papers were un-censored and were publishing inflammatory articles demanding the suppression of the P.O.U.M.

They give the same food to sick people as to well ones--always the same rich, greasy cookery, with everything sodden in olive oil.

The impression given is that some hours elapsed between the building of the barricades and the firing of the first volleys; whereas-- naturally--it was the other way about.

The working class believed in a revolution that had been begun but never consolidated, and the bourgeoisie were scared and temporarily disguising themselves as workers.

From much of this propaganda you would have derived the impression that there was something disgraceful in having gone to the front voluntarily and something praiseworthy in waiting to be conscripted.

The Communist accounts of the opening incident, the raid on the Telephone Exchange, are illuminating; they agree in nothing except in putting the blame on the other side.

Considering the general excitement and the things that were being said on both sides, the leaflet did not in effect mean much more than 'Stay at the barricades', but by seeming to approve of it while Solidaridad Obrera, the Anarchist paper, repudiated<

The posts were working again, the foreign Communist papers were beginning to arrive, and their accounts of the fighting were not only violently partisan but, of course, wildly inaccurate as to facts.

And sure enough, almost immediately--I suppose there must really have been several hours' truce, but they seemed more like minutes than hours--a sudden crash of rifle-fire, like a June cloud-burst, sent everyone scurrying; the steel shutters snappe

Above all, a planned rising of the kind suggested would have needed months of preparation, subversive propaganda among the militia, and so forth.

Many people were agreeably surprised when there was no rioting on i May. On 3 May the Government decided to take over the Telephone Exchange, which had been operated since the beginning of the war mainly by C.N.T. workers; it was alleged that it wa

To the right of the Ramblas the working-class quarters were solidly Anarchist; to the left a confused fight was going on among the tortuous by-streets, but on that side the P.S.U.C. and the Civil Guards were more or less in control.

You had to wait by the roadside for hours, sometimes three or four hours at a stretch, with knots of disconsolate peasants who carried bundles full of ducks and rabbits, waving to lorry after lorry.

For reasons of space I have taken only the reports of one incident, but the same discrepancies run all through the accounts in the Communist press.

The sand-bags in front of me receded into immense distance.

Compared with the huge miseries of a civil war, this kind of internecine squabble between parties, with its inevitable injustices and false accusations, may appear trivial.

Let it once be known that 'Anarchists' are implicated, and the right atmosphere of prejudice is established; after that the blame can safely be transferred to the 'Trotskyists'.

The room which acted as an armoury was unguarded and had a flimsy door; another Englishman and myself had no difficulty in prizing it open.

The principal landmark here was the Hotel Colon, the headquarters of the P.S.U.C., dominating the Plaza de Cataluna.

I can, however, contradict some of the more flagrant lies and help to get the affair into some kind of perspective.

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.

If we could drive Franco and his foreign mercenaries into the sea it might make an immense improvement in the world situation, even if Spain itself emerged with a stifling dictatorship and all its best men in jail.

There is nothing like starting off with a reversal of roles.

After several months of discomfort I had a ravenous desire for decent food and wine, cocktails, American cigarettes, and so forth, and I admit to having wallowed in every luxury that I had money to buy.

C.N.T. and U.G.T. members had been murdering one another for some time past; on several occasions the murders were followed by huge, provocative funerals which were quite deliberately intended to stir up political hatred.

More than this, most of the members of the Spanish Government have disclaimed all belief in the charges against the P.O.U.M.

An Anarchist patrol car drove up, bristling with weapons.

My salient memories of that time are the heat of the midday sun, and working half-naked with sand--bags punishing one's shoulders which were already flayed by the sun; and the lousiness of our clothes and boots, which were literally dropping to pie

That meant that the workers were definitely beaten; I realized--though, owing to my political ignorance, not so clearly as I ought to have done--that when the Government felt more sure of itself there would be reprisals.

The attack was a frightful mess--up and led to nothing except an orgy of lying in the newspapers.)

Forage-caps, zipper jackets, Sam Browne belts, hunting-knives, water-bottles, revolver-holsters were displayed in every window.

As an illustration of the autonomy of the police, it is interesting to learn that even with a signed order from the Director of Prisons and the Minister of Justice, McGovern and the others could not obtain admission to one of the 'secret prisons' m

To the right of the Ramblas the working-class quarters were solidly Anarchist; to the left a confused fight was going on among the tortuous by-streets, but on that side the P.S.U.C. and the Civil Guards were more or less in control.

The issue of cigarettes had ceased, but in Monflorite it was occasionally possible to buy packets of the cheapest kind of tobacco, which in appearance and texture was very like chopped chaff.

An immense amount, enough to fill many books, has already been written on the subject, and I do not suppose I should exaggerate if I said that nine-tenths of it is untruthful.

They thought they were Anarchists, but were not quite certain; perhaps they were Communists.

'The front' had come to be thought of as a mythical far-off place to which young men disappeared and either did not return or returned after three or four months with vast sums of money in their pockets.

But all the while the pain in my arm was diabolical, making me swear and then try not to swear, because every time I breathed too hard the blood bubbled out of my mouth.

In a furtive indirect way the practice of tipping was coming back.

The immediate cause of friction was the Government's order to surrender all private weapons, coinciding with the decision to build up a heavily-armed 'non-political' police-force from which trade union members were to be excluded.

For a while the Communist Press of the whole world was flaming with this kind of thing (Daily Worker, 21 June, summarizing various Spanish Communist papers):
SPANISH TROTSKYISTS PLOT WITH FRANCO
Following the arrest of a large number of leading Tr

A Civil Guard, in shirt-sleeves and livid with fright, came out of the door to parley with Kopp.

From comparison of various reports I should say that the leaflet called for (i) The formation of a revolutionary council (junta), (ii) The shooting of those responsible for the attack on the Telephone Exchange, (iii) The disarming of the Civil Guar

By the afternoon the streets were almost normal, though the deserted barricades were still standing; the Ramblas were thronged with people, the shops nearly all open, and--most reassuring of all--the trams that had stood so long in frozen blocks je

A Civil Guard, in shirt-sleeves and livid with fright, came out of the door to parley with Kopp.

Civil Guards, and so forth, had been brought back into use and were being heavily reinforced and armed.

[Note 8, below] A small but significant instance of the way in which everything was now orientated in favour of the wealthier classes could be seen in the tobacco shortage.

The tremendous shock of a bullet prevents sensation locally; a splinter of shell or bomb, which is jagged and usually hits you less hard, would probably hurt like the devil.

It was like an allegorical picture of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one's heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernic

To be marching up the street behind red flags inscribed with elevating slogans, and then to be bumped off from an upper window by some total stranger with a sub-machine-gun-- that is not my idea of a useful way to die.

More loosely, a revolutionary extremist.
(ii) A member of the actual organization of which Trotsky is head.
(iii) A disguised Fascist posing as a revolutionary who acts especially by sabotage in the U.S.S.R., but, in general, by splitting and undermini

They had managed to establish themselves close enough on either side to bring the road itself under machine-gun fire and make it impassable for traffic; but the gap was a kilometre wide and the Fascists had constructed a sunken road, a sort of enor

Since February the entire armed forces had theoretically been incorporated in the Popular Army, and the militias were, on paper, reconstructed along Popular Army lines, with differential pay-rates, gazetted rank, etc., etc.

I spent a long time wandering about the building, a great rambling place of which it was impossible to learn the geography.

A very few pedestrians, forced abroad for one reason or another, crept to and fro, flourishing white handkerchiefs, and at a spot in the middle of the Ramblas that was safe from bullets some men were crying newspapers to the empty street.

Various people were infected with spy mania and were creeping round whispering that everyone else was a spy of the Communists, or the Trotskyists, or the Anarchists, or what-not.

They would be credible only if one knew nothing whatever of the facts.

There was also a number of militiamen on leave, and a sprinkling of foreigners.

One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word 'comrade' stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug.

I am stumbling up the mucky trench, through the mist that swirls round me like cold steam.

And the man I saw rushing across the completely empty Plaza de Cataluna, brandishing a white handkerchief in each hand.

When the war broke out the foreign Trotskyists who came to Spain (fifteen or twenty in number) worked at first for the P.O.U.M., as the party nearest to their own viewpoint, but without becoming party-members; later Trotsky ordered his followers to attack

In Barcelona there' had been a series of more or less unofficial brawls in the working-class suburbs.

There was something repulsive in the parody of smart hotel life that was still going on behind shuttered windows amid the rattle of rifle-fire.

There can be no certainty about this, but it was at least inherently likely that the British Government, which had not raised a finger to save the Spanish Government from Franco, would intervene quickly enough to save it from its own working class.

Whichever way you took it it was a depressing outlook.

If the P.O.U.M. were really planning a coup d'etat it is inconceivable that they would not have used the ten thousand or so armed men who were the only striking force they had.

Some at least of the seized lands would remain in their possession, in which case there would also be a distribution of land in the territory that had been Franco's, and the virtual serfdom that had existed in some parts of Spain was not likely to

It will be clear enough from this that the Communist thesis of a P.O.U.M. 'rising' under Fascist orders rests on less than no evidence.

They were very useful to us, for they had an extraordinary dexterity at rolling the dried-up Spanish tobacco into cigarettes.

But on every wall the Government agents had stencilled: 'We need a Popular Army', and over the radio and in the Communist Press there was a ceaseless and sometimes very malignant jibing against the militias, who were described as ill-trained, undis

But what actually precipitated the fighting?

Partly, perhaps, this was due to the good luck of being among Spaniards, who, with their innate decency and their ever-present Anarchist tinge, would make even the opening stages of Socialism tolerable if they had the chance.

It was more like a bad period at the front, when men were short and we had to do abnormal hours of guard-duty; instead of being heroic one just had to stay at one's post, bored, dropping with sleep, and completely uninterested as to what it was all

The fact that the militia at the front played no part in the 'rising' should be conclusive.

It was the antagonism between those who wished the revolution to go forward and those who wished to check or prevent it--ultimately, between Anarchists and Communists.

My salient memories of that time are the heat of the midday sun, and working half-naked with sand--bags punishing one's shoulders which were already flayed by the sun; and the lousiness of our clothes and boots, which were literally dropping to pie

It was like an allegorical picture of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one's heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernicious

You had all the while a hateful feeling that someone hitherto your friend might be denouncing you to the secret police.

On Tuesday Solidaridad Obrera, the Anarchist paper, had described the attack on the Telephone Exchange as a 'monstrous provocation' (or words to that effect), but on Wednesday it changed its tune and began imploring everyone to go back to work.

All we found there were about two dozen small-bore rifles of an obsolete pattern and a few shot--guns, with no cartridges for any of them.

And meanwhile there is no possible doubt about the hatred and dissension that the 'Trotsky-Fascist' accusation is causing.

But certainly it was calculated to do so, and those responsible for it must be held to have put political spite before anti-Fascist unity.

In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy 'proving' that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact.

The office of La Batalla, the P.O.U.M. paper, which was not defended, had been raided and seized by the Civil Guards at about the same time as the Telephone Exchange, but the paper was being printed, and a few copies distributed, from another addre

The city is barricaded and both C.N.T. and U.G.T. are behind the barricades; two days afterwards the inflammatory poster (actually a leaflet) appears, and this is declared by implication to have started the whole business--effect preceding cause.

It is conceivable that she was deaf.

No doubt to anyone who had been there in August, when the blood was scarcely dry in the streets and militia were quartered in the smart hotels, Barcelona in December would have seemed bourgeois; to me, fresh from England, it was liker to a workers'

In the evenings they used to go out with green nets, hunting quails.

Predominantly they were people of the poorest class, from the back-streets down by the quays; there was a number of women among them, some of them carrying babies, and a crowd of little ragged boys.

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 s

Since February the entire armed forces had theoretically been incorporated in the Popular Army, and the militias were, on paper, reconstructed along Popular Army lines, with differential pay-rates, gazetted rank, etc., etc.

Throughout this time there were rumours, always vague and contradictory owing to newspaper censorship, of minor clashes that were occurring all over Catalonia.

(Incidentally, the tale of the stolen guns may have originated with Antonov-Ovseenko, the Russian Consul-General.

And the attack was made with the maximum of personal libel and with complete irresponsibility as to any effects it might have upon the war.

Since February the entire armed forces had theoretically been incorporated in the Popular Army, and the militias were, on paper, reconstructed along Popular Army lines, with differential pay-rates, gazetted rank, etc., etc.

The principal landmark here was the Hotel Colon, the headquarters of the P.S.U.C., dominating the Plaza de Cataluna.

I remember his remarking that the Barcelona paving-stones ought to be numbered; it would save such a lot of trouble in building and demolishing barricades.

Like everyone about me I was chiefly conscious of boredom, heat, cold, dirt, lice, privation, and occasional danger.

P.O.U.M., and C.N.T.-F.A.I. alike, were hoarding arms in Barcelona, that I could not believe that two of the principal P.O.U.M. buildings contained only the fifty or sixty rifles that I had seen.

But on every wall the Government agents had stencilled: 'We need a Popular Army', and over the radio and in the Communist Press there was a ceaseless and sometimes very malignant jibing against the militias, who were described as ill-trained, undis

La Batalla was still appearing, but it was censored until the front page was almost completely blank.

The train, already full of militiamen when it left Barbastro, was invaded by more and more peasants at every station on the line; peasants with bundles of vegetables, with terrified fowls which they carried head--downwards, with sacks which looped

The workers' militias, based on the trade unions and each composed of people of approximately the same political opinions, had the effect of canalizing into one place all the most revolutionary sentiment in the country.

The P.O.U.M. was declared to be a disguised Fascist organization, and a cartoon representing the P.O.U.M. as a figure slipping off a mask marked with the hammer and sickle and revealing a hideous, maniacal face marked with the swastika, was being c

On the Anarchist side the action was almost certainly spontaneous, for it was an affair mainly of the rank and file.

In 1936 its then leader, Joaquin Maurin, was one of the deputies who gave warning in the Cortes of Franco's impending revolt.

I remember the look of shame and misery on the poor girl's face when I accidentally bumped into her coming out of the man's bedroom.

In various parts of the town bands of Civil Guards and P.S.U.C. adherents seized buildings in strategic spots, if not actually before the fighting started, at any rate with surprising promptitude.

When we went on leave I had been a hundred and fifteen days in the line, and at the time this period seemed to me to have been one of the most futile of my whole life.

Later, in June, the Government brought troops from the Madrid front and concentrated thirty thousand men on Huesca, with an enormous quantity of aeroplanes, but still the town did not fall.

By this time the roar of rifle and machine-gun fire from various directions was almost comparable to the din of a battle.

But now that I can see this period in perspective I do not altogether regret it.

At a table nearby a bearded man with a huge automatic pistol strapped to his belt is hewing loaves of bread into five pieces.

Whatever the real intention may have been, there was a widespread belief that this was the signal for a general attack on the C.N.T. by the Civil Guards and the P.S.U.C.

Now that the trees were in full leaf we had constructed snipers' platforms, like machans, in the poplar trees that fringed the line.

The long nightmare of the fighting, the noise, the lack of food and sleep, the mingled strain and boredom of sitting on the roof and wondering whether in another minute I should be shot myself or be obliged to shoot somebody else had put my nerves

There were foreign journalists, political suspects of every shade, an American airman in the service of the Government, various Communist agents, including a fat, sinister-looking Russian, said to be an agent of the Ogpu, who was nicknamed Charlie

It was this:
They were--in cooperation with the local Trotskyists--to prepare a situation of disorder and bloodshed, in which it would be possible for the Germans and Italians to declare that they were 'unable to exercise naval control

And besides all this I was making preliminary arrangements to leave the P.O.U.M. militia and enter some other unit that would ensure my being sent to the Madrid front.

Nothing was happening except an occasional casualty from a sniper's bullet and the sporadic artillery-fire and air-raids on Huesca.

Its flavour was not bad, but it was so dry that even when you had succeeded in making a cigarette the tobacco promptly fell out and left an empty cylinder.

The shuttered streets looked ghastly.

I saw only what was happening in my immediate neighbourhood, but I saw and heard quite enough to be able to contradict many of the lies that have been circulated.

Every time they emerged from the side-street at the corner the P.S.U.C. machine-gunners in the Hotel Colon opened fire and drove them back--I don't know why, for they were obviously unarmed.

They were the Assault Guards, another formation similar to the Civil Guards and the Carabineros (i.e. a formation intended primarily for police work), and the picked troops of the Republic.

At the end of April, just after I got to Barcelona, Roldan, a prominent member of the U.G.T., was murdered, presumably by someone in the C.N.T. The Government ordered all shops to close and staged ah enormous funeral procession, largely of Popular

Nor were any extra men brought out of the line beforehand, though it would have been easy enough to smuggle, say, a thousand or two thousand men back to Barcelona on various pretexts.

You start off in the typical atmosphere of an eastern city--the scorching sunlight, the dusty palms, the smells of fish and spices and garlic, the squashy tropical fruits, the swarming dark-faced human beings--and because you are so used to it you

It is worth stopping to define it.

Was it any kind of coup d'etat or revolutionary attempt?

They had never been in favour of insurrection until the war against Franco was won; on the other hand the workers had come into the streets, and the P.O.U.M. leaders took the rather pedantic Marxist line that when the workers are on the streets it

My salient memories of that time are the heat of the midday sun, and working half-naked with sand--bags punishing one's shoulders which were already flayed by the sun; and the lousiness of our clothes and boots, which were literally dropping to pieces; an

The militia uniform and the blue overalls had almost disappeared; everyone seemed to be wearing the smart summer suits in which Spanish tailors specialize.

At any other time the little snob of a hotel manager would have done his best to make them uncomfortable, in fact would have refused to have them on the premises, but at present they were popular because, unlike the rest of us, they had a private s

All I could gather was that the Civil Guards had attacked the Telephone Exchange and seized various strategic spots that commanded other buildings belonging to the workers.

Finally, on 15-16 June, the P.O.U.M. was suppressed and declared an illegal organization.

For under the surface-aspect of the town, under the luxury and growing poverty, under the seeming gaiety of the streets, with their flower--stalls, their many-coloured flags, their propaganda-posters, and thronging crowds, there was an unmistakable

Everyone rises with a sheepish expression as the shell plunges and booms a hundred yards away.

But it dismayed me a little, and brought it home to me that some queer things had been happening in the last three months.

He made the anti-Fascist salute, which I returned.

For some time past there had been tension throughout Catalonia.

The affair was represented not as a spontaneous outbreak, but as a deliberate, planned insurrection against the Government, engineered solely by the P.O.U.M. with the aid of a few misguided 'uncontrollables'.

The Continental had been 'collectivized' by the Generalite and not, like most of the hotels, by the C.N.T. or U.G.T., and it was regarded as neutral ground.

Later, in June, the Government brought troops from the Madrid front and concentrated thirty thousand men on Huesca, with an enormous quantity of aeroplanes, but still the town did not fall.

Buenos dias was beginning to replace salud.

In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like.

But it would not be fair to attribute it solely to the shift of political power.

The smart restaurants and hotels were full of rich people wolfing expensive meals, while for the working-class population food-prices had jumped enormously without any corresponding rise in wages.

At the beginning, before the food-shortage became acute and the newspapers began stirring up hatred, there was a tendency to regard the whole affair as a joke.

I have tried to write objectively about the Barcelona fighting, though, obviously, no one can be completely objective on a question of this kind.

The essential point is that all this time I had been isolated--for at the front one was almost completely isolated from the outside world: even of what was happening in Barcelona one had only a dim conception--among people who could roughly but not

He, at any rate, communicated it to a well-known English journalist, who afterwards repeated it in good faith in a weekly paper.

As I discovered later, when buying my kit before going back to the front, certain things that one badly needed at the front were very difficult to procure.

In such places things happen quickly, the factions are ready-made, everyone knows the local geography, and when the guns begin to shoot people take their places almost as in a fire-drill.

And besides all this I was making preliminary arrangements to leave the P.O.U.M. militia and enter some other unit that would ensure my being sent to the Madrid front.

A German girl who had no papers at all dodged the police by posing for several days as a man's mistress.

Chapter 11

IT will never be possible to get a completely accurate and unbiased account of the Barcelona fighting, because the necessary records do not exist.

But before doing so it is worth pointing to several a priori reasons why this version of the May fighting as a Fascist rising engineered by the P.O.U.M. is next door to incredible.
(i) The P.O.U.M. had not the numbers or influence to provoke disord

In my memory I live over incidents that might seem too petty to be worth recalling.

So long as they remained behind the barricades they were merely watchfully waiting, an attitude which included the right to shoot at anything armed in the open street. . . (the) general bursts were invariably aggravated by pacos--hidden

The meaning of this was obvious to everyone; and it was also obvious that the next move would be the taking over of some of the key industries controlled by the C.N.T. In addition there was a certain amount of resentment among the working classes b

I had never heard of a man or an animal getting a bullet through the middle of the neck and surviving it.

On a bullet-- chipped tree in front of our parapet thick clusters of cherries were forming.

Kopp glanced out of the window, cocked his stick behind his back, said: 'Let us investigate,' and strolled down the stairs in his usual unconcerned manner, I following.

On 25 April, after the usual mananas, another section relieved us and we handed over our rifles, packed our kits, and marched back to Monflorite.

Did it definitely aim at overthrowing the Government?

It was the kind of shop you see in Bond Street or the Rue de la Paix.

If they had been good party-men they would, I suppose, have urged me to change sides, or even have pinioned me and taken away the bombs of which my pockets were full; instead they merely commiserated with me for having to spend my leave in doing gu

It appeared that he had been in the Plaza de Cataluna when several lorry-loads of armed Civil Guards had driven up to the Telephone Exchange, which was operated mainly by C.N.T. workers, and made a sudden assault upon it.

It was the first glimpse I had had of the interpretation that was likely to be put upon this affair later on.

I wish I could convey to you the atmosphere of that time.

It was said that the Valencia Government was sending six thousand men to occupy Barcelona, and that five thousand Anarchist and P.O.U.M. troops had left the Aragon front to oppose them.

You start off in the typical atmosphere of an eastern city--the scorching sunlight, the dusty palms, the smells of fish and spices and garlic, the squashy tropical fruits, the swarming dark-faced human beings--and because you are so used to it you

It was perfectly clear that it would only lead to rioting.

They had managed to establish themselves close enough on either side to bring the road itself under machine-gun fire and make it impassable for traffic; but the gap was a kilometre wide and the Fascists had constructed a sunken road, a sort of enor

Looking out from the observatory, I could grasp that the Ramblas, which is one of the principal streets of the town, formed a dividing line.

For under the surface-aspect of the town, under the luxury and growing poverty, under the seeming gaiety of the streets, with their flower--stalls, their many-coloured flags, their propaganda-posters, and thronging crowds, there was an unmistakable

Fat prosperous men, elegant women, and sleek cars were everywhere.

As before, if you are not interested in political controversy and the mob of parties and sub-parties with their confusing names (rather like the names of the generals in a Chinese war), please skip.

The Civil Guards and Carabineros, who were not intended for the front at all, were better armed and far better clad than ourselves.

You start off in the typical atmosphere of an eastern city--the scorching sunlight, the dusty palms, the smells of fish and spices and garlic, the squashy tropical fruits, the swarming dark-faced human beings--and because you are so used to it you

No doubt to anyone who had been there in August, when the blood was scarcely dry in the streets and militia were quartered in the smart hotels, Barcelona in December would have seemed bourgeois; to me, fresh from England, it was liker to a workers' city t

About a dozen men, mostly Germans, had volunteered for the attack on the Cafe Moka, if it came off.

It was obvious that the so-called funeral was merely a display of strength; a little more of this kind of thing and there might be bloodshed.

An offensive on the Aragon front, even an unsuccessful one, would have forced Franco to divert part of his army; as it was the Government did not begin any offensive action till it was far too late-- indeed, till about the time when Bilbao fell.

The 1st of May was approaching, and there was talk of a monster demonstration in which both the C.N.T. and the U.G.T. were to take part.

He seemed very anxious to recruit me and asked me, if possible, to persuade some of the other I.L.P. Englishmen to come with me.

Some kind of temporary compromise had been arrived at there, the exchange was working uninterruptedly and there was no firing from the building.

The office of La Batalla, the P.O.U.M. paper, which was not defended, had been raided and seized by the Civil Guards at about the same time as the Telephone Exchange, but the paper was being printed, and a few copies distributed, from another addre

The essential point is that all this time I had been isolated--for at the front one was almost completely isolated from the outside world: even of what was happening in Barcelona one had only a dim conception--among people who could roughly but not too in

For a while the Communist Press of the whole world was flaming with this kind of thing (Daily Worker, 21 June, summarizing various Spanish Communist papers):
SPANISH TROTSKYISTS PLOT WITH FRANCO
Following the arrest of a large number of leading Tr