Looking Back On The Spanish War by George Orwell

1


First of all the physical memories, the sounds, the smells and the
surfaces of things.

It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the
Spanish war I remember the week of so-called training that we received
before being sent to the front--the huge cavalry barracks in Barcelona
with its draughty stables and cobbled yards, the icy cold of the pump
where one washed, the filthy meals made tolerable by pannikins of wine,
the Trousered militia-women chopping firewood, and the roll-call in the
early mornings where my prosaic English name made a sort of comic
interlude among the resounding Spanish ones, Manuel Gonzalez, Pedro
Aguilar, Ramon Fenellosa, Roque Ballaster, Jaime Domenech, Sebastian
Viltron, Ramon Nuvo Bosch. I name those particular men because I remember
the faces of all of them. Except for two who were mere riff-raff and have
doubtless become good Falangists by this time, it is probable that all of
them are dead. Two of them I know to be dead. The eldest would have been
about twenty-five, the youngest sixteen.

One of the essential experiences of war is never being able to escape
from disgusting smells of human origin. Latrines are an overworked
subject in war literature, and I would not mention them if it were not
that the latrine in our barracks did its necessary bit towards puncturing
my own illusions about the Spanish civil war. The Latin type of latrine,
at which you have to squat, is bad enough at its best, but these were
made of some kind of polished stone so slippery that it was all you could
do to keep on your feet. In addition they were always blocked. Now I have
plenty of other disgusting things in my memory, but I believe it was
these latrines that first brought home to me the thought, so often to
recur: 'Here we are, soldiers of a revolutionary army, defending
Democracy against Fascism, fighting a war which is ABOUT something, and
the detail of our lives is just as sordid and degrading as it could be in
prison, let alone in a bourgeois army.' Many other things reinforced this
impression later; for instance, the boredom and animal hunger of trench
life, the squalid intrigues over scraps of food, the mean, nagging
quarrels which people exhausted by lack of sleep indulge in.

The essential horror of army life (whoever has been a soldier will know
what I mean by the essential horror of army life) is barely affected by
the nature of the war you happen to be fighting in. Discipline, for
instance, is ultimately the same in all armies. Orders have to be obeyed
and enforced by punishment if necessary, the relationship of officer and
man has to be the relationship of superior and inferior. The picture of
war set forth in books like ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT is
substantially true. Bullets hurt, corpses stink, men under fire are often
so frightened that they wet their trousers. It is true that the social
background from which an army springs will colour its training, tactics
and general efficiency, and also that the consciousness of being in the
right can bolster up morale, though this affects the civilian population
more than the troops. (People forget that a soldier anywhere near the
front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or, above all,
too tired to bother about the political origins of the war.) But the laws
of nature are not suspended for a 'red' army any more than for a 'white'
one. A louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you
are fighting for happens to be just.

Why is it worth while to point out anything so obvious? Because the bulk
of the British and American intelligentsia were manifestly unaware of it
then, and are now. Our memories are short nowadays, but look back a bit,
dig out the files of NEW MASSES or the DAILY WORKER, and just have a look
at the romantic warmongering muck that our left-wingers were spilling at
that time. All the stale old phrases! And the unimaginative callousness
of it! The sang-froid with which London faced the bombing of Madrid! Here
I am not bothering about the counter-propagandists of the Right, the
Lunns, Garvins ET HOC GENUS; they go without saying. But here were the
very people who for twenty years had hooted and jeered at the 'glory' of
war, at atrocity stories, at patriotism, even at physical courage, coming
out with stuff that with the alteration of a few names would have fitted
into the DAILY MAIL of 1918. If there was one thing that the British
intelligentsia were committed to, it was the debunking version of war,
the theory that war is all corpses and latrines and never leads to any
good result. Well, the same people who in 1933 sniggered pityingly if you
said that in certain circumstances you would fight for your country, in
1937 were denouncing you as a Trotsky-Fascist if you suggested that the
stories in NEW MASSES about freshly wounded men clamouring to get back
into the fighting might be exaggerated. And the Left intelligentsia made
their swing-over from 'War is hell' to 'War is glorious' not only with no
sense of incongruity but almost without any intervening stage. Later the
bulk of them were to make other transitions equally violent. There must
be a quite large number of people, a sort of central core of the
intelligentsia, who approved the 'King and Country' declaration in 1935,
shouted for a' firm line against Germany' in 1937, supported the People's
Convention in 1940, and are demanding a Second Front now.

As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion
which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a
tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis. In the
intelligentsia I should say they result rather from money and mere
physical safety. At a given moment they may be 'pro-war' or 'anti-war',
but in either case they have no realistic picture of war in their minds.
When they enthused over the Spanish war they knew, of course, that people
were being killed and that to be killed is unpleasant, but they did feel
that for a soldier in the Spanish Republican army the experience of war
was somehow not degrading. Somehow the latrines stank less, discipline
was less irksome. You have only to glance at the NEW STATESMAN to see
that they believed that; exactly similar blah is being written about the
Red Army at this moment. We have become too civilized to grasp the
obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to
fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is
often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and
those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases. The fact that
such a platitude is worth writing down shows what the years of RENTIER
capitalism have done to us.


2


In connexion with what I have just said, a footnote, on atrocities.

I have little direct evidence about the atrocities in the Spanish civil
war. I know that some were committed by the Republicans, and far more
(they are still continuing) by the Fascists. But what impressed me then,
and has impressed me ever since, is that atrocities are believed in or
disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone
believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his
own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew
up a table of atrocities during the period between 1918 and the present;
there was never a year when atrocities were not occurring somewhere or
other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the Right
believed in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any
moment the situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday's
proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a ridiculous lie, merely
because the political landscape has changed.

In the present war we are in the curious situation that our 'atrocity
campaign' was done largely before the war started, and done mostly by the
Left, the people who normally pride themselves on their incredulity. In
the same period the Right, the atrocity-mongers of 1914-18, were gazing
at Nazi Germany and flatly refusing to see any evil in it. Then as soon
as war broke out it was the pro-Nazis of yesterday who were repeating
horror stories, while the anti-Nazis suddenly found themselves doubting
whether the Gestapo really existed. Nor was this solely the result of the
Russo-German Pact. It was partly because before the war the Left had
wrongly believed that Britain and Germany would never fight and were
therefore able to be anti-German and anti-British simultaneously; partly
also because official war-propaganda, with its disgusting hypocrisy and
self-righteousness, always tends to make thinking people sympathize with
the enemy. Part of the price we paid for the systematic lying of 1914-17
was the exaggerated pro-German reaction which followed. During the years
1918-33 you were hooted at in left-wing circles if you suggested that
Germany bore even a fraction of responsibility for the war. In all the
denunciations of Versailles I listened to during those years I don't
think I ever once heard the question, 'What would have happened if
Germany had won?' even mentioned, let alone discussed. So also with
atrocities. The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters
it. Recently I noticed that the very people who swallowed any and every
horror story about the Japanese in Nanking in 1937 refused to believe
exactly the same stories about Hong Kong in 1942. There was even a
tendency to feel that the Nanking atrocities had become, as it were,
retrospectively untrue because the British Government now drew attention
to them.

But unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they
are lied about and made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen.
The fact often adduced as a reason for scepticism--that the same horror
stories come up in war after war--merely makes it rather more likely
that these stories are true. Evidently they are widespread fantasies, and
war provides an opportunity of putting them into practice. Also, although
it has ceased to be fashionable to say so, there is little question that
what one may roughly call the 'whites' commit far more and worse
atrocities than the 'reds'. There is not the slightest doubt, for
instance, about the behaviour of the Japanese in China. Nor is there much
doubt about the long tale of Fascist outrages during the last ten years
in Europe. The volume of testimony is enormous, and a respectable
proportion of it comes from the German press and radio. These things
really happened, that is the thing to keep one's eye on. They happened
even though Lord Halifax said they happened. The raping and butchering in
Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly
Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees
along the Spanish roads--they all happened, and they did not happen any
the less because the DAILY TELEGRAPH has suddenly found out about them
when it is five years too late.


3


Two memories, the first not proving anything in particular, the second, I
think, giving one a certain insight into the atmosphere of a
revolutionary period:

Early one morning another man and I had gone out to snipe at the Fascists
in the trenches outside Huesca. Their line and ours here lay three
hundred yards apart, at which range our aged rifles would not shoot
accurately, but by sneaking out to a spot about a hundred yards from the
Fascist trench you might, if you were lucky, get a shot at someone
through a gap in the parapet. Unfortunately the ground between was a flat
beet field with no cover except a few ditches, and it was necessary to go
out while it was still-dark and return soon after dawn, before the light
became too good. This time no Fascists appeared, and we stayed too long
and were caught by the dawn. We were in a ditch, but behind us were two
hundred yards of flat ground with hardly enough cover for a rabbit. We
were still trying to nerve ourselves to make a dash for it when there was
an uproar and a blowing of whistles in the Fascist trench. Some of our
aeroplanes were coming over. At this moment, a man presumably carrying a
message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of
the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his
trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It
is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a
hundred yards, and also that I was thinking chiefly about getting back to
our trench while the Fascists had their attention fixed on the
aeroplanes. Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about
the trousers. I had come here to shoot at 'Fascists'; but a man who is
holding up his trousers isn't a 'Fascist', he is visibly a
fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don't feel like shooting at
him.

What does this incident demonstrate? Nothing very much, because it is the
kind of thing that happens all the time in all wars. The other is
different. I don't suppose that in telling it I can make it moving to you
who read it, but I ask you to believe that it is moving to me, as an
incident characteristic of the moral atmosphere of a particular moment in
time.

One of the recruits who joined us while I was at the barracks was a
wild-looking boy from the back streets of Barcelona. He was ragged and
barefooted. He was also extremely dark (Arab blood, I dare say), and made
gestures you do not usually see a European make; one in particular--the
arm outstretched, the palm vertical--was a gesture characteristic of
Indians. One day a bundle of cigars, which you could still buy dirt cheap
at that time, was stolen out of my bunk. Rather foolishly I reported this
to the officer, and one of the scallywags I have already mentioned
promptly came forward and said quite untruly that twenty-five pesetas had
been stolen from his bunk. For some reason the officer instantly decided
that the brown-faced boy must be the thief. They were very hard on
stealing in the militia, and in theory people could be shot for it. The
wretched boy allowed himself to be led off to the guardroom to be
searched. What most struck me was that he barely attempted to protest his
innocence. In the fatalism of his attitude you could see the desperate
poverty in which he had been bred. The officer ordered him to take his
clothes off. With a humility which was horrible to me he stripped himself
naked, and his clothes were searched. Of course neither the cigars nor
the money were there; in fact he had not stolen them. What was most
painful of all was that he seemed no less ashamed after his innocence had
been established. That night I took him to the pictures and gave him
brandy and chocolate. But that too was horrible--I mean the attempt to
wipe out an injury with money. For a few minutes I had half believed him
to be a thief, and that could not be wiped out.

Well, a few weeks later at the front I had trouble with one of the men in
my section. By this time I was a 'cabo', or corporal, in command of
twelve men. It was static warfare, horribly cold, and the chief job was
getting sentries to stay awake at their posts. One day a man suddenly
refused to go to a certain post, which he said quite truly was exposed to
enemy fire. He was a feeble creature, and I seized hold of him and began
to drag him towards his post. This roused the feelings of the others
against me, for Spaniards, I think, resent being touched more than we do.
Instantly I was surrounded by a ring of shouting men:' Fascist! Fascist!
Let that man go! This isn't a bourgeois army. Fascist!' etc., etc. As
best I could in my bad Spanish I shouted back that orders had got to be
obeyed, and the row developed into one of those enormous arguments by
means of which discipline is gradually hammered out in revolutionary
armies. Some said I was right, others said I was wrong. But the point is
that the one who took my side the most warmly of all was the brown-faced
boy. As soon as he saw what was happening he sprang into the ring and
began passionately defending me. With his strange, wild, Indian gesture
he kept exclaiming, 'He's the best corporal we've got!' (NO HAY CABO COMO
EL!) Later on he applied for leave to exchange into my section.

Why is this incident touching to me? Because in any normal circumstances
it would have been impossible for good feelings ever to be re-established
between this boy and myself. The implied accusation of theft would not
have been made any better, probably somewhat worse, by my efforts to make
amends. One of the effects of safe and civilized life is an immense
oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions seem somewhat
disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as
ingratitude. But in Spain in 1936 we were not living in a normal time. It
was a time when generous feelings and gestures were easier than they
ordinarily are. I could relate a dozen similar incidents, not really
communicable but bound up in my own mind with the special atmosphere of
the time, the shabby clothes and the gay-coloured revolutionary posters,
the universal use of the word 'comrade', the anti-Fascist ballads printed
on flimsy paper and sold for a penny, the phrases like 'international
proletarian solidarty', pathetically repeated by ignorant men who
believed them to mean something. Could you feel friendly towards
somebody, and stick up for him in a quarrel, after you had been
ignominiously searched in his presence for property you were supposed to
have stolen from him? No, you couldn't; but you might if you had both
been through some emotionally widening experience. That is one of the
by-products of revolution, though in this case it was only the beginnings
of a revolution, and obviously foredoomed to failure.


4


The struggle for power between the Spanish Republican parties is an
unhappy, far-off thing which I have no wish to revive at this date. I
only mention it in order to say: believe nothing, or next to nothing, of
what you read about internal affairs on the Government side. It is all,
from whatever source, party propaganda--that is to say, lies. The broad
truth about the war is simple enough. The Spanish bourgeoisie saw their
chance of crushing the labour movement, and took it, aided by the Nazis
and by the forces of reaction all over the world. It is doubtful whether
more than that will ever be established.

I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, 'History stopped in 1936', at
which he nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of
totalitarianism in general, but more particularly of the Spanish civil
war. Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly
reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw
newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even
the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles
reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where
hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely
denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot
fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers
in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional
superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact,
history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to
have happened according to various 'party lines'. Yet in a way, horrible
as all this was, it was unimportant. It concerned secondary issues--
namely, the struggle for power between the Comintern and the Spanish
left-wing parties, and the efforts of the Russian Government to prevent
revolution in Spain. But the broad picture of the war which the Spanish
Government presented to the world was not untruthful. The main issues
were what it said they were. But as for the Fascists and their backers,
how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How could they
possibly mention their real aims? Their version of the war was pure
fantasy, and in the circumstances it could not have been otherwise.

The only propaganda line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to represent
themselves as Christian patriots saving Spain from a Russian
dictatorship. This involved pretending that life in Government Spain was
just one long massacre (VIDE the CATHOLIC HERALD or the DAILY MAIL--but
these were child's play compared with the Continental Fascist press), and
it involved immensely exaggerating the scale of Russian intervention. Out
of the huge pyramid of lies which the Catholic and reactionary press all
over the world built up, let me take just one point--the presence in
Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco partisans all believed in this;
estimates of its strength went as high as half a million. Now, there was
no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a handful of airmen and
other technicians, a few hundred at the most, but an army there was not.
Some thousands of foreigners who fought in Spain, not to mention millions
of Spaniards, were witnesses of this. Well, their testimony made no
impression at all upon the Franco propagandists, not one of whom had set
foot in Government Spain. Simultaneously these people refused utterly to
admit the fact of German or Italian intervention at the same time as the
Germany and Italian press were openly boasting about the exploits of
their' legionaries'. I have chosen to mention only one point, but in fact
the whole of Fascist propaganda about the war was on this level.

This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the
feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the
world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar
lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish war be
written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history
books, and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never
existed will become historical fact, and schoolchildren will learn about
it generations hence. But suppose Fascism is finally defeated and some
kind of democratic government restored in Spain in the fairly near
future; even then, how is the history of the war to be written? What kind
of records will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the
records kept on the Government side are recoverable--even so, how is a
true history of the war to be written? For, as I have pointed out
already, the Government, also dealt extensively in lies. From the
anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war,
but it would be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet,
after all, some kind of history will be written, and after those who
actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally accepted. So
for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies
anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part
inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the
abandonment of the idea that history COULD be truthfully written. In the
past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they
wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must
make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that 'facts' existed
and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a
considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost
everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance,
the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, you will find that a respectable amount of
the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German
historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but
there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which
neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis
of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species
of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically
denies that such a thing as 'the truth' exists. There is, for instance,
no such thing as 'Science'. There is only 'German Science', 'Jewish
Science', etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a
nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not
only the future but THE PAST. If the Leader says of such and such an
event, 'It never happened'--well, it never happened. If he says that two
and two are five--well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me
much more than bombs--and after our experiences of the last few years
that is not a frivolous statement.

But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a
totalitarian future? Before writing off the totalitarian world as a
nightmare that can't come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of
today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn't come true. Against that
shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and
yesterday's weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only
two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth
goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently
can't violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is
that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal
tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination
of several Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no
longer exist. We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing,
because our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental
belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear
never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in
which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe
half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run.
Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief. Don't resist
evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What
evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modern
industrialized state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by
military force?

Consider for instance the re-institution of slavery. Who could have
imagined twenty years ago that slavery would return to Europe? Well,
slavery has been restored under our noses. The forced-labour camps all
over Europe and North Africa where Poles, Russians, Jews and political
prisoners of every race toil at road-making or swamp-draining for their
bare rations, are simple chattle slavery. The most one can say is that
the buying and selling of slaves by individuals is not yet permitted. In
other ways--the breaking-up of families, for instance--the conditions
are probably worse than they were on the American cotton plantations.
There is no reason for thinking that this state of affairs will change
while any totalitarian domination endures. We don't grasp its full
implications, because in our mystical way we feel that a régime founded
on slavery MUST collapse. But it is worth comparing the duration of the
slave empires of antiquity with that of any modern state. Civilizations
founded on slavery have lasted for such periods as four thousand years.

When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those
hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested
generation after generation have left behind them no record whatever. We
do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and Roman history,
how many slaves' names are known to you? I can think of two, or possibly
three. One is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus. Also, in the Roman
room at the British Museum there is a glass jar with the maker's name
inscribed on the bottom, 'FELIX FECIT'. I have a mental picture of poor
Felix (a Gaul with red hair and a metal collar round his neck), but in
fact he may not have been a slave; so there are only two slaves whose
names I definitely know, and probably few people can remember more. The
rest have gone down into utter silence.


5


The backbone of the resistance against Franco was the Spanish working
class, especially the urban trade union members. In the long run--it is
important to remember that it is only in the long run--the working class
remains the most reliable enemy of Fascism, simply because the
working-class stands to gain most by a decent reconstruction of society.
Unlike other classes or categories, it can't be permanently bribed.

To say this is not to idealize the working class. In the long struggle
that has followed the Russian Revolution it is the manual workers who
have been defeated, and it is impossible not to feel that it was their
own fault. Time after time, in country after country, the organized
working-class movements have been crushed by open, illegal violence, and
their comrades abroad, linked to themin theoretical solidarity, have
simply looked on and done nothing; and underneath this, secret cause of
many betrayals, has lain the fact that between white and coloured workers
there is not even lip-service to solidarity. Who can believe in the
class-conscious international proletariat after the events of the past
ten years? To the British working class the massacre of their comrades in
Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, or wherever it might be seemed less interesting
and less important than yesterday's football match. Yet this does not
alter the fact that the working class will go on struggling against
Fascism after the others have caved in. One feature of the Nazi conquest
of France was the astonishing defections among the intelligentsia,
including some of the left-wing political intelligentsia. The
intelligentsia are the people who squeal loudest against Fascism, and yet
a respectable proportion of them collapse into defeatism when the pinch
comes. They are far-sighted enough to see the odds against them, and
moreoever they can be bribed--for it is evident that the Nazis think it
worth while to bribe intellectuals. With the working class it is the
other way about. Too ignorant to see through the trick that is being
played on them, they easily swallow the promises of Fascism, yet sooner
or later they always take up the struggle again. They must do so, because
in their own bodies they always discover that the promises of Fascism
cannot be fulfilled. To win over the working class permanently, the
Fascists would have to raise the general standard of living, which they
are unable and probably unwilling to do. The struggle of the working
class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but
it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do
this in the face of endless discouragements. What are the workers
struggling for? Simply for the decent life which they are more and more
aware is now technically possible. Their consciousness of this aim ebbs
and flows. In Spain, for a while, people were acting consciously, moving
towards a goal which they wanted to reach and believed they could reach.
It accounted for the curiously buoyant feeling that life in Government
Spain had during the early months of the war. The common people knew in
their bones that the Republic was their friend and Franco was their
enemy. They knew that they were in the right, because they were fighting
for something which the world owed them and was able to give them.

One has to remember this to see the Spanish war in its true perspective.
When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of War--and in
this particular case of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the
misunderstandings--there is always the temptation to say: 'One side is
as bad as the other. I am neutral'. In practice, however, one cannot be
neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no
difference who wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for progress,
the other side more or less for reaction. The hatred which the Spanish
Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps,
and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay. In
essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common
people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the
dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real
issue; all else was froth on its surface.


6


The outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome,
Berlin--at any rate not in Spain. After the summer of 1937 those with
eyes in their heads realized that the Government could not win the war
unless there were some profound change in the international set-up, and
in deciding to fight on Negrin and the others may have been partly
influenced by the expectation that the world war which actually broke out
in 1939 was coming in 1938. The much-publicized disunity on the
Government side was not a main cause of defeat. The Government militias
were hurriedly raised, ill-armed and unimaginative in their military
outlook, but they would have been the same if complete political
agreement had existed from the start. At the outbreak of war the average
Spanish factory-worker did not even know how to fire a rifle (there had
never been universal conscription in Spain), and the traditional pacifism
of the Left was a great handicap. The thousands of foreigners who served
in Spain made good infantry, but there were very few experts of any kind
among them. The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the
revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalize
factories, demolish churches, and issue revolutionary manifestoes would
not have made the armies more efficient. The Fascists won because they
were the stronger; they had modern arms and the others hadn't. No
political strategy could offset that.

The most baffling thing in the Spanish war was the behaviour of the great
powers. The war was actually won for Franco by the Germans and Italians,
whose motives were obvious enough. The motives of France and Britain are
less easy to understand. In 1936 it was clear to everyone that if Britain
would only help the Spanish Government, even to the extent of a few
million pounds' worth of arms, Franco would collapse and German strategy
would be severely dislocated. By that time one did not need to be a
clairvoyant to foresee that war between Britain and Germany was coming;
one could even foretell within a year or two when it would come. Yet in
the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical way the British ruling class did
all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis. Why? Because
they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer. Undoubtedly they were, and
yet when it came to the final showdown they chose to Stand up to Germany.
It is still very uncertain what plan they acted on in backing Franco, and
they may have had no clear plan at all. Whether the British ruling class
are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our
time, and at certain moments a very important question. As to the
Russians, their motives in the Spanish war are completely inscrutable.
Did they, as the pinks believed, intervene in Spain in order to defend
Democracy and thwart the Nazis? Then why did they intervene on such a
niggardly scale and finally leave Spain in the lurch? Or did they, as the
Catholics maintained, intervene in order to foster revolution in Spain?
Then why did they do all in their power to crush the Spanish
revolutionary movements, defend private property and hand power to the
middle class as against the working class? Or did they, as the
Trotskyists suggested, intervene simply in order to PREVENT a Spanish
revolution? Then why not have backed Franco? Indeed, their actions are
most easily explained if one assumes that they were acting on several
contradictory motives. I believe that in the future we shall come to feel
that Stalin's foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as
it is claimed to be, has been merely opportunistic and stupid. But at any
rate, the Spanish civil war demonstrated that the Nazis knew what they
were doing and their opponents did not. The war was fought at a low
technical level and its major strategy was very simple. That side which
had arms would win. The Nazis and the Italians gave arms to the Spanish
Fascist friends, and the western democracies and the Russians didn't give
arms to those who should have been their friends. So the Spanish Republic
perished, having' gained what no republic missed'.

Whether it was right, as all left-wingers in other countries undoubtedly
did, to encourage the Spaniards to go on fighting when they could not win
is a question hard to answer. I myself think it was right, because I
believe that it is better even from the point of view of survival to
fight and be conquered than to surrender without fighting. The effects on
the grand strategy of the struggle against Fascism cannot be assessed
yet. The ragged, weaponless armies of the Republic held out for two and a
half years, which was undoubtedly longer than their enemies expected. But
whether that dislocated the Fascist timetable, or whether, on the other
hand, it merely postponed the major war and gave the Nazis extra time to
get their war machine into trim, is still uncertain.


7


I never think of the Spanish war without two memories coming into my
mind. One is of the hospital ward at Lerida and the rather sad voices of
the wounded militiamen singing some song with a refrain that ended--


UNA RESOLUCION,
LUCHAR HAST' AL FIN!


Well, they fought to the end all right. For the last eighteen months of
the war the Republican armies must have been fighting almost without
cigarettes, and with precious little food. Even when I left Spain in the
middle of 1937, meat and bread were scarce, tobacco a rarity, coffee and
sugar almost unobtainable.

The other memory is of the Italian militiaman who shook my hand in the
guardroom, the day I joined the militia. I wrote about this man at the
beginning of my book on the Spanish war [Homage to Catalonia], and do not
want to repeat what I said there. When I remember--oh, how vividly!--his
shabby uniform and fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the complex side-issues
of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any rate
no doubt as to who was in the right. In spite of power politics and
journalistic lying, the central issue of the war was the attempt of
people like this to win the decent life which they knew to be their
birthright. It is difficult to think of this particular man's probable
end without several kinds of bitterness. Since I met him in the Lenin
Barracks he was probably a Trotskyist or an Anarchist, and in the
peculiar conditions of our time, when people of that sort are not killed
by the Gestapo they are usually killed by the G.P.U. But that does not
affect the long-term issues. This man's face, which I saw only for a
minute or two, remains with me as a sort of visual reminder of what the
war was really about. He symbolizes for me the flower of the European
working class, harried by the police of all countries, the people who
fill the mass graves of the Spanish battlefields and are now, to the tune
of several millions, rotting in forced-labour camps.

When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism,
one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme
which at any rate for a while could bring Hitler, Petain, Montagu Norman,
Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst, Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan
March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold
Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady Houston, and Marinetti
all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are all
people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical
society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings.
Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about 'godless' Russia and the
'materialism' of the working class lies the simple intention of those
with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a
partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social
reconstruction not accompanied by a 'change of heart'. The pious ones,
from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the' change of
heart', much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in
the economic system. Petain attributes the fall of France to the common
people's 'love of pleasure'. One sees this in its right perspective if
one stops to wonder how much pleasure the ordinary French peasant's or
working-man's life would contain compared with Pétain's own. The damned
impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary men, and what-not
who lecture the working-class socialist for his 'materialism'! All that
the working man demands is what these others would consider the
indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all.
Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the
knowledge that your children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day,
clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn't leak, and short enough
working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done. Not
one of those who preach against 'materialism' would consider life livable
without these things. And how easily that minimum could be attained if we
chose to set our minds to it for only twenty years! To raise the standard
of living of the whole world to that of Britain would not be a greater
undertaking than the war we have just fought. I don't claim, and I don't
know who does, that that wouldn't solve anything in itself. It is merely
that privation and brute labour have to be abolished before the real
problems of humanity can be tackled. The major problem of our time is the
decay of the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with
while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering
in fear of the secret police. How right the working classes are in their
'materialism'! How right they are to realize that the belly comes before
the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time! Understand
that, and the long horror that we are enduring becomes at least
intelligible. All the considerations are likely to make one falter--the
siren voices of a Pétain or of a Gandhi, the inescapable fact that in
order to fight one has to degrade oneself, the equivocal moral position
of Britain, with its democratic phrases and its coolie empire, the
sinister development of Soviet Russia, the squalid farce of left-wing
politics--all this fades away and one sees only the struggle of the
gradually awakening common people against the lords of property and their
hired liars and bumsuckers. The question is very simple. Shall people
like that Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life
which is now technically achievable, or shan't they? Shall the common man
be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps
on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or
later, but I want it to be sooner and not later--some time within the
next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand
years. That was the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the last war,
and perhaps of other wars yet to come.

I never saw the Italian militiaman again, nor did I ever learn his name.
It can be taken as quite certain that he is dead. Nearly two years later,
when the war was visibly lost, I wrote these verses in his memory:

The Italian soldier shook my hand
Beside the guard-room table;
The strong hand and the subtle hand
Whose palms are only able

To meet within the sound of guns,
But oh! what peace I knew then
In gazing on his battered face
Purer than any woman's!

For the flyblown words that make me spew
Still in his ears were holy,
And he was born knowing what I had learned
Out of books and slowly.

The treacherous guns had told their tale
And we both had bought it,
But my gold brick was made of gold--
Oh! who ever would have thought it?

Good luck go with you, Italian soldier!
But luck is not for the brave;
What would the world give back to you?
Always less than you gave.

Between the shadow and the ghost,
Between the white and the red,
Between the bullet and the lie,
Where would you hide your head?

For where is Manuel Gonzalez,
And where is Pedro Aguilar,
And where is Ramon Fenellosa?
The earthworms know where they are.

Your name and your deeds were forgotten
Before your bones were dry,
And the lie that slew you is buried
Under a deeper lie;

But the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Catalonia