"Homage to Catalonia" by George Orwell

Born in India in 1903, the son of a minor British official, George Orwell served in the imperial police in Burma before establishing himself as a journalist and author. In December 1936, he arrived in Barcelona. He soon joined the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, becoming one of fifty thousand militia that formed the International Brigades.

Inspired by the workers

In Spain, the Republicans were fighting the Nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco, who had led a coup against a democratically-elected government. However, the Republican side was divided into many left-wing factions —Liberals, Anarchists, Communists, and Socialists among others— that quarrelled among themselves. Orwell records his experiences with the communist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista). He describes the elation he initially felt as he joined the fight against the rise of fascism in Europe. 

“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. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. […] It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.” 

“Había viajado a España con la vaga intención de escribir artículos para periódicos, pero me alisté en la milicia casi enseguida, porque en aquel momento y en aquel ambiente parecía lo único lógico. Los anarquistas todavía controlaban casi toda Cataluña y la revolución aún conservaba intacta su fuerza. [...] Era la primera vez que yo pisaba una ciudad donde estaban al mando los obreros”.

Orwell believed that working people should control their own destiny. In Barcelona in 1936 it seemed possible that this would happen. The decency, friendliness and generosity of the Spanish working classes impressed him. For Orwell, protecting this emerging workers’ state was a cause worth fighting for.

“Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señor’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos días’.

“En todas las tiendas y cafés había una inscripción que advertía de que los habían colectivizado; incluso habían colectivizado a los limpiabotas, que habían pintado sus cajones de rojo y negro. Los camareros y los dependientes de los comercios te miraban a los ojos y te trataban de igual a igual. Las formas de tratamiento serviles o ceremoniosas habían desaparecido temporalmente. Nadie decía señor, ni don, ni siquiera usted, sino que todos se llamaban camarada, se tuteaban y decían ¡salud! en lugar de buenos días”.

horror

After just a few days’ training, Orwell was sent to fight on the front in Aragon. He describes day-to-day life in the trenches. The soldiers, some as young as fifteen, had very little equipment: there were few weapons and those they did have were old and often didn’t work. The uniforms and boots were inadequate against the freezing Aragonese winter. Orwell remembers feeling more scared of the cold than of the Nationalists. Then there were the lice and rats: 

“In the barn where we waited, the floor was a thin layer of chaff over deep beds of bones, human bones and cows’ bones mixed up, and the place was alive with rats. The filthy brutes came swarming out of the ground on every side. If there is one thing I hate more than another it is a rat running over me in the darkness.” 

“El suelo del granero donde aguardábamos era una fina capa de paja sobre un profundo lecho de huesos humanos y de vaca, y las ratas pululaban por todas partes. Si hay algo que odio es que una rata me pase por encima en la oscuridad”.

Factions

In May 1937, Orwell returned to Barcelona. He writes in great detail about the different factions on the Republican side and how these groups then divided into smaller sub-factions that ended upfighting each other. Orwell writes that the Spanish Civil War was “above all things a political war.”

“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. When I came to Spain, and for some time afterwards, I was not only uninterested in the political situation but unaware of it. […] If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: ‘To fight against Fascism,’ and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: ‘Common decency.’”

“No hay un solo acontecimiento, al menos de los ocurridos durante el primer año, que pueda entenderse si no se conocen, aunque sea por encima, las luchas entre partidos que tenían lugar detrás de las líneas del bando gubernamental. Cuando llegué a España, y hasta pasado un tiempo, no solo no me interesé por la situación política, sino que ni siquiera fui consciente de ella. […] Si me hubiesen preguntado por qué me había alistado en la milicia, habría respondido: «Para combatir al fascismo», y si me hubieran preguntado por qué luchaba, habría respondido: «Por la honradez más elemental»”.

An eye-witness account

Orwell describes in vivid detail what it is like to be in the middle of an armed conflict. We get a strong sense of his personality from the way he describes events. For example, after he’s been shot through the throat, he writes with amusing British understatement:   

“The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail. […] Roughly speaking, it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock — no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal.”

“Recibir un balazo es una vivencia interesante, y creo que vale la pena describirla con detalle. […] A grandes rasgos, tuve la sensación de encontrarme en el centro de una explosión. Creí oír una detonación muy fuerte, vi una luz muy intensa y sentí una tremenda sacudida, aunque no me dolió; solo fue una sacudida muy violenta, como una descarga eléctrica”.

Homage to Catalonia has had a huge impact on the way that the English-speaking world thinks about the Spanish Civil War. While some historians say that Orwell’s depiction of the political detail is misleading, as an unflinching autobiographical account the book is incomparable. Orwell is most famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which warn about the dangers of totalitarianism .However, the political ideas expressed in these later works were certainly shaped by Orwell’s civil war experiences in Spain