HOMAGE TO CATALONIA

ONE

HOMAGE  TO CATALONIA  by George Orwell  

(Copyright Eric Blair 1938)  <fadedpage.com/#20181044-a5.pdf>

       As the road struck into the sierra we branched off to the right and climbed a narrow mule-track that wound round the mountain-side ... In the distance you could see our 'position' at the crown of the horseshoe; a ragged barricade of sandbags, a red flag fluttering, the smoke of dug-out fires.  A little nearer and you could smell a sickening sweetish stink that lived in my nostrils for weeks.  Into the cleft immediately behind the position all the refuse of months had been tipped ― a deep festering bed of breadcrusts, excrement, and rusty tins.

       The company we were relieving were getting their kits together. They had been three months in the line; their uniforms were caked with mud, their boots falling to pieces, their faces mostly bearded ... a few stray bullets were cracking high overhead.  The position was a semi-circular enclosure about fifty yards across, with a parapet that was partly sandbags and partly lumps of limestone.  There were thirty or forty dug-outs running into the ground like rat-holes...

       In front of the parapet there ran a system of narrow trenches hewn out of the rock, with extremely primitive loopholes made of limestone ... In front of the trench was the barbed wire, and then the hill-side slid down into a seemingly bottomless ravine; opposite were naked hills, in places, mere cliffs of rock, all grey and wintry, with no life anywhere, not even a bird.  I peered cautiously through a loophole, trying to find the Fascist trench ... Then with a shock of dismay I saw ... on the opposite hill-top, beyond the ravine, seven hundred metres away ... the tiny outline of a parapet and a red-and-yellow flag ― the Fascist position ... We were nowhere near them!  At that range our rifles were completely useless...

       In winter on the Saragossa front ... except at night, when a surprise-attack was always conceivable, nobody bothered about the enemy. They were simply remote black insects whom one occasionally saw hopping to and fro.  The real preoccupation of both armies was trying to keep warm.   Up here, in the hills of Saragossa, it was simply the mingled boredom and discomfort of stationary warfare ... On every hill-top, Fascist or Loyalist, a knot of ragged, dirty men shivering round their flag and trying to keep warm.  And all day and all night the meaningless bullets wandering across the empty valleys and only by some rare improbable chance getting home on a human body.  Often I used to gaze round the wintry landscape and marvel at the futility of it all ...

[ Georges Kopp, on his periodical tours of inspection, was quite frank with us. "This is not a war", he used to say, "it is a comic opera with an occasional death". ]   

Chapter II.

POUM Militia including George Orwell/Eric Blair (tall man at the rear of the column)

SPAIN   by W.H. Auden.   March 1937.   Stanzas 14-19, 23-26.

"What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will.

 I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic

        Death?  Very well, I accept, for

 I am your choice, your decision.  Yes, I am Spain."

Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,

On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen's islands

       Or the corrupt heart of the city,

Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.

They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch

Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel, -  

        They floated over the oceans;

They walked the passes.  All presented their lives

On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot

Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe; 

       On that tableland scored by rivers,

Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever

Are precise and alive.  For the fears which made us respond

To the medicine ad. and the brochure of winter cruises

       Have become invading battalions; 

And our faces, the institute face, the chain-store, the ruin

Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.

Madrid is the heart.  Our moments of tenderness blossom

       As the ambulance and the sandbag;

Our hours of friendship into a people's army.

     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -     -      -     -     -     -     -     -

To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,

The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;

       To-morrow the bicycle races

Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,

The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;

       To-day the expending of powers 

On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

To-day the make-shift consolations: the shared cigarette,

The cards in the candle-lit barn, and the scraping concert,

       The masculine jokes; To-day the 

Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look.

We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and

        History to the defeated

May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

TWO

HOMAGE TO CATALONIA  continued

       It is not easy to convey the nightmare atmosphere of that time ― the peculiar uneasiness

produced by rumours that were always changing, by censored newspapers and the constant presence of armed men.  It is not easy to convey it because, at the moment, the thing essential to such an atmosphere does not exist in England. In England political intolerance is not yet taken for granted. There is political persecution in a petty way; if I were a coalminer I would not care to be known to the boss as a Communist; but the 'good party man', the gangster-gramophone of continental politics, is still a rarity, and the notion of 'liquidating' or 'eliminating' everyone who happens to disagree with you does not yet seem natural. It seemed only too natural in Barcelona. The 'Stalinists' were in the saddle, and therefore it was a matter of course that every 'Trotskyist' was in danger. The thing everyone feared was a thing which, after all, did not happen ― a fresh outbreak of street-fighting, which, as before, would be blamed on the POUM and the Anarchists. There were times when I caught my ears listening for the first shots. It was as though some huge evil intelligence were brooding over the town. Everyone noticed and remarked upon it. And it was queer how everyone expressed it in almost the same words: "The atmosphere of this place ― it's horrible. Like living in a lunatic asylum".

[ From the point of view of political theory there were only three parties that mattered, the PSUC (Communist Party, Russian 'line'), the POUM (other communists, anti-Stalinist), and the CNT-FAI loosely described as the Anarchists...]

Chapter XI and Appendix I.

Execution by firing squad (suspected nationalist)

THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES   by W.H. Auden  Written 1952   Verses 2-3, 5-6, 8.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,

     No blade of grass, no sign of neighbourhood, 

Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down, 

     Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood

     An unintelligible multitude,

A million eyes, a million boots in line,

Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face

     Proved by statistics that some cause was just

In tones as dry and level as the place:

     No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;

     Column by column in a cloud of dust

They marched away enduring a belief

Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot

     Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)

And sentries sweated for the day was hot:

     A crowd of ordinary decent folk

     Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke

As three pale figures were led forth and bound

To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all

     That carries weight and always weighs the same

Lay in the hands of others; they were small

     And could not hope for help and no help came:

     What their foes liked to do was done, their shame 

Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride

And died as men before their bodies died.

.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,

     Loitered about that vacancy; a bird

Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:

     That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,

     Were axioms to him, who'd never heard

Of any world where promises were kept,

Or one could weep because another wept.

THREE

HOMAGE TO CATALONIA  continued

     "Get out!"

     "What?"

     "Get out of here at once!"

     "What?"

     "Don't keep standing here! You must get outside quickly!"

     "What? Why? What do you mean ?"

"Haven't you heard?"

"No. Heard what? I've heard nothing."

"The POUM's been suppressed. They've seized all the buildings. Practically everyone's in  prison. And they say they're shooting people already."

I kept saying, but why should anyone want to arrest me? What had I done? I was not even a party member of the POUM...

Patiently she explained the state of affairs. It did not matter what I had done or not done. This was not a round-up of criminals; it was merely a reign of terror.

I was not guilty of any definite act, but I was guilty of 'Trotskyism'. The fact that I had served in the POUM militia was quite enough to get me into prison.

It was no use hanging onto the English notion that you are safe as long as you keep the law. Practically the law was what the police chose to make it. The only thing to do was to lie low and conceal the fact that I had anything to do with POUM...

The thing we had to think of now was getting out of Spain...