Homage to Catalonia by Geroge Orwell

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As raw as Matterhorn and as savage a take on war as Catch-22, this is a true account of Orwell’s (as a starry-eyed idealist) experience in the Spanish Civil War – where no one seemed to know who was fighting who

I had accepted the News Chronicle – New Statesman version of the war as the defence of civilisation against a maniacal outbreak by an army of Colonel Blimps in the pay of Hitler. The revolutionary atmosphere of Barcelona had attracted me deeply, but I had made no attempt to understand it. As for the kaleidoscope of political parties and trade unions, with their tiresome names – PSUC, POUM, FAI, CNT, UGT, JCI, JASU, AIT – they merely exasperated me. It looked at first sight as though Spain were suffering from a plague of initials. I knew that I was serving in something called the POUM. (I had only joined the POUM militia rather than any other because I happened to arrive in Barcelona with ILP papers)…

In England, where the Press is more centralized and the public more easily deceived than elsewhere, only two versions of the Spanish-war have had any publicity to speak of: the Right-wing version of Christian patriots versus Bolsheviks dripping with blood, and Left-wing version of gentlemanly republicans quelling a military revolt. The central issue has been successfully covered up.

(POUM: Partido Obero de Unificans Marxista; in Catalan – Partit Ober d’Unificano Marxista – Worker’s Party of Marxist Unification).
His experience with poverty and privation as experienced in Down and Out in Paris and London and this book are stark and vividly described in simple prose with no flowery language and dramatic verbal calisthenics – akin to another Master - Ernst Hemingway. He writes about the futility of war and the dehumanising, disillusionment that eventually sets in with the political and military leadership. His Kafkaesque experience in a Police Station, while attempting to get his friend freed by the authorities

Inside, the place was a huge complicated warren running round a central courtyard, with hundreds of offices on each floor; and, as this was Spain, nobody had the vaguest idea where the office I was looking for was… People smiled and shrugged their shoulders gracefully. Everyone who had an opinion sent me in a different direction; up these stairs, down those, along interminable passages which turned out to be blind alleys. And time was slipping away. I had the strangest sensation of being in a nightmare: the rushing up and down flights of stairs, the mysterious people coming and going, the glimpses through open doors of chaotic offices with papers strewn everywhere and typewriters clicking; and time slipping away and a life perhaps in balance.

Here are some extracts from his war-time experiences

We were near the front line now, near enough to smell the characteristic smell of war – in experience a smell of excrement and decaying food…

In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles and the enemy. In winter on the Saragossa front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last. 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 moth armies was trying to keep warm…

In stationary warfare there are three things that all soldiers long for: a battle, more cigarettes, and a week’s leave…

I have had a big experience of body vermin of various kinds, and for sheer beastliness the louse beats everything I have encountered. Other insects, mosquitoes for instance, make you suffer more, but at least they aren’t resident vermin. The human louse somewhat resembles a tiny lobster, and he lives chiefly in your trousers. Short of burning all your clothes there is known way of getting rid of them. Down the seams of your trousers he lays his glittering white eggs, like tiny grains of rice, which hatch out and breed families of their own at horrible speed… In war all soldiers are lousy, at least when it is warm enough. The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermpylae – every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles. We kept the brutes down to some extent by burning out the eggs and by bathing as often as we could face it. Nothing short of lice could have driven me into that ice-cold river.

There are rats, rats,
Rats as big as cats,
In the quartermaster’s store!
The ones at La Granja itself really were as big as cats, or nearly; great bloated brutes that waddled over the beds of muck, too impudent even to run away unless you shot at them…

When you are taking part in events like these you are, I suppose, in a small way, making history, and you ought by rights to feel like an historical character. But you never do, because at such times the physical details always outweigh everything else…

– it was more difficult to think about this war in quite the same naively idealistic manner as before…

The reader is remineded of the entrepreneurial spirit of Joseph Heller’s Milo Minderbinder

“This war is a racket the same as any other.”

On a more philosophical note

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…

A crutch waved out of the window; bandaged forearms made the Red Salute. 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 feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that was is glorious after all.

Here is rather objective take on being shot

The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail…

Suddenly, in the middle of saying something, I felt – it is very hard to describe what I felt, though I remember it with the utmost vividness.

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 electrical terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shriveled up to nothing. The sandbags in front of me receded into immense distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash thought it was a rifle nearby that had done off accidentally and shot me. All this happened in a space of time much less than a second. 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. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense.

The pain would come later and last for a long time as he had suffered nerve-damage – his experience in the makeshift hospitals is another horror story. He goes on

“The artery is gone,” I though. I wondered how long you last when your carotid artery is cut; not may minutes presumably. Everything was blurry. There must have been two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. And that too was interesting – I mean it is interesting to know what your thought would be at such a time. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well. I had time to feel this very vividly. The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it! To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in this stale corner of the trenches…

This seems to be the period when his hate for Communism became obvious and his defining books Animal Farm and 1984 started to gestate.

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