Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia

File:Homage catalonia.jpg
Author	George Orwell
Language	English
Genre	Non-Fiction, Political
Publisher	Secker and Warburg (London)
Publication date	25 April 1938
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	368 pp (Paperback edition) 248 pp (Hardback edition)

Homage to Catalonia is political journalist and novelist George Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations in the Spanish Civil War, written in the first person. The first edition was published in 1938.

Overview

Orwell served as both a private and a corporal in Catalonia and Aragon from December 1936 until June 1937. The political party whose militia he served with (the POUM, an anti-Stalinist communist party) was declared an illegal organization and Orwell was subsequently forced to flee or face imprisonment.

By his own admission, Orwell joined the POUM rather than the Communist-run International Brigades by chance—but his experiences, in particular his and his wife's narrow escape from the Communist purges in Barcelona in June 1937, greatly increased his sympathy for POUM and, while not challenging his moral and political adhesion to the cause of Socialism, made him a lifelong anti-Stalinist.

At the front, Orwell was shot through the neck and was nearly killed. He wrote in Homage to Catalonia that people frequently told him he was lucky to survive, but that he personally thought "it would be even luckier not to be hit at all."

George Orwell, and his wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, who accompanied him to Spain, returned to England. After nine months of animal husbandry and writing up Homage to Catalonia at their cottage at Wallington, Hertfordshire, Orwell's health declined and he had to spend several months at a sanatorium in Kent.

Because of the book's criticism of the Communists in Spain, it was rejected by Gollancz, who had previously published all Orwell's books, and Orwell finally found a sympathetic publisher in Frederic Warburg. Warburg was willing to publish books by the dissident left, that is, by socialists hostile to Stalinism.

The book was finally published in April 1938 but "made virtually no impact whatsoever and by the outbreak of war with Germany had sold only 900 copies."

According to John Newsinger, "the Communist vendetta against the book" was ongoing as recently as 1984, when Lawrence and Wishart published Inside the Myth, a collection of essays "bringing together a variety of standpoints hostile to Orwell in an obvious attempt to do as much damage to his reputation as possible."

Summary of chapters

It should be noted that the following summary is based on a later edition of the book which contains some amendments that Orwell requested: two chapters (formerly chapters five and eleven) describing the politics of the time were moved to appendices. Orwell felt that these chapters should be moved so that readers could ignore them if they wished; the chapters, which became appendices, were journalistic accounts of the political situation in Spain, and Orwell felt these were out of place in the midst of the narrative.

Chapter one

The book begins in late December 1936. Orwell describes the atmosphere in Barcelona as it appears to him at this time. " 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..every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle.. every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized." "The Anarchists" (referring to the Spanish CNT and FAI) were "in control", tipping was prohibited by workers themselves, and servile forms of speech, such as "Señor" or "Don", were abandoned. He goes on to describe the scene at the Lenin Barracks (formerly the Lepanto Barracks) where militiamen were given "what was comically called 'instruction'" in preparation for fighting at the front.

" There were still women serving in the militias, though not very many. In the early battles they had fought side by side with the men as a matter of course. It is a thing that seems natural in times of revolution. Ideas were changing already, however." ( Barcelona, 1936. Militiawomen on beach near Barcelona.Photo : Gerda Taro). p.18

He describes the deficiencies of the POUM workers' militia, the absence of weapons, the recruits mostly boys of sixteen or seventeen ignorant of the meaning of war, half-complains about the sometimes frustrating tendency of Spaniards to put things off until "mañana" (tomorrow), notes his struggles with Spanish (or more usually, the local use of Catalan). He praises the generosity of the Catalan working class . Orwell leads to the next chapter by describing the "conquering-hero stuff"—parades through the streets and cheering crowds—that the militiamen experienced at the time he was sent to the Aragón front.

Chapter two

Orwell arrives in Alcubierre (in January 1937), which was just behind the line fronting Zaragoza. He experiences the squalid conditions. He then mentions the arrival of various "Fascist deserters" and the poor weaponry that the militiamen in that area of the front received. Rifles weren't handed out until their third day in the village. " I got a shock of dismay when I saw the thing they gave me. It was a German Mauser dated 1896..It was rusty, the bolt was stiff, the wooden barrel-guard was split; one glance down the muzzle showed that it was corroded and past praying for. " The chapter ends on his centuria's arrival at trenches near Zaragoza and the first time a bullet nearly hit him. He adds that, regrettably, he ducked - " the movement appears to be instinctive, and almost everybody does it at least once."

Chapter three

Orwell, in the hills around Zaragoza, describes the mingled boredom and discomfort of stationary warfare, the mundaneness of a situation in which, " each army had dug itself in and settled down on the hill-tops it had won." He praises the Spanish militias for their relative social equality, for their holding of the front while the army was trained in the rear, and for the "democratic 'revolutionary' type of discipline," - "more reliable than might be expected." " 'Revolutionary' discipline depends on political consciousness - on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square." Throughout the chapter Orwell describes the various shortages and problems at the front—firewood, - " We were between two and three thousand feet above sea-level, it was mid winter and the cold was unspeakable", - food, candles, tobacco, and adequate munitions—as well as the danger of accidents inherent in a badly trained and poorly armed group of soldiers.

Chapter four

After some three weeks at the front, Orwell and the other English militiaman in his unit, Williams, join a contingent of fellow Englishmen sent out by the Independent Labour Party to a position at Monte Oscuro, within sight of Zaragosa. In this new position, he witnesses the sometimes propagandistic shouting between the Fascist and Socialist trenches and hears of the fall of Málaga. ".. every man in the militia believed that the loss of Malaga was due to treachery. It was the first talk I had heard of treachery or divided aims. It set up in my miind the first vague doubts about this war in which, hitherto, the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple." In February, he is sent with the other POUM militiamen 50 miles to make a part of the army besieging Huesca; he mentions the running joke phrase, "Tomorrow we'll have coffee in Huesca," attributed to a general commanding the Government troops who, months earlier, made one of many failed assaults on the town.

Chapter five

Orwell complains, in chapter five, that on the eastern side of Huesca, where he was stationed, nothing ever seemed to happen—except the onslaught of spring, and, with it, lice. He was in a ("so-called") hospital at Monflorite for ten days at the end of March 1937 with "a poisoned hand." He describes rats that "really were as big as cats, or nearly" (in his famous Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell's character Winston Smith has a phobia of rats that Orwell himself shared to some degree). He makes a reference here to the lack of orthodox "religious feeling," telling us that the Roman Catholic Church was to the Spanish "a racket, pure and simple." He muses that Christianity may have, to some extent, been replaced by Anarchism. The latter portion of the chapter briefly details various operations in which Orwell took part: silently advancing the Loyalist frontline by night, for example.

Chapter six

One of these operations, which in chapter five had been postponed, was a "holding attack" on Huesca, designed to draw the Fascist troops away from an Anarchist attack on "the Jaca road." It is described herein. Orwell notes the offensive of that night where his group of fifteen captured a Fascist position, but then retreated to their lines with captured rifles and ammunition. The diversion was successful in drawing troops from the Anarchist attack.

Chapter seven

This chapter reads like an interlude. Orwell shares his memories of the 115 days he spent on the war front, including a recognition that his political ideas were changing slowly. By the time he left Spain, he had become a "convinced democratic Socialist."

Chapter eight

Herein Orwell details noteworthy changes in the social and political atmosphere when he returns to Barcelona after more than three months at the front. He describes a lack of revolutionary atmosphere and the class division that he had thought would not reappear, i.e., with visible division between rich and poor and the return of servile language. Orwell had been determined to leave the POUM, and confesses here that he "would have liked to join the Anarchists," but instead sought a recommendation to join the International Column, so that he could go to the Madrid front. The latter half of this chapter is devoted to describing the conflict between the Anarchist CNT and the Socialist UGT and the resulting cancellation of the May Day demonstration and the build-up to the street fighting of the Barcelona May Days.

Chapter nine

Orwell relates his involvement in the Barcelona street fighting that began on 3rd of May when the Government Assault Guards tried to take the telephone exchange from the CNT workers who controlled it. For his part, Orwell acted as part of the POUM, guarding a POUM-controlled building. Although he realises that he is fighting on the side of the working class, Orwell describes his dismay at coming back to Barcelona on leave from the front only to get mixed up in street fighting. In his second appendix to the book, Orwell discusses the political issues at stake in the May 1937 Barcelona fighting, as he saw them at the time and later on, looking back.

Chapter ten

Here he begins with musings on how the Spanish Civil War might turn out. Orwell predicts that the "tendency of the post-war Government... is bound to be Fascistic." He returns to the front, where he is shot through the throat by a sniper, an injury that takes him out of the war. After spending some time in a hospital in Lleida, he was moved to Tarragona where his wound was finally examined more than a week after he'd left the front.

Chapter eleven

Orwell tells us of his various movements between hospitals in Siétamo, Barbastro, and Monzón while getting his discharge papers stamped, after being declared medically unfit. He returns to Barcelona only to find that the POUM had been "suppressed": it had been declared illegal the very day he had left to obtain discharge papers and POUM members were being arrested without charge. He sleeps that night in the ruins of a church; he cannot go back to his hotel because of the danger of arrest.

Chapter twelve

This chapter explores the political persecution he encountered with regard to his and his wife's visit to Georges Kopp, unit commander of the ILP Contingent while Kopp was incarcerated in a Spanish makeshift jail. Having done all he could to free Kopp, ineffectively and at great personal risk, Orwell decides to leave Spain. Crossing the Pyrenees frontier, "thanks to the inefficiency of the police," he and his wife arrived in France "without incident."

Appendix one

The broader political context in Spain and the revolutionary situation in Barcelona at the time is discussed. The political differences among the PSUC (the Catalan Communists), the anarchists, and the POUM, are considered.

Appendix two

An attempt to dispel some of the myths in the foreign press at the time (mostly the pro-Communist press) about the street fighting that took place in Catalonia in early May 1937. This was between anarchists and POUM members, against Communist/government forces which sparked off when local police forces occupied the telephone exchange, which had until then been under the control of CNT workers.

See also

• Anarchist Catalonia
• Bibliography of George Orwell
• ILP Contingent described in Homage to Catalonia
• Spanish Civil War
• Spanish Revolution

External links

• Homage to Catalonia - Searchable, indexed etext.
• Homage to Catalonia Complete book with publication data and search option.
• Homage to Catalonia Complete book as plain text.
• Looking back on the Spanish War - an essay written 6 years later.
• George Orwell in Lleida A photograph of a column of the POUM, including a man who appears to be Orwell, about 1936/37.