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===Chapter eleven=== |
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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. |
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. " ''The attack on [[Huesca]] was beginning..there must have been numbers of men who were killed without ever learning that the newspapers in the rear were calling them Fascists. This kind of thing is a little difficult to forgive.''" He sleeps that night in the ruins of a church; he cannot go back to his hotel because of the danger of arrest. |
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===Chapter twelve=== |
===Chapter twelve=== |
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Revision as of 18:51, 26 May 2010
| 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. The only translation made in Orwell's lifetime was into Italian, in December 1948, and it was not published in the United States until February 1952. The American edition had a preface written by Lionel Trilling.
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. Having arrived in Barcelona about 26 December he told John McNair, the ILP's representative there, that he had " come to Spain to join the militia to fight against Fascism." He also told McNair that " he would like to write about the situation and endeavour to stir working class opinion in Britain and France." McNair took him to the POUM barracks, where Orwell immediately enlisted. "Orwell did not know that two months before he arrived in Spain, the NKVD's resident in Spain, Aleksandr Orlov, had assured NKVD Headquarters, 'the Trotskyist organisation POUM can easily be liquidated' - by those, the Communists, whom Orwell took to be allies in the fight against Franco." [1]
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, [2] 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 book's core are the May 1937 events in Barcelona. Orwell, " became convinced that he had been the spectator of a full-blown Stalinist putsch, complete with rigged evidence, false allegations and an ulterior hand directed by Moscow. " [3] According to Christopher Hitchens, writing in the introduction to Orwell in Spain, this conviction has been supported as papers from the Soviet Military Archive have become known. " Document 42 , delivered on 15 April 1937, forwarded to Marshal Voroshilov, ( the actual author may have been André Marty, the French-born Comintern agent for Spain), characterizes the non-Communist left in the Spanish Republic and specifically Catalonia as 'fascists or semi-fascists'.." The report considers it the duty of the Party, " not to wait for government crisis, but to hasten it and, if necessary, to provoke it." The report anticipates the Communist police attack by just over two weeks. The succeeding paper, Document 43, regrets the extent to which the POUM and other forces had been able to resist the Stalinist onslaught and demands, " energetic and merciless repression" by means of a " military tribunal of the Trotskyists." " Professor Peter Davison's work on Orwell has already established that a Catalan version of the Moscow show trials was in preparation, and that George Orwell and his wife would have been in the dock..an NKVD file , dated 13 July 1937 describes Orwell and his wife as 'pronounced Trotskyists.' Andres Nin, the leader of the POUM, was kidnapped by Stalin's agents and tortured to death." [4]
Whether a planned Communist attack to provoke a revolt, and crush their opponents, or not, in any case it was a defeat for the CNT and the POUM. On 17 May Largo Caballero resigned. Juan Negrin, the next prime minister, left the " NKVD-controlled secret police unhindered in its persecution of persons who opposed the Moscow line. On 16 June, when the POUM was declared illegal, the communists turned its headquarters in Barcelona into a prison for 'Trotskyists'..leaders were handed over to NKVD operatives and taken to a secret prison in Madrid..Nin taken to Alcala de Henares, where he was interrogated from 18 to 21 June..he was then moved to a summer house outside the city which belonged to the wife of Hidalgo de Cisneros and tortured to death..Diego Abad de Santillan remarked ; " Whether Juan Negrin won with his communist cohorts, or Franco won with his Italians and Germans, the results would be the same for us." [5]
At the front, Orwell was shot through the throat by a sniper on 20 May 1937 and was nearly killed. He wrote in Homage to Catalonia that people frequently told him a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive, but that he personally thought "it would be even luckier not to be hit at all." After dressing at a first aid post about half a mile from the actual line, he was transferred to Barbastro and then to Lérida where he received only an external treatment of his wound. On the 27th he was transferred to Tarragona and on the 29th May to Barcelona. On 23 June 1937, Eileen and Orwell with John McNair and Stafford Cottman, boarded the morning train from Barcelona to Paris. They safely crossed into France. Sir Richard Rees later wrote that the strain of her experience in Barcelona showed clearly on Eileen's face : " In Eileen Blair I had seen for the first time the symptoms of a human being living under a political terror." [6]
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.[2]
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."[2]
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."[2]
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.
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. " Perhaps the best of the bunch was Bob Smillie - the grandson of the famous miners' leader - who afterwards died such an evil and meaningless death in Valencia." 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 mind 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 that had to be lanced and put in a sling. 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 reference to the lack of " religious feeling, in the orthodox sense" , and that the Roman Catholic Church, was, "to the Spanish people, at any rate in Catalonia and Aragon, 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, and its influence on his political ideas, " ..the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of socialism...the ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England..the effect was to make my desire to see Socialism established much more actual than it had been before." By the time he left Spain, he had become a "convinced democratic Socialist." The chapter ends with Orwell's arrival in Barcelona on the afternoon of April 26 1937.
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. "It was the antagonism between those who wished the revolution to go forward and those who wished to check or prevent it - ultimately, between Anarchists and Communists."
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. Assault Guards from Valencia arrive - "I had not known that the Republic possessed troops like these. It was not only that they were picked men physically, it was their weapons that most astonished me. All of them were armed with brand-new rifles..vastly better than the dreadful old blunderbusses we had at the front." The P.S.U.C. papers declare POUM to be a disguised Fascist organization - " a cartoon representing the P.O.U.M. as a figure slipping off a mask marked with the hammer and sickle and revealing a hideous, maniacal face marked with the swastika, was being circulated...No one who was in Barcelona then..will forget the horrible atmosphere produced by fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food queues, and prowling gangs..." 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,[8] 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. " The attack on Huesca was beginning..there must have been numbers of men who were killed without ever learning that the newspapers in the rear were calling them Fascists. This kind of thing is a little difficult to forgive." 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 Socialist Party of Catalonia - entirely under Communist control and affiliated to the Third International), 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. He relates the suppression of the P.O.U.M. on 15-16 June 1937 , gives examples of the Communist Press of the world - (Daily Worker , 21 June, SPANISH TROTSKYISTS PLOT WITH FRANCO), quotes Indalecio Prieto - " We have received aid from Russia and have had to permit certain actions which we did not like."
See also
- Anarchist Catalonia
- Bibliography of George Orwell
- ILP Contingent described in Homage to Catalonia
- Spanish Civil War
- Spanish Revolution
References
- ^ Orwell in Spain p.6 Penguin Books, 2001
- ^ a b c d Newsinger, John "Orwell and the Spanish Revolution" International Socialism Journal Issue 62 Spring 1994
- ^ C. Hitchens, introduction, Orwell in Spain Penguin ISBN 978-0-141-18516-3
- ^ Christopher Hitchens, Introduction p. xii - xiii Orwell in Spain Penguin Books
- ^ Antony Beevor The Battle for Spain , Chapter 23 The Civil War Within The Civil War
- ^ Richard Rees, George Orwell: Fugitive from the camp of victory (1961), 147
- ^ Out of the Shadows, a life of Gerda Taro, François Maspero ISBN 978-0-28563-825-9 p.18
- ^ "Harry Milton - The Man Who Saved Orwell" The Hoover Institute. Retrieved on 2008-12-23
- ^ Christopher Hitchens, introduction, p xviii, Orwell in Spain
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.