George Orwell's account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War was written in 1938, before the final victory of the Fascists under Franco, so it is necessarily incomplete. But this doesn't matter. It isn't an attempt at history. It is a very visceral account of fighting in a war. It starts with his experiences as a dreadfully ill-equipped militiaman in the trenches following which he goes on leave to Barcelona only to be caught up in street fighting when the different anti-Fascist factions decide to fight among themselves; finally he has to escape from Spain after the socialist organisation with whom he has enlisted are proscribed.
It's an enthralling read. He has passages in which he describes aspects of his experience in which his adjectives are perfectly chosen:
- "My memories of that part of the war - the red flags in Barcelona, the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers creeping to the front, the grey war-stricken towns further up the line, the muddy, ice-cold trenches in the mountains." (Ch 1): Gaunt trains: wow!
- "the atmosphere of that time ... is all bound up with the winter cold, the ragged uniforms of the militiamen, the oval Spanish faces, the Morse-like tapping of machine-guns, the smells of urine and rotting bread, the tinny taste of bean-stews wolfed hurriedly out of unclean pannikins." (Ch 6)
- "Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered with willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen - all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the road of bombs." (Ch 12) Final words. I adore the horses who "browse and meditate". Brilliant!
The only difficulty I had with this book was understanding all the different factions, referred to usually by their initials. I can pardon some confusion: immediately before and during the Civil War, Spain was a chaos of competing political tendencies to the extent that in one day she had three premiers! Orwell does his best to explain things (who was POUM and PSUC and UGT and NCT etc) in Appendix I but I needed this information drip-fed to me through the text.
Nevertheless, I don't think I have ever read a book which better captures the experience of soldiering, although Laurie Lee's memoir of the Spanish Civil War A Moment of War and Joyce Cary's Memoir of the Bobotes both come close.
Selected Quotes:
- "the characteristic smell of war - in my experience a smell of excrement and decaying food." (Ch 2)
- "I never think of my first two months at war without thinking of wintry stubble fields whose edges are encrusted with dung." (Ch 2)
- "It was beastly water, hardly more transparent than milk." (Ch 3)
- "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 Thermopylae - every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles." (Ch 5)
- "There was a kind of harrow that took one straight back to the later Stone Age. It was made of boards joined together, to about the size of a kitchen table; in the board hundreds of holes were morticed, and into each hole was jammed a piece of flint which had been chipped into shape ... It made me sick to think of the work that must go into the making of such a thing, and the poverty that was obliged to use flint in place of steel. I have felt more kindly towards industrialisation ever since." (Ch 5)
- "No sooner had the fighting started than the hotel filled to the brim with a most extraordinary collection of people. There were foreign journalists, political suspects of every shade, an American airman in the service of the Government, various Communist agents, including a fat, sinister-looking Russian, said to be an agent of the Ogpu, who was nicknamed Charlie Chan and wore attached to his waistband a revolver and a neat little bomb, some families of well-to-do Spaniards who looked like Fascist sympathisers, tow or three wounded men from the International Column, a gang of lorry drivers from some huge French lorries which had been carrying a load of oranges back to France and had been held up by the fighting, and a number of Popular Army officers." (Ch 9)
- "Even a man as tall as I am cannot wear a long Mauser down his trouser leg without discomfort. It was an intolerable job getting down the corkscrew staircase of the observatory with a completely rigid left leg. Once in the street, we found that the only way to move was with extreme slowness, so slowly that you did not have to bend your knees." (Ch 9)
- "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." (Ch 10)
- "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; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing." (Ch 10) Orwell's experience of being shot in the neck.
- "No one I met at this time ... failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all." (Ch 10)
- "It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench." (Appendix One)
Other books by Orwell that I have reviewed in this blog:
- The Road to Wigan Pier: a masterpiece of reporting on social conditions in England in the 1930s
- Down and Out in Paris and London
June 2023; 248 pages
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