George Orwell, the rebel with a cause who was funnier than you think — part 2
The Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, Joseph Stalin and Animal Farm.
“The Spaniards are good at many things”, wrote George Orwell, “but not at making war”[1]. In December 1936, Orwell left England to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Six months later and with Eileen at his side, he fled Barcelona a fugitive, the target of Russian hit squads. Laced with laconic, often blackly comic humour — he survived a bullet to the throat — Homage to Catalonia was Orwell’s classic account of his experiences in Spain. What he witnessed there would make a lasting impact on his politics and later inspire his first great masterpiece, Animal Farm.
ARRIVAL & FIGHTING
The sleeve notes for Homage to Catalonia describe an account “told with all the honesty and bitterness of a fighting man only a few months after the events”[2]. If the idea of Orwell as ‘a fighting man’ sounds surprising, it really shouldn’t. He was already well used to violence and death from his time in Burma. In Spain, he was an enthusiastic volunteer for combat missions and frequently badgered his command to be sent where the battle was most fierce.
War in Spain had broken out in July 1936 following the overthrow of the elected Popular Front coalition socialist government by extreme right-wing Nationalists, led by the army under General Franco. With Europe’s major powers sizing each other up, Spain became the centre of a proxy war. Hitler and Mussolini weighed in for Franco’s Nationalist/Fascist side, while Stalin’s Russia propped up the Republicans. Although less well resourced than the Fascists, the Republican ranks were significantly boosted by the International Brigades, a force numbering some 60,000 made up of volunteer foreign fighters.
George was by this time settled into married life with Eileen, combining writing with running the grocery store he and Eileen had taken on in the Hertfordshire village of Wallington. In December, once he’d finished the final draft of The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell left to report on the escalating conflict in Spain. Amid the wider backdrop of European fascism already on the rise, he had long considered another world war an inevitability. Gaining entry into Spain with the help of the Independent Labour Party, Orwell enlisted with the ILP-affiliated POUM militia in Barcelona, signing up as ‘Eric Blair, grocer’.
“I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do”[3]. He was immediately struck by the disarmingly open, unselfconscious Spanish character, what he later called “generosity in a deeper sense, a real largeness of spirit”[4]. In his first week in barracks he spoke to some Republican comrades just back from the front, writing “they were talking excitedly about their experiences and were full of enthusiasm for some French troops…the French were very brave, they said ‘Más valientes que nosotros’ — ‘braver than we are’”[5]. Orwell thought that a telling remark, reflecting that “an Englishman would cut his hand off sooner than say a thing like that”[6].
He was nevertheless underwhelmed by the alarming sight of ill-equipped, inexperienced new recruits, some as young as 15, being put through a series of what he considered pointless training ground drills before being packed off to the front line. After just a week in barracks, Orwell was sent to the trenches at Alcubierre, 25 miles from the Fascist position at Huesca. Eileen reached Spain a couple of months later in February 1937, working out of the ILP offices under their man in Barcelona, John McNair. At about the same time, George was about to get his first taste of action.
“In mid February we were sent…to make a part of the army besieging Huesca…Four kilometres from our new trenches Huesca glittered small and clear…Months earlier, the general commanding had said gaily: ‘Tomorrow we’ll have coffee in Huesca.’ It turned out that he was mistaken. There had been bloody attacks, but the town did not fall, and ‘Tomorrow we’ll have coffee in Huesca’ had become a standing joke throughout the army. If I ever go back to Spain I shall make a point of having a cup of coffee in Huesca”[7].
Possessing military experience from his time in Burma, Orwell was quickly made Corporal, later Lieutenant, and placed in command of a small unit of men whose ill-discipline drove him to distraction. “Every foreigner who served in the militia spent his first few weeks in learning to love the Spaniards and in being exasperated by certain of their characteristics. In the front line my own exasperation sometimes reached the pitch of fury. The Spaniards are good at many things, but not at making war. All foreigners alike are appalled by their inefficiency, above all their maddening unpunctuality”[8].
Anyone who knows Spain will know that broadly speaking, the idea of ‘mañana’ is still very much alive and well, almost 100 years after Orwell was writing.
“In Spain nothing, from a meal to a battle, ever happens at the appointed time. As a general rule things happen too late, but just occasionally — just so that you shan’t even be able to depend on their happening late — they happen too early. A train which is due to leave at eight will normally leave at any time between nine and ten, but perhaps once a week it leaves at half past seven. Such things can be a little trying”[9].
The tragi-comic nature of the conflict was most apparent when the opposing front lines were within shouting distance of one another, as they often were — this was World War One style, close-quarter combat. The Republicans used these opportunities to unleash barrages, not of bullets or artillery, but of socialist propaganda consisting of “set piece, revolutionary sentiments”[10] which had the desired effect of causing significant numbers of Fascist soldiers to desert, crossing no-man’s land to join the Republican trenches. Orwell admits that “at the beginning…it made us feel that the Spaniards were not taking this war of theirs sufficiently seriously”[11]. But, as he showed throughout his life, he was always prepared to change his opinion upon reasoned argument or reflection: “I admit I was amazed and scandalised when I first saw it done. The idea of trying to convert your enemy instead of shooting him! I now think that from any point of view it was a legitimate manoeuvre”[12].
The bleak reality of trench warfare would often descend into farce:
“The man who did the shouting at the post down on our right was an artist at the job. Sometimes, instead of shouting revolutionary slogans he simply told the Fascists how much better we were fed than they were…‘Buttered toast!’ You could hear his voice echoing across the lonely valley. ‘We’re just sitting down to buttered toast over here! Lovely slices of buttered toast!’ I do not doubt that, like the rest of us, he had not seen butter for weeks or months past, but in the icy night the news of buttered toast probably set many a Fascist mouth watering. It even made mine water, though I knew he was lying”[13].
The amateurishness of that part of the war is summed up in one of the book’s most famous quotes: “In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last”[14]. As winter thawed and spring came on, so the weather warmed up. That meant the cold wasn’t such a problem but a new enemy appeared — an equal-opportunities adversary who tormented both Fascist and Republican alike, as Orwell discovered to his dismay: “The lice were multiplying in my trousers far faster than I could massacre them”[15].
BARCELONA MAY DAYS
After four months on the front line, Orwell was sent on leave and returned to Barcelona on April 26th, 1937. Coincidentally, this was the same day of the most infamous atrocity of the entire war — the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica, perpetrated by German and Italian aerial forces acting on Franco’s orders. When Orwell got back to Barcelona, once more reunited with Eileen, the mood in the city was very different to the one he’d found upon his arrival, when he’d been so swept along by the excitement and the possibilities the fervent revolutionary atmosphere seemed to promise.
Getting a clear picture of what was happening in Barcelona in May and June 1937, is, at this distance, impossible. Nobody agreed about it then and those who are so inclined still argue over it to this day. But by any reckoning it was a period marked by confusion, paranoia and vicious in-fighting between various factions on the Republican left, which was comprised of a bewildering array of socialist, communist, anarchist and anti-fascist groups all with their own ideals (and acronyms — the “plague of initials”[16] which Orwell complained about upon his arrival in Spain).
There is however little dispute that the trouble was stirred up by Soviet agent provocateurs, as the intrigues and power struggles of internal Russian politics were exported to the streets and battlefields of Spain, and started to take precedence ahead of who was actually winning the war. Russian secret agents were operating openly in Barcelona, as Orwell observed in his hotel lobby: “I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies — unless one counts journalists”[17].
He was himself a reluctant participant in the deadly shootouts taking place in the labyrinthine streets of Barcelona, but it wasn’t as if he had much choice. With characteristic sang-froid, he describes his sleep-deprived preparation before a POUM assault on an enemy position: “I lay down on the sofa, feeling that I would like half an hour’s rest before the attack…in which I should presumably be killed”[18]. Any suggestion of false bravado here can be promptly dismissed considering the (at times reckless) courage Orwell had a well-deserved reputation for amongst his comrades. ILP member and future Labour MP Bob Edwards fought alongside Orwell and singled him out as “a cool customer, completely without fear”[19].
Of what would become known as the Barcelona May Days, Orwell noted with typical foresight that “this squalid brawl in a distant city is more important than might appear at first sight”[20], placing the events he was witnessing within their wider military-political context. As it was, he survived those few fraught weeks unscathed and before long he was back on the Aragon front.
GETTING SHOT
Despite his frustration at what he sometimes viewed as a shambolic conflict, Orwell, like many of his generation, saw the advance of fascism as a threat which simply had to be resisted. And despite the war’s absurdities, it was bitterly fought with savage atrocities committed by both sides. No-one knows with any certainty how many people died, but all told, estimates range between 500,000 and one million dead. Orwell himself came within millimetres of becoming one of those fatalities when he was shot through the neck by an enemy sniper, only days after arriving back on the front line.
In Homage to Catalonia he wrote that “everyone always did miss everyone else in this war, whenever it was humanly possible to do so”[21]. In that sense he could count himself unlucky to be hit, but then his comrades had repeatedly warned the 6”2 Orwell about keeping his head down in the trenches. It seems he didn’t listen.
Yet, typically clear-headed even in the midst of catastrophe, he gave a vivid description of the sensation of being shot and, convinced he is about to die, feels “a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well…I thought, too, of the man who had shot me — wondered what he was like, whether he was a Spaniard or a foreigner, whether he knew he had got me, and so forth. I could not feel any resentment against him. I reflected that as he was a Fascist I would have killed him if I could, but that if he had been taken prisoner and brought before me at this moment I would merely have congratulated him on his good shooting”[22]. All good stiff upper lip stuff.
Orwell would of course survive this narrow escape, and after a perilous evacuation from the front he spent a week recovering in hospital in Lleida, where yet again the redoubtable Eileen turned up to visit with the help of her husband’s rather mysterious commander, Georges Kopp. When he was well enough to travel, Orwell received a fittingly Spanish experience on his final journey back to Barcelona: “One morning it was announced that the men in my ward were to be sent down to Barcelona today. I managed to send a wire to my wife, telling her that I was coming, and presently they packed us into buses and took us down to the station. It was only when the train was actually starting that the hospital orderly who travelled with us casually let fall that we were not going to Barcelona after all, but to Tarragona. I suppose the engine-driver had changed his mind. ‘Just like Spain!’ I thought. But it was very Spanish, too, that they agreed to hold up the train while I sent another wire, and more Spanish still that the wire never got there”[23].
BARCELONA, RETURN & ESCAPE
If Orwell had a sense of foreboding about his return to Barcelona, and it’s impossible to think he wouldn’t, he’d have been right to feel uneasy. Initially sent to a POUM sanatorium just outside the city, when he was discharged on June 11th he discovered that the situation was even more dire than it had been just a few short weeks before.
Soviet agents had for months past been working against anti-Stalin Republican groups including the POUM, making absurd accusations that they were in fact Fascist conspirators. Denouncing the group as traitors, the Russians exerted pressure on the pro-Stalin Spanish government to have the group outlawed, which they duly were on June 16th. Thus anyone associated with the POUM was now in grave danger.
What followed was a spate of disappearances, arrests, abductions and murders. ILP man John McNair was briefly detained. Georges Kopp was arrested and spent eighteen months in jail. In total, over 1,000 POUM members were imprisoned by a government they were actually fighting to defend. The killing of POUM leader Andreu Nin was the most notorious case of all, standing out for its cruelty even among the many barbarous crimes committed in the whole grim business of the war. Nin was abducted, tortured for several days, then finally executed after refusing to submit to his captors.
This was the perilous, cloak and dagger world which the Blairs were now desperately trying to escape. The Soviet secret police had them both under surveillance, raiding Eileen’s hotel room while George was out of town collecting his discharge papers. When he returned on June 20th, he headed straight to Eileen’s hotel whereupon she told him to get out immediately. Thus began their frantic final few days on the run.
Lying low and sleeping rough amid the rubble of bombed-out churches, Orwell and Eileen made it out of Barcelona on June 23rd. Accompanied by John McNair and Stafford Cotton, another ILP comrade, the four crossed into France by train. Shortly after arriving back in England, an arrest warrant was issued for the Blairs by the Tribunal for Espionage & High Treason. The war continued in their absence, ever more savage, for almost two more years. But once the pro-Stalin faction on the left turned on their own side, the Republican fate was sealed. Franco’s fascists won the war and remained in power for forty years. Orwell never did return for that cup of coffee in Huesca.
DON’T SHOOT
For a man who said of his participation in the war, “if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: ‘Common decency’”[24], Orwell was nevertheless cold-blooded about his one, simple goal: “I had promised myself to kill one Fascist — after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct”[25].
But if it’s true that war makes monsters out of men, then he never lost his humanity. Out on a sniping mission and presented with the perfect opportunity to make good on his promise, he found himself unable to open fire. With an unarmed Fascist soldier in his sights, his target suddenly spotted him and fled: “He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards… still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers…a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist,’ he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him”[26]. Such chivalry feels comfortingly characteristic of Orwell. You almost hope and expect that this would be his reaction in that situation. Shooting a defenceless man, Fascist or not, offended his notion of fair play and simply wouldn’t do.
THE ITALIAN MILITIAMAN
His sentimental side is also on display in the opening lines of Homage to Catalonia, with his touching recollection of an Italian militiaman he briefly met on his very first day in Barcelona:
“Something in his face deeply moved me…there were both candour and ferocity in it…I hardly know why, but I have seldom seen anyone — any man, I mean — to whom I have taken such an immediate liking…as we went out he stepped across the room and gripped my hand very hard. Queer, the affection you can feel for a stranger! It was as though his spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy. I hoped he liked me as well as I liked him”[27].
Orwell was profoundly struck by this man, who he mentioned time and again in his reporting on Spain. Homage to Catalonia begins with his memory of their meeting, he penned a poem honouring the man’s “crystal spirit”[28] two years later, and he remembers him again in his 1943 essay Looking Back on the Spanish War, lamenting “I never saw the Italian militiaman again, nor did I ever learn his name. It can be taken as quite certain that he is dead”[29]. Orwell seemed to regard their fleeting encounter as emblematic of everything noble, heroic, naive and tragic about the ultimately doomed Republican cause. It’s curious to think that his anonymous Italian comrade would never have known who he spoke to that day. But how satisfying too to know that he wasn’t forgotten and that his memory would endure, upheld so passionately by one of the titans of the 20th century.
ANIMAL FARM & JOSEPH STALIN
Following his return to England, Orwell was appalled to see the same lies and misinformation which led to the division and defeat of the Republicans in Spain repeated as fact by the English press: “One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right”[30].
Having shed blood for the cause, and as a first-hand witness to events in Spain, he bitterly resented the wilful mis-representation of facts by supposed allies on the left, all done in order to appease Russia. While the UK maintained a neutral stance in Spain, the British government was fearful of Hitler’s rise and scared of offending a potentially crucial ally against him. No-one wanted to hear any criticism of Stalin, which was why Orwell had such a hard time getting Homage to Catalonia published.
All these events produced within Orwell a visceral and lasting hatred of Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was there in Spain and in the immediate aftermath that the idea for Animal Farm — his brilliant allegory of a workers revolution betrayed — began to form. When it finally came in 1945 (only three months after the end of World War Two) it was an utterly ruthless takedown of a political system and a figure whom Orwell had grown to despise.
Through the scheming, hypocritical coward of a pig ‘Napoleon’, Animal Farm was not so much thinly disguised satire as a direct attack on a specific target, Joseph Stalin. Orwell once wrote that “every joke is a tiny revolution”[31]. He knew that if you stop fearing the powerful and poke fun at them instead, you can undermine their power, although they might kill you for laughing at them. A hallmark of every authoritarian regime throughout history has been, without exception, the complete absence of a sense of humour. Psychopaths take themselves quite seriously and get upset when others do not. Orwell didn’t care about that: “authority is always there to be laughed at. There is always room for one more custard pie”[32]. The critic and essayist Jonathan Clarke writes beautifully of Orwell that his “is the humour that celebrates the part of us the state can never reach”[33].
“Whatever destroys dignity, and brings down the mighty from their seats, preferably with a bump, is funny. And the bigger they fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate”[34].
If, as Bernard Crick said, it was Orwell’s habit “to wrap up a profound theoretical point in broad humour”[35], then Animal Farm was Orwell launching a custard pie of his own right into Stalin’s face.
LEGACY AND RECOGNITION
In 1996, a square in Barcelona’s Barrio Gótico was christened the Placa de George Orwell. One suspects he’d have appreciated the modest manner of the recognition. Certainly he had no time for what he regarded as the pomposity of Barcelona’s most famous landmark, the Sagrada Família, calling it “one of the most hideous buildings in the world” and adding, presumably tongue in cheek, “I think the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance”[36]. The naming of a down-at-heel neighbourhood square in the heart of Barcelona’s old town seems like a fitting nod to Orwell’s links to the city and service to the Republican cause. And the Republicans did eventually win out, but only after the death of the dictator Franco in 1975, after thirty-nine years in power, did democracy finally return to Spain — and even then it was not without a fight.
Spain was the culmination of a decade long journey which shaped Orwell as the writer he would become in the final twelve years of his life. That journey began when he quit his hated job as the imperial oppressor in Burma, it continued as he chronicled the forgotten lives of London’s homeless and the poor of Paris, before exposing the dismal conditions endured by so many in the squalid slums of England’s industrial north. Lucky to make it out of Spain at all, Orwell was 34 years old and battle-scarred when he returned to England in the summer of 1937.
By this time an author and journalist of some repute, the great novelist we know today was still to emerge. Despite all that he’d been through, and the perilous state of a world which he knew was about to plunge into yet another calamitous war, the coming years were the most prolific of Orwell’s life.
Part three: Making tea, the perfect pub, true crime and Coming Up for Air.
If you would like to learn more about George Orwell/Eric Blair, please visit the Orwell Society or the Orwell Foundation.
References:
- George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938).
- Homage to Catalonia, 1962 Penguin Edition.
3–18. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938).
19. Bob Edwards, (New Leader, 1937).
20–27. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938).
28. George Orwell, The Italian Soldier Shook My Hand (1939).
29. George Orwell, Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War (New Road, 1943).
30. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938).
31. George Orwell, Funny, but not Vulgar (Leader, 1945).
32. George Orwell, Charles Dickens (Inside the Whale, 1940).
33. Jonathan Clarke, Orwell’s Humor (City Journal, 2022).
34. George Orwell, Funny, but not Vulgar (Leader, 1945).
35. Bernard Crick, Orwell as a Comic Writer, https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/articles/bernard-crick-orwell-as-a-comic-writer/
36. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938).
