Orwell

by Jeffrey Meyers

  These “men of good will” are always the victims of war, and it is from this traditional viewpoint that Orwell narrates his war memoir. He specifically compares the Spanish to the Great War—“it was a bad copy of 1914–18, a positional war of trenches, artillery, raids, snipers, mud, barbed wire, lice and stagnation,” and defines his tradition by comparing books on both wars. In “Inside the Whale” (1940), Orwell criticizes the Spanish war books for “their shocking dullness and badness,” and states that “almost all of them, right-wing or left-wing, are written from a political angle, by cocksure partisans telling you what to think.” Homage to Catalonia, on the other hand, is distinguished from these books by its truthfulness and objectivity and by its frank portrayal of Orwell's helplessness and confusion. Though more polemical and positive than books about the Great War, Homage belongs in that tradition because of its sensitive portrayal of a sympathetic victim. For those books were also

  written by common soldiers or junior officers who did not even pretend to understand what the whole thing was about. Books like All Quiet on the Western Front, Le Feu, A Farewell to Arms, Death of a Hero, Good-Bye to All That, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and A Subaltern on the Somme7 were written not by propagandists but by victims. They are saying, in effect, “What the hell is this about? God knows. All we can do is to endure.” … They are the records of something completely meaningless, a nightmare happening in a void. That was not actually the truth about the war, but it was the truth about the individual reaction. The soldier advancing into a machine-gun barrage or standing waist-deep in a flooded trench knew only that here was an appalling experience in which he was all but helpless. He was likelier to make a good book out of his helplessness and his ignorance than out of a pretended power to see the whole thing in perspective.

  In squalid misery and unspeakable horror, Orwell's experiences on the Aragon front surpassed anything he had previously endured in Burma8 or Wigan or while “down and out.” He insists that in war “the physical details always outweigh everything else” (139), and he is constantly submerged in an atmosphere of “filth and chaos,” “excrement and decay,” “boredom and discomfort”—in “mud, lice, hunger, cold.” The “nightmare” feeling is constantly stressed and rats appear frequently. During the parapet attack he feels “a deep horror at everything: the chaos, the darkness, the frightful din, the slithering to and fro in the mud” (95). When he is wounded, he finds the medical treatment almost as crude as in the days of Hogarth and Smollett. When he returns to Barcelona he finds the suspicion and hostility “sickening and disillusioning.”9

  For Orwell, helpless and confused, war is a trial by ordeal that ends with his wound and his flight. The most interesting things about his narrative are his startling honesty and the accuracy of his psychological responses, portrayed in an exciting and vivid, yet detached style. Orwell admits that he is often frightened: when going to the front, the first time under fire and especially after his wound when he loses his nerve completely. He confesses that he is ineffectual in combat, deceived in a crisis, absurd as a smuggler, self-indulgent on leave. Yet this seems to generalize his experiences (we would be the same) and to engage our sympathies as he becomes a kind of military Everyman who embodies “the fate of most soldiers in most wars” (103). Though a soldier, he is always a sensitive humanist, who observes, “It was the first time in my life that I had fired a gun at a human being” (21). When he is under fire he reacts with instinctive and futile gestures: he ducks, he claps his hand over his cheek, “as though one's hand could stop a bullet!—but I had a horror of being hit in the face” (91). Instead, he is shot through the neck and, like Joyce Cary who was wounded in the German Cameroons in 1915, manages to reflect in the midst of the horrible experience. Cary recalls, “I got a bullet that scraped my mastoid, and of course it felt as if my brains were blown to pieces, and it knocked me right out. And I just sat down to think: ‘Well, this is it, and it is easy.’”10 Similarly, Orwell observes,

  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…. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone 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. (185)11

  Orwell's wound is carefully foreshadowed by those of his wounded comrades, a series of ghastly creatures who pass through the book like scenes from Goya's Disasters of War and evoke Orwell's sympathy: “I saw one poor devil, his breeches dark with blood, flung out of his stretcher and gasping in agony” (83). “There was the roar of the explosion and then, instantly, a diabolical outcry of screams and groans…. Poor wretch, poor wretch! I felt a vague sorrow as I heard him screaming” (96–97). “There was one man wounded in the face and throat who had his head inside a sort of spherical helmet of butter-muslin…. He looked so lonely, wandering to and fro” (192).

  When the injured men are sent back to the hospitals, “the ambulances filed down the abominable road to Sietamo, killing the badly wounded with their joltings” (75–76); and when Orwell is shot he endures the horrors of the same ride: “no one who was liable to bleed internally could have survived those miles of jolting” (188). The tender pity in these passages is similar to the feeling in “How the Poor Die”; in Donne's words, Orwell felt “any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind.”

  Strangely enough, war, for Orwell, is not all futility and suffering. He reverts at times to the self-conscious, adventurous and Boy Scout attitude of the Eton officers, where sniping and whizzing bullets are “rather fun,” patrols and trenches are “not bad fun in a way,” and building barricades is “a strange and wonderful sight.” Here the boyish naïveté in combat, a kind of playful whistling in the dark, is the military correlative of Orwell's political innocence. But as the political realities darken his vision, the fighting does not seem quite so much “fun” as before. In a crucial way, Homage is a Bildungsroman der Realpolitik, for Orwell moves a great distance from “[The fall of Malaga] set up in my mind the first vague doubt about this war in which, hitherto, the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple” (45) to “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” (180).

  Like all victims, Orwell is immersed in immediate events and confused about the political situation, and his perspective is not clarified until his political awareness gradually develops. “There is no such thing as a genuinely non-political literature,” writes Orwell in 1946, “and least of all in an age like our own, when fears, hatreds and loyalties of a directly political kind are near to the surface of everyone's consciousness.” And he adds in the same year, a writer's “subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in.” One of the primary obligations of the political writer is to be honest, to establish the truth; and Orwell writes of Homage, “I happened to know, what very few people in England had been allowed to know, that innocent men were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that I should never have written the book.”12

  Orwell came to know this truth by a series of accidents. He describes his connection with POUM, the Unified Marxist Workers’ Party, “the most extreme of the revolutionary parties,” in the recently published “Notes on the Spanish Militias”: “Just before leaving England I rang up the ILP [Independent Labour Party], with which I had some slight connections, mainly personal, and asked them to give me
some kind of recommendation. They sent me a letter … to John. McNair at Barcelona…. [I] produce[d] my letter to McNair (whom I did not know) and through this I joined the POUM militia…. At that time I was only rather dimly aware of the differences between the political parties…. Had I a complete understanding of the situation I should have probably joined the CNT militia.”13 Hugh Thomas writes of POUM that “many joined this party believing that it represented a mean between, the indiscipline of the Anarchists and the strictness of the PSUC [Socialists]. Foreigners in Barcelona joined the POUM in the romantic supposition that it indeed embodied a magnificent Utopian aspiration.”14

  Though Orwell idealistically affirms, “There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all” (153), 15 he also states: “As a militiaman one was a soldier against Franco, but one was also a pawn in an enormous struggle that was being fought out between two political theories” (47). As Orwell gradually realizes, the real struggle is between revolution and counterrevolution, between the Comintern and the Spanish Left-wing parties. The Russian government tried to prevent revolution in Spain,16 just as it had done in China ten years earlier.17

  The retrogression of Barcelona from a revolutionary to a bourgeois to a totalitarian city is paralleled by the decline of the POUM party. First, writes Orwell, it “was an accepted party and supplied a minister to the Catalan Government; later it was expelled from the Government; then it was denounced as Trotskyist; then it was suppressed, every member that the police could lay their hands on being flung in jail.” Trotsky in Russia, Snowball in Animal Farm, suffered a similar fate.

  There is considerable confusion in Homage (Orwell tells what happens, but not why), because he, like everyone else, did not understand why the Communists destroyed their Socialist allies.18 And his bewilderment continued beyond 1943 when he says, “As to the Russians, their motives in the Spanish war are completely inscrutable.” This confusion results because the Russian policy was both contradictory and ineffectual. As Isaac Deutscher writes: “Stalin's desire [was] to preserve for the Spanish Popular Front its republican respectability and to avoid antagonizing the British and French Governments. He saved nobody's respectability and he antagonized everybody. Conservative opinion in the west, not interested in the internecine struggle of the Spanish left and confused by the intricacies of Stalin's policy, blamed Stalin as the chief fomenter of revolution.”19

  According to Orwell, “The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being antitotalitarian.” Except for Orwell, Trotsky, Borkenau, and a few others, no one seemed to realize “that among the parties on the Government side the Communists stood not upon the extreme Left, but upon the extreme Right” (56). Since the Loyalist revolutionaries had no footing in the foreign press, Orwell had to tell the truth. But he was a voice crying in the wilderness: his book sold only six hundred copies in its first twelve years and was not even published in America until after his death.

  For Orwell, this Loyalist internecine strife was more horrible than actual warfare against the Fascists. During the street fighting, “I was in no danger, I suffered from nothing worse than hunger and boredom, yet it was one of the most unbearable periods in my whole life. I think few experiences could be more sickening, more disillusioning or, finally, more nerve-racking” (130). Yet Orwell's “thrill of hope” was never extinguished and he remained “an affirming flame”: “When you have had a glimpse of such a disaster as this—and however it ends the Spanish war will turn out to have been an appalling disaster, quite apart from the slaughter and the physical suffering—the result is not necessarily disillusionment and cynicism. Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings” (230).

  His conception of human decency is manifested in comradeship and solidarity, and is symbolized by the moving handshakes of the Italian militiaman and Spanish police officer at the beginning and end of the book. This idea of comradeship is at the very core of Homage and is elaborated in numerous ways—humanistic, psychological, idealistic and heroic. Orwell shares the concept of “the virile fraternity” with the great masculine writers like Melville, Conrad, and Malraux, who writes of Vincent Berger in The Walnut Trees of Altenburg: “What he liked about war was the masculine comradeship, the irrevocable commitments that courage imposes.”20 This sense of a brotherhood that shares the intimacy of death is general rather than local and extends to all combatants. When enemy deserters slip across the Loyalist lines and Orwell sees his first “real Fascists,” “it struck me that they were indistinguishable from ourselves, except that they wore khaki overalls” (17). And when he lies next to a wounded Assault Guard in Monzon Hospital, he says, “‘In Barcelona we should have been shooting one another,’ and we laughed over this” (202). Similarly, during the soldiers’ talk across the rooftop barricades near the Café Moka (which recalls the famous scene in The Red Badge of Courage where foes converse along a narrow river bank), the peaceful Orwell yells:

  Hi! Don't you shoot at us!

  What?

  Don't you fire at us or we'll fire back!

  No, No! I wasn't firing at you…. We don't want to shoot you.

  We are only workers, the same as you are. (133)

  This powerful bond makes Orwell a reluctant warrior. Once, in the trenches, Orwell suddenly came very close to an enemy and “could see him clearly. He was bareheaded and seemed to have nothing on except a blanket which he was clutching round his shoulders. If I had fired I could have blown him to pieces … [but] I never even thought of firing.” Instead, Orwell chases and prods him with a bayonet but never quite catches him—“a comic memory for me to look back upon, though I suppose it seemed less comic to him” (92). The point here is that Orwell does not really want to kill the man, and this is reinforced by the well-known incident described in “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” (1943). Again, a vulnerable enemy suddenly appears: “He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him…. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man 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.”21

  This sense of comradeship and solidarity that Orwell experienced in Spain answered his deep-rooted psychological need. In school, Burma, Paris-London and Wigan, Orwell had been a lonely outsider, and this feeling of intense isolation is reflected in his fictional heroes—Flory, Dorothy and Comstock. He and his wife went to Spain right after their marriage, and it was the first time in his life that he was not isolated and alien. United in a common cause with the Spanish Loyalists, he became passionately attached to them.

  In the autobiographical ninth chapter of The Road to Wigan Pier, a book Orwell completed just before leaving for Spain, he relates how the overpowering guilt that resulted from his years as a colonial oppressor in Burma forced him to seek expiation among the down-and-outs of Paris and London: “I could go among these people, see what their lives were like and feel myself temporarily part of their world. Once I had been among them and accepted by them … part of my guilt would drop from me.”22 Though Orwell knows he can belong to this world only “temporarily,” he is desperate to be “accepted,” for only then can he begin to shed his guilt. Despite his extensive experience with low life and poverty in Burma, “I was still half-afraid of the working-class. I wanted to get in touch with them, I even wanted to become one of them, but I still thought of them as alien and dangerous…. The people would spot that I was not one of themselves.”23

  When he finally overcomes his fears and enters a common lodging-house, “it seemed to me like going down into some dreadful subterranean place—a sewer full of rats, for instance.” (The real rats in Homage, where he is accepted, are less frightening though they become the symbol of ultimate horror to the isolated Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four.)24 Orwell is initiated by a drunken stevedor
e who cries, “’ave a cup of tea, chum!” and he writes that “It was a kind of baptism … everybody was polite and gentle and took me utterly for granted…. [I was] on terms of utter equality with workingclass people.”25 If tramp life is Orwell's “baptism,” life in the Spanish militia is his “confirmation”—in true equality and comradeship with the working class for the first time in his life. In Aragon they were “all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality…. One had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade’ stood for comradeship…. One had breathed the air of equality…. This period … is now of great importance to me. It is so different from the rest of my life” (104–105).

  The stevedore's crucial acceptance of Orwell is repeated in another moving, almost ceremonial incident, concerning the dark, ragged boy in his section who was accused of stealing, stripped naked and exonerated. Orwell believed him guilty and was ashamed of his humiliation. Shortly afterwards, when Corporal Orwell got into a dispute with his men about the need for discipline, this boy “sprang into the ring and began passionately defending me. With his strange, wild, Indian gesture he kept exclaiming, ‘He's the best corporal we've got.’ … Why is this incident touching to me? Because in any normal circumstances it would have been impossible for good feelings ever to be re-established between this boy and myself.”