Orwell in Spain

by George Orwell

  My wife wishes to be remembered to you. Neither of us suffered any ill-effects from being in Spain, though, of course, the whole thing was terribly distressing and disillusioning. The effects of my wound passed off more quickly than was expected. If it would interest I will send you a copy of my book on Spain when it comes out.

  Yours sincerely,

  Eric Blair

  1. Partido Socialista Unificado de Cataluña (The United Catalan Socialist Party, a communist party). For its ‘line’, see Homage to Catalonia, pp. 179–80 [VI/201–2].

  2. John Langdon-Davies (1897–1971), journalist and author. He wrote for the News Chronicle in Spain and was joint secretary with the communist lawyer, Geoffrey Bing, of the Comintern-inspired Commission of Inquiry into Alleged Breaches of the Non-Intervention Agreement in Spain; see Thomas 397–8. Orwell’s ‘refusal to accept the politics of liquidation and elimination’ led to sneering by ‘harder Communists’ – of which Langdon-Davies was one – at Homage to Catalonia: see Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (1988), 427.

  [421]

  Review of The Tree of Gernika by G. L. Steer; Spanish Testament by Arthur Koestler

  Time and Tide, 5 February 1938

  It goes without saying that everyone who writes of the Spanish War writes as a partisan. What is perhaps less obvious is that, because of the huge discords that have shaken and threatened to split the Government side, every pro-Government writer is really involved in several distinct controversies. He is writing for the Government, but he is also (though he generally pretends otherwise) writing against the Communists, or the Trotskyists, or the Anarchists, or what-not. Mr. Steer’s book is no exception to the general rule, but he carries a different set of prejudices from the majority of pro-Government writers, because he happens to have seen the war not in eastern Spain but in the Basque country.

  In a way the problems here were simpler. The Basques were Catholic and Conservative, the left-wing organizations were weak even in the large towns (as Mr. Steer says, ‘there was no socéial revolution in Bilbao’), and what the Basques chiefly wanted was regional autonomy, which they were likelier to get from the Popular Front Government than from Franco. Mr. Steer writes entirely from the Basque standpoint, and he has, very strongly, the curious English characteristic of being unable to praise one race without damning another. Being pro-Basque, he finds it necessary to be anti-Spanish, i.e., to some extent anti-Government as well as anti-Franco. As a result his book is so full of gibes at the Asturians and other non-Basque loyalists as to make one doubtful of his reliability as a witness – a pity, for he has had opportunities that were shared by very few Englishmen.

  His book is sub-titled ‘A Field Study of Modern War’, but as a matter of fact it is not at all clear how much he has seen with his own eyes and how much he is repeating from hearsay. Nearly every incident is described as though by an eye-witness, but it is obviously impossible that Mr. Steer can have been in all places at once. However, there is one very important and much-disputed event upon which he speaks with undoubted authority – the bombing of Guernica (or Gernika). He was in the immediate neighbourhood at the time of the aeroplane raids, and his account leaves no doubt that the little town was not‘burnt by Red militiamen’ but systematically destroyed from the air, out of sheer, wanton brutality. Guernica was not even of much importance as a military objective. And the most horrible thought of all is that this blotting-out of an open town was simply the correct and logical use of a modern weapon. For it is precisely to slaughter and terrify the civilian population – not to destroy entrenchments, which are very difficult to hit from the air – that bombing aeroplanes exist. The photographs in this book are very good. All photo graphs in books on the Spanish war have a certain similarity, but these have much more character in them than most.

  Mr. Arthur Koestler,1 a News Chronicle correspondent, stayed in Maálaga when the Republican troops had departed – a bold thing to do, for he had already published a book containing some very unfriendly remarks about General Queipo de Llano.2 He was thrown into jail by the rebels, and suffered what must have been the fate of literally tens of thousands of political prisoners in Spain. That is to say, he was condemned to death without trial and then kept in prison for months, much of the time in solitary confinement, listening at his keyhole night after night for the roar of rifle-fire as his fellow prisoners were shot in batches of six or a dozen. As usual – for it really does seem to be quite usual – he knew that he was under sentence of death without knowing with any certainty what he was accused of.

  The prison part of the book is written mainly in the form of a diary. It is of the greatest psychological interest – probably one of the most honest and unusual documents that have been produced by the Spanish war. The earlier part is more ordinary and in places even looks rather as though it had been ‘edited’ for the benefit of the Left Book Club. Even more than Mr. Steer’s, this book lays bare the central evil of modern war – the fact that, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘he who fights against dragons becomes a dragon himself’.3

  Mr. Koestler says:

  I can no longer pretend to be objective… Anyone who has lived through the hell of Madrid with his eyes, his nerves, his heart, his stomach – and then pretends to be objective, is a liar. If those who have at their command printing machines and printer’s ink for the expression of their opinions, remain neutral and objective in the face of such bestiality, then Europe is lost.

  I quite agree. You cannot be objective about an aerial torpedo. And the horror we feel of these things has led to this conclusion: if someone drops a bomb on your mother, go and drop two bombs on his mother. The only apparent alternatives are to smash dwelling houses to powder, blow out human entrails and burn holes in children with lumps of thermite, or to be enslaved by people who are more ready to do these things than you are yourself; as yet no one has suggested a practicable way out.

  1. Arthur Koestler (1905–83), novelist and political and scientific writer, born in Hungary. He was a lifelong friend of Orwell’s. See Orwell’s essay on Koestler, September 1944 (2548), and the cumulative index in CW. XX.

  2. General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano y Serra (1875–1951), Nationalist, who, on 18 July 1936 in Seville, when commander of carabineers, ‘carried out an outstanding coup de main and took Seville for Franco. From the radio station he made a ‘notorious series of harangues. In a voice seasoned by many years’ consumption of sherry, he declared that Spain was saved and that the rabble who resisted the rising would be shot like dogs’ (Thomas, 221, 223). In his most famous broadcast, he said, ‘tonight I shall take a sherry and tomorrow I shall take Maálaga’ (520). In 1947, though now an avowed republican, he accepted a marquisate from Franco (948).

  3. Nietzsche, Jenseitsvon Gut undBöse (Beyond Good and Evil, 1886), ch. 4, no. 146.

  [422]

  To the Editor, Time and Tide

  5 February 1938

  Time-Tide Diary’ of 22 January 1938 included these paragraphs over the pen-name ‘Sirocco’ [unknown]:

  That nine thousand Left Book Club’s members rallied to the Albert Hall on Sunday is gratifying or alarming, according to whichever way you look at it. Here is an organization both subtle and widespread, an embryo Catholic Church with Mr. Gollancz as Pope. I can imagine him seated at his desk with a map of England in front of him. Every time the telephone rings he sticks in a red flag – a new member for Blackpool, five for Manchester, a married couple for Stow-on-the-Wold. Presently there is no map left – only red flags.

  It is hard to see why a club with such excellent principles should give one such a nightmare. The Left is kind. The Left has good intentions. Mr. Gollancz is only the spokesman of the Left. But is he also the censor? Why are there no orange volumes by anarchists? Who publishes the perorations of those nice young Trotskyites one meets at parties? What galvanizes all Left Book Club writers into total and unnatural agreement? Is the English intellectual already in training for the critical apathy of post-revolution?


  Orwell responded two weeks later

  ‘TROTSKYIST’ PUBLICATIONS

  SIR, – In ‘Time-Tide Diary’ of January 22nd, Sirocco remarks upon the ‘unnatural agreement’ of Left Book Club writers, and adds, ‘Why are there no orange volumes1 by anarchists? Who publishes the perorations of those nice young Trotskyites one meets at parties?’

  As a matter of fact, a certain number of political books written from a Left Wing but non-Communist standpoint do get published, in particular by Messrs. Secker & Warburg, who are coming to be known rather inaccurately as ‘the Trotskyist publishers’. I have had the honour of reviewing several books of this type, dealing with the Spanish war, in your columns. One was Red Spanish Notebook, which was written actually by Trotskyists. I thought it, as I said at the time, a prejudiced book, but interesting in detail and giving a good picture of Catalonia in the early months of the war. Another was Mairin Mitchell’s Storm Over Spain, written by a Catholic, but very sympathetic to the Spanish Anarchists. And above all there was Franz Borkenau’s The Spanish Cockpit (published by Faber’s), which was written from a strictly non-party standpoint, except insomuch that the author was pro-Government and anti-Franco. This in my opinion is by a long way the ablest book that has yet appeared on the Spanish war or is likely to appear until the dust of conflict has died down. But the sequel to my review of it is rather interesting, and gives one a glimpse of the kind of censorship under which we are now suffering and of which the Left Book Club is a symptom.

  Shortly after my review of The Spanish Cockpit appeared in Time and Tide, the author wrote and thanked me, saying that though the book had been widely praised I was the only reviewer who had drawn attention to one of its central themes, i.e., to the real part played by the Communist Party in Spain. Simultaneously I had had the book to review for another well-known weekly paper, and had said much the same as I said in Time and Tide, but at greater length. My review was refused publication on the ground that it ‘controverted editorial policy’.2 Meanwhile I had already discovered that it was almost impossible to get any publicity in the English press for a truthful account of what had been happening in Catalonia in May-June, 1937. A number of people had said to me with varying degrees of frankness that one must not tell the truth about what was happening in Spain, and the part played by the Communist Party, because to do so would be to prejudice public opinion against the Spanish Government and so aid Franco. I do not agree with this view, because I hold the outmoded opinion that in the long run it does not pay to tell lies, but in so far as it was dictated by a desire to help the Spanish Government, I can respect it. But what I think is interesting is this. The pro-Government papers covered up the disreputable happenings in Spain, the mass imprisonments without trial, assassinations by the secret police, etc., but so did the pro-Franco papers. The huge ‘Trotsky-Fascist’ plot which the Communist press claimed to have discovered was given wide publicity; the fact that Prieto3 and other members of the Government denied that there was any truth whatever in the ‘plot’ story, and said roundly that the police were practically an independent body under Communist control, was carefully unmentioned. It will be seen, therefore, that the pro-Communist censorship extends a great deal further than the Left Book Club. The newspapers of the Right, although professing to lump all ‘Reds’ together and to be equally hostile to all of them, are in fact perfectly well aware which parties and individuals are or are not dangerous to the structure of Capitalism. Ten years ago it was almost impossible to get anything printed in favour of Communism; today it is almost impossible to get anything printed in favour of Anarchism or ‘Trotskyism’. Did not Miss Ellen Wilkinson remark in your number of January 22nd that in Paris ‘one can meet a Pertinax and a former Chef du Cabinet, Poincaré, at a lunch with Communist leaders without any sense of strain’?4 And does she really see no more in this than that Pertinax and Thorez5 are both frightened of Hitler?

  1. Left Book Club copies intended for members were bound in limp orange-coloured covers.

  2. See Orwell’s letter to Raymond Mortimer, 9 February 1938, following.

  3. Indalecio Prieto y Tuero (1883–1962) was a Socialist. He was Minister of Defence in the Negráin Government, and a fountainhead of defeatism; see Thomas, 809. He founded the SIM, the counter-espionage police of ill-repute, and died in exile in Mexico.

  4. Ellen Cicely Wilkinson (1891–1947) was a leading Labour Party MP, first elected in 1924. She had written: ‘there is an influential section of French opinion which, though completely reactionary at home, is passionately patriotic as against the old enemy Germany. M. de Kérillis and Pertinax are the best-known voices of this current of opinion. In France today, however, one cannot be anti-German without also being anti-Fascist. Anti-Fascism immediately links up with the most uncompromising anti-Hitlerites who are the Communists. So one can meet a Pertinax…’ Henri de Kérillis was a journalist and right-wing politician. He was the only non-communist member of the Chamber of Deputies to vote against ratification of the Munich Agreement with Hitler. Pertinax was the pen-name of journalist André Géraud (1882–1956). He was London correspondent of the right-wing Echo de Paris, 1905–14 and foreign-affairs editor, 1917–38. He went to the United States after the fall of France in 1940. After the war, he became diplomatic correspondent for France-Soir. Raymond Poincaré (1860–1934), a lawyer, was both Premier and Foreign Minister of France from January 1912 to January 1913, and President from 1913 to 1920. Again Premier, 1926–9, he resigned because of ill health. His politics were conservative.

  5. Maurice Thorez (1900–1964), a miner at the age of twelve, became Secretary-General of the Pas de Calais Communist Federation in 1923 and Secretary-General of the Communist Party of France in 1930. He went to the Soviet Union in 1939 and returned only in 1944. He had been elected a deputy in 1932, and from 1945 to 1946 was a minister of state. In ‘As I Please’, 48, 17 November 1944, Orwell devoted a section to Thorez and the falsification of history (see 2579)

  [424]

  To Raymond Mortimer

  9 February 1938

  On reading Orwell’s letter of 5 February 1938 to the editor of Time and Tide, Raymond Mortimer, critic and literary editor of the New Statesman & Nation and one of the best that paper had, wrote to Orwell, on 8 February 1938, in protest, saying: ‘It is possible of course that the “well known weekly paper” to which you refer is not the New Statesman, but I take this as a reference to us, and so no doubt will the majority of those who read your letter’ The offices of the New Statesman were bombed during the war, so all the correspondence of that time has been lost. But among his papers Orwell kept the originals of letters from Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, and Raymond Mortimer and a carbon copy, reprinted here, of his reply to Mortimer.

  The Stores, Wallington, Near Baldock, Herts

  Dear Mortimer,

  With reference to your letter of February 8th. I am extremely sorry if I have hurt your or anybody else’s feelings, but before speaking of the general issues involved, I must point out that what you say in it is not quite correct. You say, ‘Your review of The Spanish Cockpit was refused, because it gave a most inadequate and misleading description of the book. You used the review merely to express your own opinions and to present facts which you thought should be known. Moreover, last time I saw you, you acknowledged this. Why then do you now suggest, quite mistakenly, that the review was refused because it “controverted editorial policy”? Are you confusing the review with the previous refusal of an article, which you submitted, and which the editor turned down because we had just printed three articles on the same subject.’

  I attach a copy of Kingsley Martin’s letter. You will see from this that the review was refused because it ‘controverts the political policy of the paper’ (I should have said ‘political policy’ not ‘editorial policy’). Secondly, you say that my previous article had been turned down ‘because we had just printed three articles on the same subject’. Now, the article I sent in was on the suppressio
n of the P.O.U.M., the alleged ‘Trotsky-Fascist’ plot, the murder of Nin etc. So far as I know the New Statesman has never published any article on this subject. I certainly did and do admit that the review I wrote was tendentious and perhaps unfair, but it was not returned to me on those grounds, as you see from the letter attached.

  Nothing is more hateful to me than to get mixed up in these controversies and to write, as it were, against people and newspapers that I have always respected, but one has got to realise what kind of issues are involved and the very great difficulty of getting the truth ventilated in the English press. So far as one can get at the figures, not less than 3000 political prisoners (ie. anti-Fascists) are in the Spanish jails at present, and the majority of them have been there six or seven months without any kind of trial or charge, in the most filthy physical conditions, as I have seen with my own eyes. A number of them have been bumped off, and there is not much doubt that there would have been a wholesale massacre if the Spanish Government had not had the sense to disregard the clamour in the Communist press. Various members of the Spanish Government have said over and over again to Maxton, McGovern, Félicien Challaye1and others that they wish to release these people but are unable to do so because of Communist pressure. What happens in Loyalist Spain is largely governed by outside opinion, and there is no doubt that if there had [been] a general protest from foreign Socialists the anti-Fascist prisoners would have been released. Even the protests of a small body like the I.L.P. have had some effect. But a few months back when a petition was got up for the release of the anti-Fascist prisoners, nearly all the leading English Socialists refused to sign it. I do not doubt that this was because, though no doubt they disbelieved the tale about a ‘Trotsky-Fascist’ plot, they had gathered a general impression that the Anarchists and the P.O.U.M. were working against the Government, and, in particular, had believed the lies that were published in the English press about the fighting in Barcelona in May 1937. To mention an individual instance, Brailsford in one of his articles in the New Statesman was allowed to state that the P.O.U.M. had attacked the Government with stolen batteries of guns, tanks etc. I was in Barcelona during the fighting, and as far as one can ever prove a negative I can prove by eye-witnesses etc. that this tale was absolutely untrue. At the time of the correspondence over my review I wrote to Kingsley Martin to tell him it was untrue, and more recently I wrote to Brailsford to ask him what was the source of the story. He had to admit that he had had it on what amounted to no authority whatever. (Stephen Spender has his letter at present, but I could get it for you if you wanted to see it.) Yet neither the New Statesman nor Brailsford has published any retraction of this statement, which amounts to an accusation of theft and treachery against numbers of innocent people. I do not think you can blame me if I feel that the New Statesman has its share of blame for the one-sided view that has been presented.