Parliamentary democracy, and especially the party system, developed in a period when no dispute between the different factions was really irreconcilable. Whigs and tories, or liberals and conservatives, are conducting what is in effect a family quarrel, and they will abide by one another’s decisions; but when the issue is, for instance, between capitalism and socialism, the case is altered. Actually, in slightly varying guises, the same situation has arisen over and over again. A democratically elected government proceeds to make radical reforms; it is acting perfectly legally, but its opponents ‘won’t play’; they rise in rebellion, either by open violence, as in Spain, or, more usually, by financial sabotage. The peculiarity of this case was that the Spanish Government fought back.
The war has now lasted two-and-a-half years and caused perhaps a million deaths, besides unheard-of-misery. How much damage has it done to the cause of democracy? One has only to consider the possibilities of modern war, the kind of things that governments will have to do to hold their peoples together, to feel very doubtful whether there will be much democracy left anywhere after several years of ‘all-in’ warfare between great nations. Yet it is a fact that the Spanish war, in nearly every way so terrible, has been a hopeful portent in this respect. In Government Spain both the forms and the spirit of democracy have survived to an extent that no one would have foreseen; it would even be true to say that during the first year of the war they were developing.
I was in Catalonia and Aragón from Christmas, 1936, until about the middle of the following year. To be in Spain at that time was a strange and moving experience, because you had before you the spectacle of a people that knew what it wanted, a people facing destiny with its eyes open. The rebellion had plunged the country into chaos and the Government nominally in power at the outbreak of war had acted supinely; if the Spanish people were saved, it had got to be by their own effort. It is not an exaggeration to say that practically the whole resistance of the opening months was the direct and conscious action of the ordinary people in the street, via their trade unions and political organisations. Transport and major industries had devolved directly into the hands of the workers; the militias which had to bear the brunt of the fighting were voluntary organisations growing out of the trade unions. There was plenty of incompetence, of course, but also there were astonishing feats of improvisation. The fields were tilled, trains ran, life away from the fighting line was for the most part peaceful and orderly, and the troops, though poorly armed, were well fed and cared for. With all this there was a spirit of tolerance, a freedom of speech and the press, which no one would have thought possible in time of war. Naturally the social atmosphere changed, in some ways for the worse, as time went on. The country settled down to a long war; there were internal political struggles which resulted in power passing from the hands of socialists and anarchists into the hands of communists, and from the hands of communists into the hands of radical republicans; conscription was imposed and censorship tightened up – two inevitable evils of modern war. But the essentially voluntary spirit of the opening months has never disappeared, and it will have important after-effects.
It would be childish to suppose that a Government victory could have instantly brought a democratic regime into existence. Democracy, as we understand it in Western Europe, is not immediately workable in a country so divided and exhausted as Spain will be when the war is over. Certainly any Government which triumphs over Franco will be of liberal tendency, if only because it will have to sweep away the power of the great landowners and most if not all of the power of the Church. But the task of governing the whole of Spain will be completely different from that of governing the present loyal fraction. There will be large dissident minorities and enormous problems of reconstruction; inevitably this implies a transition period during which the régime will be democratic chiefly in name. On the other hand, if Franco wins even the name will be abandoned. He has made perfectly clear his intention of setting up a corporative state on the Italian model – that is to say, a state in which the majority of people are openly and cynically excluded from having any voice in affairs.
And yet the situation may be less desperate than it looks. Obviously if Franco wins the immediate prospects are not hopeful; but the long-term effects of a Franco victory are hard to foresee, because a dictator in Franco’s position would almost certainly have to depend on foreign support. And if the Government can win, there is reason to think that the evil results necessarily following on civil war may disappear quite rapidly. Wars are normally fought by soldiers who are either conscripts or professionals, but who in either case are essentially in the position of victims and who have only a very dim idea as to what they are fighting about. One could not possibly say the same of the armies of Government Spain. Instead of the usual process of conscripts being fed into a military machine, a civilian people has voluntarily organised itself into an army. It is the psychological after-effects of this that may make a return to democracy more easy.
It was impossible to travel in Spain in early 1937 without feeling that the civil war, amid all its frightful evil, was acting as an educational force. If men were suffering, they were also learning. Scores of thousands of ordinary people had been forced into positions of responsibility and command which a few months earlier they would never have dreamed of. Hundreds of thousands of people found themselves thinking, with an intensity which would hardly have been possible in normal times, about economic theories and political principles. Words like fascism, communism, democracy, socialism, Trotskyism, anarchism, which for the vast mass of human beings are nothing but words, were being eagerly discussed and thought out by men who only yesterday had been illiterate peasants or overworked machine-hands. There was a huge intellectual ferment, a sudden expansion of consciousness. It must be set down to the credit side of the war, a small offset against the death and suffering, and it is doubtful whether it can be completely stamped out, even under a dictatorship.
It is true that things have not fallen out as we expected them to do at that time. To begin with, up till the summer of 1937 everyone in Government Spain took it as a thing assured that the Government was going to win. I would be far from saying that the Government is beaten even now, but the fact is that a Government victory cannot any longer be regarded as certain. Secondly, great numbers of people took it for granted that the war would be followed by a definitely revolutionary movement in the direction of socialism. That possibility has receded. Given a Government victory, it seems much likelier that Spain will develop into a capitalist republic of the type of France than into a socialist state. What seems certain, however, is that no regression to a semi-feudal, priest-ridden régime of the kind that existed up to 1931 or, indeed, up to 1936, is now possible. Such régimes, by their nature, depend upon a general apathy and ignorance which no longer exist in Spain. The people have seen and learned too much. At the lowest estimate, there are several million people who have become impregnated with ideas which make them bad material for an authoritarian state. If Franco wins, he will hold Spain’s development back, but probably only so long as it pays some foreign power to keep him in place. Shooting and imprisoning his political opponents will not help him; there will be too many of them. The desire for liberty, for knowledge, and for a decent standard of living has spread far too widely to be killed by obscurantism or persecution. If that is so, the slaughter and suffering which accompany a modern civil war may not have been altogether wasted.
1. The Highway was subtitled A Review of Adult Education and the Journal of the Workers Educational Association. W. E. Williams, editor of a special number, called ‘Democracy at Work’, had written to Orwell, 22 November 1938, asking if he could contribute an article with this title. A note preceded the article: ‘Two at least of Mr. Orwell’s books are familiar to W.E.A. members: The Road to Wigan Pier, and Down and Out in London and Paris. This article was written before Catalonia collapsed.’ Various dates for the collapse can be used. Thomas has a map showing the advanc
es made by Nationalist forces in the campaign for Catalonia, December 1938–January 1939 (870); Barcelona was occupied on 26 January 1939; Nationalist troops reached the French border at all points by 10 February (873, 881). Sir William Emrys Williams (1896-1977) was Chief Editor and Director of Penguin Books, 1935-65. He was also, from 1934-40, Secretary of the British Institute of Adult Education; Director of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, 1941-5, and the Bureau of Current Affairs, 1946-51. He was so closely associated with the Pelican series that he was known in-house as ‘Pelican Bill’. He can be seen in Rodrigo Moynihan’s painting of the Penguin Editors (reproduced in ThePenguin Story, 1956) and on p. 26 of Fifty Penguin Years (1985).
[550]
To Yvonne Davet
19 June 1939 Typewritten in French; translation given below
The Stores, Wallington, Near Baldock, Herts, Angleterre
TRANSLATION
I am sending you chapters 7–10,1 and I shall send the others in a few days when I have corrected them. In these four chapters I have made notes on pages 120, 126, 128, 141, 164, 165, 168, 174, 207. There is not very much to alter anywhere, and I think the translation expresses the feeling of the original very well. I do hope that all your work will not be in vain. If we cannot find a publisher, I do not see why we should not publish some chapters in a magazine. I like the introduction by Georges Kopp very much,2 but here I shall be guided by the wishes of the publisher, if we can find one. If necessary I am quite prepared to write an introduction myself. I shall let Warburg know he must not ask too much. I am surprised he asked £40 for Freda Utley’s book3 – it is probably because the book was quite successful in England.
Until the other day I didn’t know you did not have a copy oí Homage to Catalonia. A year ago I asked Warburg to send you one and he promised he would, but he probably forgot. The other day I sent you a proof copy, but I shall send you a proper copy of the book as soon as I can get one. Anyway there is no textual difference between the book and the manuscript. The name of Monte Oscuro could be changed to Monte Trazo4 – I was definitely mistaken.
My latest book5 came out a week ago. I don’t yet know how it will be received. You will have noticed that I am still with Gollancz, that Stalinist publisher!
1. Chapters from Homage to Catalonia as originally published; these are chapters 6 to 9 and Appendix I, as rearranged in line with Orwell’s wishes in the Complete Works edition. Yvonne Davet’s translation was not published until 1955, five years after Orwell’s death. See Note on the Text, above [VI/251-3].
2. George Kopp evidently wrote an introduction, because Orwell told Moore, 15 April 1947 (see 3216), that it had been sent to the publisher (Gallimard). By 1947 Orwell thought it ‘was not a very suitable one and in any case would have no point now’. Kopp’s introduction has not been traced.
3. Freda Ut le y s Japan s Gamble in China (June 1938).
4. This change was made in CW[VI/38], and see p. 58.
5. Coming Up for Air.
[578]
Review of Hotel in Flight by Nancy Johnstone
The Adelphi, December 1939
How many millions of people in Spain and elsewhere are now looking back on the Spanish war and asking themselves what the devil it was all about? The thing had begun to seem meaningless even before the European kaleidoscope had twisted itself into its new pattern, and practically every foreigner who was involved seems to have brought away the impression of having been mixed up in a nightmare. Some months ago I was talking to a British soldier who was coming home from Gibraltar on a Japanese liner. A year earlier he had deserted from the Gibraltar garrison and with great difficulty made his way round to Valencia to join the Spanish Government forces. He had no sooner got there than he was arrested as a spy, flung into prison and forgotten about for six months. Then the British consul managed to extricate him and ship him back to Gibraltar, where he received another six months for desertion. This might almost be an allegorical history of the Spanish war.
Mrs. Johnstone’s book, sequel to an earlier one, deals with the last eighteen months of the war, the period during which the Spanish Government’s cause was becoming more and more obviously hopeless. She and her husband kept a hotel at Tossa on the Catalan coast, which became a rendezvous for journalists and visiting literary men, besides insufferable ‘politicals’ of all colours. Starting off with the comic-opera conditions which still prevailed in 1937, the book becomes increasingly a story of food-shortage and tobacco-shortage, air-raids, spy-mania and refugee children, and ends with the terrible retreat into France and the stench and misery of the concentration camps round Perpignan. Much of the atmosphere will be horribly familiar to anyone who was in Spain at any period of the war. The sense of never having quite enough to eat, the muddle, the inefficiency, the inability to understand what is happening, the feeling that everything is fading away into a sort of mist of fear, suspicion, red tape and obscure political jealousies – it is all there, with plenty of crude physical adventure into the bargain. Mrs. Johnstone’s picture of the concentration camps on the French-Spanish border is dreadful enough, but there is one observation that she makes and which ought to be underlined, and that is that the French Government is the only one that has actually done anything appreciable for the refugees from Fascist countries. Whereas the British Government made a grant of £12,000 for the Spanish refugees, their keep at the beginning was costing the French Government £17,000 a day, and presumably is not costing much less even now. It is worth remembering that at any time during the past ten years close on 10 per cent of the population of France has consisted of foreigners, quite largely political refugees. After all, there is something to be said for ‘bourgeois’ democracy.
This book gives a valuable picture of the retreat and will no doubt help to stop up some historical gaps, but it does not seem to me a very good book, as a book. Why is it that autobiographical journalism of this type always has to be so chirpily facetious? As soon as I glanced into the book and saw the style in which it was written I began looking for the dog. Books of this kind almost always have a comic dog which is a great filler-up of paragraph-ends; however, the part is filled by Mrs. Johnstone’s husband. The probability is that if a really good book is ever written about the Spanish war it will be by a Spaniard, and probably not a ‘politically conscious’ one. Good war books are nearly always written from the angle of a victim, which is just what the average man is in relation to war. What vitiated the outlook of most of the foreigners in Spain, and especially the English and Americans, was the knowledge at the back of their minds that they would probably succeed in escaping from Spain in the end. Moreover, if they had gone there deliberately to take part, they knew what the war was about, or thought they did. But what did it mean to the great mass of the Spanish people? We simply do not know as yet. Looking back on casual contacts with peasants, shopkeepers, street-hawkers, even militiamen, I now suspect that great numbers of these people had no feelings about the war whatever, except a wish that it were over. Mrs. Johnstone’s picture of the stolid inhabitants of the little seaport town of Tossa half-consciously confirms this. One question that is still not satisfactorily answered is why the war went on so long. After the beginning of 1938 it was obvious to anyone with any military knowledge that the Government could not win, and even by the summer of 1937 the odds were in Franco’s favour. Did the mass of the Spanish people really feel that even the atrocious sufferings of the later part of the war were preferable to surrender – or did they continue to fight at least partly because the whole of left-wing opinion from Moscow to New York was driving them on? Perhaps we shall know the answer when we begin to hear what the war looked like to Spanish conscripts and non-combatants, and not merely to foreign volunteers.
[586]
Review of The Last Days of Madrid by S. Casado, translated by Rupert Croft-Cooke; Behind the Battle by T. C. Worsley
Time and Tide, 20 January 1940
Although not many people outside Spain had heard of him before the beg
inning of 1939. Colonel Casado’s name1 will always be among those that are remembered in connection with the Spanish Civil War. He it was who overthrew the Negrín Government2 and negotiated the surrender of Madrid – and, considering the actual military situation and the sufferings of the Spanish people, it is difficult not to feel that he was right. The truly disgraceful thing, as Mr. Croft-Cooke says forcibly in his introduction, was that the war was ever allowed to continue so long. Colonel Casado and those associated with him were denounced all over the world in the left-wing press as traitors, crypto-Fascists, etc., etc., but these accusations came very badly from people who had saved their own skins long before Franco entered Madrid. Besteiro,3 who took part in the Casado administration and afterwards stayed behind to face the Fascists, was also denounced as ‘pro-Franco’. Besteiro was given thirty years’ imprisonment! The Fascists certainly have a strange way of treating their friends.
Perhaps the chief interest of Colonel Casado’s book is the light it throws on the Russian intervention in Spain and the Spanish reaction to it. Although well-meaning people denied it at the time, there is little doubt that from the middle of 1937 until nearly the end of the war the Spanish Government was directly under the control of Moscow. The ultimate motives of the Russians are uncertain, but at any rate they aimed at setting up in Spain a Government obedient to their own orders, and in the Negrín Government they had one. But the bid that they had made for middle-class support produced unforeseen complications. In the earlier part of the war the main adversaries of the Communists in their fight for power had been the Anarchists and left-wing Socialists, and the emphasis of Communist propaganda was therefore on a ‘moderate’ policy. The effect of this was to put power into the hands of ‘bourgeois Republican’ officers and officials, of whom Colonel Casado became the leader. But these people were first and foremost Spaniards and resented the Russian interference almost as much as that of the Germans and Italians. Consequently the Communist-Anarchist struggle was followed by another struggle of Communists against Republicans, in which the Negrín Government was finally overthrown and many Communists lost their lives.
Orwell in Spain Page 44
