The very important question that this raises is whether a western country can in practice be controlled by Communists acting under Russian orders. It is a question that will probably come to the front again in the event of a revolution of the Left in Germany. The inference from Colonel Casado’s book seems to be that a western or westernized people will not for any length of time allow itself to be governed from Moscow. Making all allowance for the prejudice he undoubtedly feels against the Russians and their local Communist agents, his account leaves very little doubt that the Russian domination was widely and deeply resented in Spain. He also suggests that it was the knowledge of the Russian intervention that decided Britain and France to leave the Spanish Government to its fate. This seems more doubtful. If the British and French Governments had really wanted to counter the Russian influence, by far the quickest way was to supply the Spanish Government with arms, for it had been obvious from the start that any country that supplied arms could control Spanish policy. One must conclude that the British and French Governments not only wanted Franco to win, but would in any case have preferred a Russian-controlled Government to a Socialist-Anarchist combination under some such leader as Caballero.4
Colonel Casado’s book gives a detailed account of all the events leading up to the capitulation, and it is one of those documents that will always have to be studied by future historians of the Spanish War. As a book it is not and does not pretend to be anything very remarkable. Mr. Worsley’s book5 is better written, by a more practised hand; but the subject-matter is more familiar – air-raids, Barcelona politics, etc., etc. The story begins with a singularly amateurish attempt at intelligence-work on behalf of the Spanish Government by the author and Mr. Stephen Spender. Later Mr. Worsley found more useful and congenial work with an ambulance and had some interesting experiences, which included being mixed up in the retreat from Málaga. But I think it is very nearly the close-season for this class of Spanish war-book.
1. Colonel Sigismundo Casado López (1893-1968), commander of the Republican Army of the Centre. He organized a campaign against Dr Juan Negrin, the Republican Prime Minister, and attempted, towards the end of the civil war, to gain better terms from Franco. He failed and took refuge in Britain; he later returned to Spain.
2. Dr Juan Negrin (1889-1956) was Socialist Prime Minister of Spain, September 1936-March 1938. He fled to France in 1939 and set up a Spanish Government in Exile; he resigned from its premiership in 1945 in the hope of uniting all exiled Spaniards. He died in exile. See Thomas, 949-50.
3. Julián Besteiro (1870-1940), President of the UGT (Socialist Trade Union) to 1931, Speaker of the Cortes (the Spanish Parliament) and temporarily President of Spain in 1931. He died in prison in 1940 while serving a thirty-year prison sentence imposed by Franco’s government.
4. See p. 223, n. 6.
5. T. C. Worsley (1907-77) was an author and critic. He taught at Wellington (where Orwell spent a term in 1917). Orwell reviewed his Philistines and Barbarians: Democracy and the Public Schools in Time and Tide, 14 September 1940 (see Orwell and the Dispossessed), and he wrote the foreword to his The End of the ‘Old School Tie’, May 1941 (XII/793). With W. H. Auden Worsley wrote Education Today – and Tomorrow (1939). He took part in a BBC broadcast to India on education with N. G. Fisher (1910-72), which was directed by Orwell, 1 September 1942 (see XIII/1415).
[726]
Review of The Spanish Dilemma by E. Allison Peers; A Key to Victory: Spain by Charles Duff
Time and Tide, 21 December 1940
Now that the British Government’s pro-Fascist policy during the Spanish Civil War has had its inevitable result, some of the apologists of General Franco are noting with surprise and dismay that Franco is not a gentleman after all. It is curious that Professor Peers, who during the war itself was one of the most moderate and fair-minded of Franco’s supporters, does not seem to share this feeling. He still appears to think that Franco’s victory was all to the best, not only from the Spanish point of view but from our own. The strongest argument he can advance is that, had the Government won, Spain might have remained under the control of Russia, who is the friend of Germany.1 So apparently it is better that Spain should remain in direct vassalage to Germany – and of the most slavish kind, as one can see by glancing at the Spanish press – than that she should retain any kind of connection with Germany’s rather doubtful ally. He gives various quotations from the Spanish newspapers, and from the history textbooks which Franco has introduced into the schools, in which England and the U.S.A. are vilified as malignantly as Goebbels himself could wish, and yet on top of this alleges that Nationalist Spain is a possible friend of England. His book is, in fact, simply a re-hash of the ‘anti-red’ doctrines of three years ago, most manifestly false at the time and since exploded by events. If an attack on Gibraltar should begin, I should be interested to read Professor Peers’s explanation of it. Meanwhile, after what happened in France, it is disquieting that people of such views should remain in any kind of position of influence.
Mr. Duff’s book is at any rate a corrective to Professor Peers’s, even if, like some others of the Victory Books, it is a little too easily optimistic. It is a vigorous plea for support of the Spanish Republicans, both as part of the general defence of democracy and because of the strategic importance of the Spanish peninsula. When one remembers how during the past three years we have been deluged with books on the Spanish war, mainly from a pro-Government angle, it might seem that the familiar Popular Front viewpoint is hardly worth re-stating. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The policy of Danegeld is still being followed towards Franco Spain, and there is no sign that the general public grasps even now what this suicidal policy must mean. Worse still, influence has been brought to bear on the press to prevent free criticism of the Spanish question. All through the winter of 1939-40 Italy was flattered and supplied with war materials, with the result, foreseen by every thinking person, that Italy came into the war against us in the spring. It is just possible that this might not have happened if the Italian danger had been freely publicized at the time. And so also with Spain. If the ordinary newspaper-reader can be brought to understand that Franco Spain is not neutral, is venomously hostile towards England and directly under the control of Germany, then it is at any rate conceivable that our policy may be changed by force of public opinion.
Mr. Duff is certainly right in saying that we should support the Spanish Republicans. Where it is impossible to follow him is in the way he proposes to set about it. He is actually advocating that we should invade Spain through Portugal, making use of the fact that Portugal is friendly to Britain! It does not seem to occur to him that the Portuguese Government might not remain friendly if such an invasion took place.
Meanwhile, Dr. Negrín is grudgingly allowed to remain in England on condition that he ‘takes no part in politics’. Franco’s seizure of Tangier is sleekly explained away by Mr. Butler,2 and friendly talks are being exchanged with the Spanish Fascist Government at the same time as Súñer3 is in Berlin and Republicans like Zugazagoitia are being shot in jail. How to reconcile all this with a war against Fascism’ is a little difficult to see. The best hope lies in the rapid enlightenment of public opinion, and towards that Mr. Duff’s book should help. I wish it, therefore, a larger sale than on purely literary grounds it deserves.
1. In August 1939, Russia and Germany signed a Non-Aggression Pact. The countries were therefore allies from the outbreak of war in September 1939 (when both invaded Poland) until Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.
2. Presumably R. A. (‘Rab’) Butler (1902-84; Life Peer, 1963), who was Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 1938-41. He was later Chancellor of the Exchequer and Foreign Secretary in the Conservative governments of 1951-64
3. Ramón Serrano Súñer (b. 1901), brother-in-law of Franco and, as Minister of the Interior, second in importance to him until dismissed in 1942. He was a pro-German Falangist. On 18 October 1940, Hitler expressed to hi
m his exasperation at Spain’s failure to join the war on the side of the Axis. His experience as a prisoner of the Republicans embittered him for life. As Thomas puts it, they were such ‘as to make him close his eyes to pity’ (Thomas, 924, and see 633-4).
[749]
Extract from War-time Diary
22.1.41: A propos of what — says, it is at any rate a fact that the People’s Convention1 crew have raised a lot of money from somewhere. Their posters are everywhere, also a lot of new ones from the Daily Worker. The space has not been paid for, but even so the printing, etc., would cost a good deal. Yesterday I ripped down a number of these posters, the first time I have ever done such a thing. Cf. in the summer when I chalked up ‘Sack Chamberlain’, etc., and in Barcelona, after the suppression of the POUM, when I chalked up ‘Visca POUM’.2 At any normal time it is against my instincts to write on a wall or to interfere with what anyone else has written.
1. The People’s Convention was organized in January 1941 by the Communists, ostensibly to fight for public rights, higher wages, better air-raid precautions and friendship with the USSR, but some historians have said its true purpose was to agitate against the war effort. In July 1941, after Russia’s entry into the war, it immediately called for a second front. By 1942 its active work had ceased.
2. See Homage to Catalonia, p. 164 [VI/181].
[852]
Review of The Forge by Arturo Barea,1 translated and with an introduction by Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell2
Horizon, September 19413
If some Russian writer were at this moment to produce a book of reminiscences of his childhood in 1900, it would be difficult to review it without mentioning the fact that Soviet Russia is now our ally against Germany, and in the same way it is impossible to read The Forge without thinking at almost every page of the Spanish Civil War. In fact there is no direct connection, for the book deals only with Señor Barea’s early youth and ends in 1914. But the civil war made a deep and painful impression on the English intelligentsia, deeper, I should say, than has yet been made by the war now raging. The man in the street, misled by frivolous newspapers, ignored the whole business, the rich mechanically sided with the enemies of the working class, but to all thinking and decent people the war was a terrible tragedy that has made the word ‘Spain’ inseparable from the thought of burnt bodies and starving children. One seems to hear the thunder of future battles somewhere behind Señor Barea’s pages, and it is as a sort of prologue to the civil war, a picture of the society that made it possible, that his book is most likely to be valued.
He was born into a very poor family, the son actually of a washerwoman, but with uncles and aunts who were slightly richer than his mother. In Catholic countries the clever boy of a peasant family finds his easiest escape from manual labour in the priesthood, but Señor Barea, who had anticlerical relatives and was an early unbeliever himself, after winning a scholarship at a Church school, went to work at thirteen in a draper’s shop, and afterwards in a bank. All his good memories are of country places, especially of the forge belonging to his uncle in Mentrida, a magnificent independent peasant of the type now extinct in the industrialized countries. On the other hand his memories of Madrid are low and squalid, a tale of poverty and overwork far more extreme than anything to be found in England. And here, perhaps, in his descriptions of the Madrid slums, of hordes of naked children with their heads full of lice and lecherous priests playing cards for the contents of the poor-boxes, he gives half-consciously the clue to the Spanish Civil War: it is that Spain is a country too poor to have ever known the meaning of decent government. In England we could not have a civil war, not because tyranny and injustice do not exist, but because they are not obvious enough to stir the common people to action. Everything is toned down, padded, as it were, by ancient habits of compromise, by representative institutions, by liberal aristocrats and incorruptible officials, by a ‘superstructure’ that has existed so long that it is only partly a sham. There are no half-tones in the Spain that Señor Barea is describing. Everything is happening in the open, in the ferocious Spanish sunlight. It is the straightforward corruption of a primitive country, where the capitalist is openly a sweater, the official always a crook, the priest an ignorant bigot or a comic rascal, the brothel a necessary pillar of society. The nature of all problems is obvious, even to a boy of fifteen. Sex, for example:
My cousin is taking advantage of my being a boy. But she is right. She would be a whore if she were to go to bed with anyone… I’d like to go to bed with the girls, and they would like to come with me, but it is impossible. Men have whores for that; women have to wait until the priest marries them, or they become whores themselves. And, naturally, meantime they get excited. Those who get too excited have to become whores.
Or politics:
They were always fighting in Parliament, Maura, Pablo Iglesias, and Lerroux, and they painted on the walls slogans such as ‘Down with Maura’. Sometimes they would write in red, ‘Maura, up!’ The workers were those who wrote ‘Down with Maura!’ Those who wrote ‘up’ were the gentry… At nightfall, when Alcalá Street is crowded, a group of young gentlemen will appear shouting ‘Maura, up!’ Then a group of workers and students is formed at once, and begins to shout ‘Maura, down!’… The civil guards charge, but they never attack the gentry.
When I read that last phrase, ‘the civil guards never attack the gentry’, there came back to me a memory which is perhaps out of place in a review, but which illustrates the difference of social atmosphere in a country like England and a country like Spain. I am six years old, and I am walking along a street in our little town with my mother and a wealthy local brewer, who is also a magistrate. The tarred fence is covered with chalk drawings, some of which I have made myself. The magistrate stops, points disapprovingly with his stick and says, ‘We are going to catch the boys who draw on these walls, and we are going to order them six STROKES OF THE BIRCH ROD.’ (It was all in capitals in my mind.) My knees knock together, my tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth, and at the earliest possible moment I sneak away to spread the dreadful intelligence. In a little while, all the way down the fence, there is a long line of terror-stricken children, all spitting on their handkerchiefs and trying to rub out the drawings. But the interesting thing is that not till many years later, perhaps twenty years, did it occur to me that my fears had been groundless. No magistrate would have condemned me to six STROKES OF THE BIRCH ROD, even if I had been caught drawing on the wall. Such punishments were reserved for the Lower Orders. The Civil Guards charge, but they never attack the gentry. In England it was and still is possible to be unaware of this, but not in the Spain that Señor Barea writes of. There, injustice was unmistakable, politics was a struggle between black and white, every extremist doctrine from Carlism to Anarchism could be held with lunatic clarity. ‘Class war’ was not merely a phrase, as it has come to be in the Western democracies. But which state of affairs is better is a different question.
This is not primarily a political book, however. It is a fragment of autobiography, and we may hope that others will follow it, for Señor Barea has had a varied and adventurous life. He has travelled widely, he has been both worker and capitalist, he took part in the civil war and he served in the Riff War4 under General Franco. If the Fascist powers have done no other good, they have at least enriched the English-speaking world by exiling all their best writers. Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell’s translation is vivid and colloquial, but it was a pity to stick all the way through to the ‘dramatic present’, which seems all right in a Latin language but rapidly becomes tiresome in English.
1. Arturo Barea (1897-1957) had been Head of Foreign Press Censorship and Controller for Broadcasts, Madrid, in 1937. Orwell knew him personally. See Orwell’s review of The Clash, below.
2. Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell (1864–1945; Kt., 1929) was an eminent zoologist. He was responsible for rebuilding much of London Zoo and for the creation of the ‘open’ zoological garden at Whipsnade. He reti
red to Malaga but the civil war forced his return to England.
3. Orwell also reviewed this book in Time and Tide, 28 June 1941 (see 821).
4. The Riff (or Rif) is an area of north-eastern Morocco occupied by Berber tribes. Under Abd-el-Krim they maintained their independence against the Spanish until 1926 when they were defeated by a combined French and Spanish army. Franco served with distinction in the Rif War. The tribesmen are noted warriors and have served in the French and Spanish armies.
[854]
Extract from letter to Partisan Review
23 September 1941
When I said that the belief in international working class solidarity doesn’t exist any longer, I was not thinking of what may or may not be said at the ‘parties’ which Mr. [Nicholas] Moore supposes I frequent. I was thinking of the history of Europe during the past ten years and the utter failure of the European working class to stand together in the face of Fascist aggression. The Spanish civil war went on for two and a half years, and during that time there was not one country in which the workers staged even a single strike in aid of their Spanish comrades. So far as I can get at the figures the British working class subscribed to various ‘aid Spain’ funds about one per cent of what they spent during the same period in betting on football and horse-races. Anyone who actually talked to working men at the time knows that it was virtually impossible to get them to see that what happened in Spain concerned them in any way. Ditto with Austria, Manchuria, etc. During the past three months Germany has been at war with Russia and at the time of writing the Germans have overrun the greater part of the Russian industrial areas. If even the shadow of international working class solidarity existed, Stalin would only have to call on the German workers in the name of the Socialist Fatherland for the German war-effort to be sabotaged. Not only does nothing of the kind happen, but the Russians do not even issue any such appeal. They know it is useless. Until Hitler is defeated in the field he can count on the loyalty of his own working class and can even drag Hungarians, Rumanians and what-not after him. At present the world is atomised and no form of internationalism has any power or even much appeal. This may be painful to literary circles in Cambridge, but it is the fact.
Orwell in Spain Page 45
