Orwell in Spain

by George Orwell

  The most baffling thing in the Spanish War was the behaviour of the great powers. The war was actually won for Franco by the Germans and Italians, whose motives were obvious enough. The motives of France and Britain are less easy to understand. In 1936 it was clear to everyone that if Britain would only help the Spanish Government, even to the extent of a few million pounds’ worth of arms, Franco would collapse and German strategy would be severely dislocated. By that time one did not need to be a clairvoyant to foresee that war between Britain and Germany was coming; one could even foretell within a year or two when it would come. Yet in the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical way the British ruling class did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis. Why? Because they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer. Undoubtedly they were, and yet when it came to the final showdown they chose to stand up to Germany. It is still very uncertain what plan they acted on in backing Franco, and they may have had no clear plan at all. Whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question. As to the Russians, their motives in the Spanish War are completely inscrutable. Did they, as the pinks believed, intervene in Spain in order to defend democracy and thwart the Nazis? Then why did they intervene on such a niggardly scale and finally leave Spain in the lurch? Or did they, as the Catholics maintained, intervene in order to foster revolution in Spain? Then why did they do all in their power to crush the Spanish revolutionary movements, defend private property and hand power to the middle class as against the working class? Or did they, as the Troskyists suggested, intervene simply in order to prevent a Spanish revolution? Then why not have backed Franco? Indeed, their actions are most easily explained if one assumes that they were acting on several contradictory motives. I believe that in the future we shall come to feel that Stalin’s foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as it is claimed to be, has been merely opportunistic and stupid. But at any rate, the Spanish Civil War demonstrated that the Nazis knew what they were doing and their opponents did not. The war was fought at a low technical level and its major strategy was very simple. That side which had arms would win. The Nazis and the Italians gave arms to their Spanish Fascist friends, and the western democracies and the Russians didn’t give arms to those who should have been their friends. So the Spanish Republic perished, having ‘gained what no republic missed’.8

  Whether it was right, as all left-wingers in other countries undoubtedly did, to encourage the Spaniards to go on fighting when they could not win is a question hard to answer. I myself think it was right, because I believe that it is better even from the point of view of survival to fight and be conquered than to surrender without fighting. The effects on the grand strategy of the struggle against Fascism cannot be assessed yet. The ragged, weaponless armies of the Republic held out for two and a half years, which was undoubtedly longer than their enemies expected. But whether that dislocated the Fascist time-table, or whether, on the other hand, it merely postponed the major war and gave the Nazis extra time to get their war machine into trim, is still uncertain.

  VII

  I never think of the Spanish War without two memories coming into my mind. One is of the hospital ward at Lérida and the rather sad voices of the wounded militiamen singing some song with a refrain that ended:

  ¡Una resolución,

  Luchar hasta’ l fin!9

  Well, they fought to the end all right. For the last eighteen months of the war the Republican armies must have been fighting almost without cigarettes, and with precious little food. Even when I left Spain in the middle of 1937, meat and bread were scarce, tobacco a rarity, coffee and sugar almost unobtainable.

  The other memory is of the Italian militiaman who shook my hand in the guardroom, the day I joined the militia. I wrote about this man at the beginning of my book on the Spanish War,10 and do not want to repeat what I said there. When I remember – oh, how vividly! – his shabby uniform and fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the complex side-issues of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any rate no doubt as to who was in the right. In spite of power politics and journalistic lying, the central issue of the war was the attempt of people like this to win the decent life which they knew to be their birthright. It is difficult to think of this particular man’s probable end without several kinds of bitterness. Since I met him in the Lenin Barracks he was probably a Trotskyist or an Anarchist, and in the peculiar conditions of our time. when people of that sort are not killed by the Gestapo they are usually killed by the GPU. But that does not affect the long-term issues. This man’s face, which I saw only for a minute or two, remains with me as a sort of visual reminder of what the war was really about. He symbolises for me the flower of the European working class, harried by the police of all countries, the people who fill the mass graves of the Spanish battlefields and are now, to the tune of several millions, rotting in forced-labour camps.

  When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a while could bring Hitler, Pétain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst, Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the Mufti of Jerusalem,11 Arnold Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady Houston and Marinetti all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of California,12 are great on the ‘change of heart’,13 much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system. Pétain attributes the fall of France to the common people’s ‘love of pleasure’. One sees this in its right perspective if one stops to wonder how much pleasure the ordinary French peasant’s or workingman’s life would contain compared with Pétain’s own. The damned impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary men, and whatnot who lecture the working-class Socialist for his ‘materialism’! All that the workingman demands is what these others would consider the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all. Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn’t leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done. Not one of those who preach against ‘materialism’ would consider life livable without these things. And how easily that minimum could be attained if we chose to set our minds to it for only twenty years! To raise the standard of living of the whole world to that of Britain would not be a greater undertaking than this war we are now fighting. I don’t claim, and I don’t know who does, that that would solve anything in itself. It is merely that privation and brute labour have to be abolished before the real problems of humanity can be tackled. The major problem of our time is the decay of the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police. How right the working classes are in their ‘materialism’! How right they are to realise that the real belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time! Understand that, and the long horror that we are enduring becomes at least intelligible. All the considerations that are likely to make one falter – the siren voices of a Pétain or of a Gandhi, the inescapable fact that in order to fight one has to degrade oneself, the equivocal moral position of Britain, with its democratic phrases and its coolie empire, the sinister development of Soviet Russia,
the squalid farce of left-wing politics – all this fades away and one sees only the struggle of the gradually awakening common people against the lords of property and their hired liars and bumsuckers. The question is very simple. Shall people like that Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which is now technically achievable, or shan’t they? Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not later – some time within the next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was the real issue of the Spanish War, and of the present war, and perhaps of other wars yet to come.

  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. Nearly two years later, when the war was visibly lost, I wrote these verses in his memory:

  The Italian soldier shook my hand

  Beside the guard-room table;

  The strong hand and the subtle hand

  Whose palms are only able

  To meet within the sound of guns,

  But oh! what peace I knew then

  In gazing on his battered face

  Purer than any woman’s!

  For the fly-blown words that make me spew

  Still in his ears were holy,

  And he was born knowing what I had learned

  Out of books and slowly.

  The treacherous guns had told their tale

  And we both had bought it,

  But my gold brick was made of gold –

  Oh! who ever would have thought it?

  Good luck go with you, Italian soldier!

  But luck is not for the brave;

  What would the world give back to you?

  Always less than you gave.

  Between the shadow and the ghost,

  Between the white and the red,

  Between the bullet and the lie,

  Where would you hide your head?

  For where is Manuel González,

  And where is Pedro Aguilar,

  And where is Ramón Fenellosa?

  The earthworms know where they are.

  Your name and your deeds were forgotten

  Before your bones were dry,

  And the lie that slew you is buried

  Under a deeper lie;

  But the thing that I saw in your face

  No power can disinherit:

  No bomb that ever burst

  Shatters the crystal spirit.

  1. New Road: New Directions in English Arts and Letters was published 1943–49. Vols. I and II (1943–44) were edited by Alex Comfort (1920–2000, who later gained a certain fame as author of The Joy of Sex, 1972) and John Bayliss.

  2. Dwight Macdonald (1906–82), libertarian critic, pamphleteer and scholar. He was for a time associate editor of Partisan Review, for which journal Orwell wrote his London Letters. He later founded Politics, which he edited 1944–49, and to which Orwell also contributed.

  3. All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel based on the experiences of front-line German troops in the First World War trenches, was written by Erich Maria Remarque and published as Im Westen nichts Neue in 1929. It was immediately translated into English by A. W. Wheen and published in the same year. It is still in print, in a new translation. A film of the novel was made in 1930 (featuring Lew Ayres and Louis Wolheim). It was censored in Britain because regarded as too horrific (in particular a scene featuring a rat; if Orwell had seen it, he would have been particularly impressed, given his antipathy to rats).

  4. US weekly journal devoted to proletarian literature. It ran from 1926 to 1948.

  5. The Oxford Union’s motion in 1935 supporting the refusal to fight ‘for King and Country’ initiated a series of alternating demands that Britain abstain from and engage in military action.

  6. Jesus said: “for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword”, Matthew, 26: 52.

  7. See War-time Diary, 1218, 11.6.42.

  8. The source of this quotation has not been traced.

  9. ‘A resolution, / To fight to the end!’

  10. Homage to Catalonia.

  11. Mohammed Amin al-Husseini (1893–1974), Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921. He was arrested in 1937 for instigating anti-Semitic riots. He escaped and later broadcast for the Nazis from Berlin and encouraged the deportation of Jews to concentration camps. He was charged with war crimes but found refuge first in Egypt and then in Palestine. Six thousand Bosnian Muslims who formed the S.S. Handzar Division in Yugoslavia in 1943 to fight for the Nazis saw him as their spiritual leader. A ‘Mufti’ is a Muslim canon lawyer.

  12. Orwell possibly had in mind Gerald Heard (1889–1971), whom he mentions in his September 1943 review in Horizon of Lionel Fielden’s Beggar My Neighbour (see 2257, and see also headnote to ‘Can Socialists be Happy?’, 2397); also Aldous Huxley (see 600, section 3), and possibly Christopher Isherwood (see 2713), all of whom settled in Los Angeles just before the war. In California, Isherwood developed an interest in yoga and vedanta (though whether Orwell knew this is uncertain), edited and introduced Vedanta for the Western World (Hollywood, 1945; London, 1948) and with Swami Prabhavananda translated The Bhagavad-Gita (1944) and other related works. It is possible that this reference was inspired by Orwell’s preliminary arrangements for G. V. Desani to talk on the Bhagavad-Gita in his BBC series Books that Changed the World (see 1970).

  13. ‘New style of architecture, a change of heart’, from W. H. Auden, ‘Sir, No Man’s Enemy’ (1930).

  Proposed BBC Broadcast on the Spanish Civil War

  3 December 1942

  While a Talks Producer for the BBC’s India Section, Orwell arranged many series of talks. One of these was on ‘The History of Fascism’. The fifth in the series was to be on the Spanish Civil War and, on 7 October 1942, Orwell asked Mulk Raj Anand whether he would be willing to write and broadcast such a talk (1551). Anand (1905 – ), novelist, short-story writer, essayist and critic, was born in India and had fought for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, though he and Orwell did not meet there. He taught literature and philosophy to London County Council adult-education classes and wrote scripts and broadcast for the BBC, 1939–45. After the war he lectured in a number of Indian universities and was appointed Professor of Fine Arts, University of Punjab, 1963. He was awarded an International Peace Prize from the World Council of Peace in 1952. At the time of writing (1999) he is living in Bombay. He and Orwell remained friends and their relationship is discussed in Abha Sharma Rodrigues, ‘George Orwell, the BBC and India: A Critical Study’ (Edinburgh University, Ph.D, 1994).

  Anand was formally booked to give the talk on 3 December 1942 for a fee of £8 8s. (1595) but his talk was not passed by the censor. Orwell wrote to E. W. D. Boughen of the Talks Booking Department on 10 December (1729) to ask that Anand be paid a proportion of his fee because the ‘subject is a particularly delicate one at the present time’ and it was not practicable to modify its ‘angle’. It was agreed that he be paid £5 5s. – but as he had already received his full fee his next fee would be reduced by £3 3s.

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  Review of Spain in Eclipse, 1937–1943 by E. Allison Peers; Behind the Spanish Mask by Lawrence Dundas

  Observer, 28 November 1943

  The titles of both of these books are symptomatic of the fact that we know very little of what has been happening in Spain since the end of the Civil War. There have been hunger and pestilence, great numbers of people are in gaol, and the régime has been markedly friendly to the Axis – that is about as far as common knowledge extends. Opinions on anything else are likely to be coloured by the political sympathies of the writer, and one must keep it in mind that Mr. Dundas is vigorously pro-Republic, while Professor Peers should rather be described as mildly and regretfully pro-Franco.

  Professor Peers devotes part of his book to the Civil War, but his best chapters are those dealin
g with the last four years. He considers that the Franco regime for a while enjoyed majority support, that its political persecutions have probably been exaggerated, and that it has not in fact given much solid aid to the Nazis. He does not, however, believe that it will last much longer, and though he himself hopes for some kind of Liberal monarchist régime, he thinks that a swing to the extreme Left is not impossible.

  It is noticeable that Professor Peers seems surprised as well as pained that the ‘non-belligerent’ Spanish Government has been so consistently unfriendly to ourselves. He lists the endless provocations, and the inspired campaigns of libel in the Spanish Press, as though these in some way contradicted Franco’s earlier record. But, in fact, there was never very much doubt as to where the sympathies of Franco and his more influential followers lay, and the time when it might have been useful to point out that Franco was the friend of our enemies was in 1936. At that time Professor Peers did nothing of the kind. No one would accuse him of falsifying facts, but the tone of the books he was then writing did, there is little doubt, tend to make the Nationalist cause more respectable in British eyes. In so far as books influence events, Professor Peers must be held to have done something towards establishing Franco’s régime, and he ought not now to be astonished because Franco has behaved in very much the manner that every supporter of the Republic foretold at the time.1

  Mr. Dundas’s book is written round the speculative but interesting thesis that a quite different kind of rebellion – a Conservative but not Fascist rebellion – had been planned in the beginning, and that events only took the course they did because of Sanjurjo’s2 death and because the Nationalists, having failed in their first coup, had to apply for help to the Germans and Italians, who imposed their own terms. The importance of this is that the régime which has actually been set up is, as Mr. Dundas says, ‘not Spanish’. It is a régime modelled on foreign lines and intolerable from the point of view of an ordinary Spaniard, even an aristocrat; it might therefore turn out to be brittle in a moment of emergency. The book contains some interesting details about Civil War events in Majorca. But Mr. Dundas is surely wrong in suggesting that Franco will fight for the Axis if the Allies invade Europe. Fidelity is not the strong point of the minor dictators.