Orwell in Spain

by George Orwell

  1. Also in 1943, under the name of Bruce Truscot, Professor Peers published Redbrick University. This included ‘The Nature and Aims of a Modern University’, which proved influential in post-war British university development. A more modest publication, under the name E. Allison Peers, was A Skeleton Spanish Grammar (1917). See also p. 259, n. 4.

  2. General José Sanjurjo Sacanell (1872–1936), a Nationalist (as was Franco), led a coup against the government of the Second Spanish Republic in August 1932. This failed; he was captured, tried, sentenced, then, in 1934, reprieved. He was killed when a plane sent to bring him from Lisbon to Burgos crashed on take-off. Sabotage was suspected, but the cause was more mundane. The plane, a small Puss Moth, was overloaded because Sanjurjo ‘insisted on taking with him a heavy suitcase, which contained a full-dress uniform for his use as head of the new Spanish State’. The plane, which had been diverted by the Portuguese authorities to a small outlying airfield, failed to clear the surrounding pine trees. The pilot was injured but thrown clear; Sanjurjo was burned to death, a ‘victim of conformity rather than sabotage’ (Thomas, 254).

  [2416]

  Extract from ‘As I Please’, 10 [How the lie becomes truth]

  Tribune, 4 February 1944

  During the Spanish Civil War I found myself feeling very strongly that a true history of this war never would or could be written. Accurate figures, objective accounts of what was happening, simply did not exist. And if I felt that even in 1937, when the Spanish Government was still in being, and the lies which the various Republican factions were telling about each other and about the enemy were relatively small ones, how does the case stand now? Even if Franco is overthrown, what kind of records will the future historian have to go upon? And if Franco or anyone at all resembling him remains in power, the history of the war will consist quite largely of ‘facts’ which millions of people now living know to be lies. One of these ‘facts’, for instance, is that there was a considerable Russian army in Spain. There exists the most abundant evidence that there was no such army. Yet if Franco remains in power, and if Fascism in general survives, that Russian army will go into the history books and future schoolchildren will believe in it. So for practical purpose the lie will have become truth.

  This kind of thing is happening all the time…

  [2510]

  ‘The Eight Years of War: Spanish Memories’

  Observer, 16 July 1944

  The Spanish Civil War, curtain-raiser of the present struggle and one of the most tragic as well as one of the most sordid events that modern Europe has seen, began eight years ago next Friday.

  The issue of the Spanish war was decided outside Spain, and by the time that it was a year old realistic observers were able to see that the elected government could not win unless there were some radical change in the European situation. In the first period of the war, which lasted just under a year, the struggle was essentially between Franco’s professional soldiers and Moors on the one side and the hurriedly-raised militias of peasants and factory workers on the other.

  In this period honours were about even, and no objective of first-rate importance changed hands.

  Franco, however, was being reinforced on a massive scale by the Axis Powers, while the Spanish Government was receiving only sporadic doles of arms from Soviet Russia and the help of a few thousand foreign volunteers, mostly refugee Germans. In June, 1937, the resistance of the Basques collapsed and the balance of forces tipped heavily against the Government.

  In the meantime, however, the Government had quelled the revolutionary disorder of early days, smoothed out the struggles between factions, and trained its raw forces. Early in 1938 it had a formidable army, able to fight on for the year or so that food supplies would last out.

  Dr. Negrín and the other rulers of Government Spain probably realised that they could not win by their own efforts, but they were justified in fighting on, since the political outlook in Europe still might change. The obviously approaching world war might break out during 1938; the British Government might abandon its policy of non-intervention.

  Neither event happened, and towards the end of 1938 the Russians withdrew their help. Government Spain had long been hungry, and was now definitely starving.

  As the Fascist forces drove across Catalonia, hordes of refugees streamed into France, machine-gunned by Italian aeroplanes and interned behind barbed-wire as soon as they arrived.

  Early in 1939 Franco entered Madrid, and used his victory with the utmost ruthlessness. All political parties of the Left were suppressed, and countless people executed or imprisoned. If recent reports are true, half a million people, or 2 per cent of the population of Spain, are still in concentration camps.

  The story is a disgusting one, because of the sordid behaviour of the Great Powers and the indifference of the world at large. The Germans and Italians intervened in order to crush Spanish democracy, to seize a strategic keypoint for the coming war, and, incidentally, to try out their bombing planes on helpless populations.

  The Russians doled out a small quantity of weapons and extorted the maximum of political control in return. The British and French simply looked the other way while their enemies triumphed and their friends were destroyed. The British attitude is the hardest to forgive, because it was foolish as well as dishonourable.

  It had been obvious from the start that any foreign country which supplied arms to the Spanish Government could control or at least influence that Government’s policy. Instead, the British preferred to make sure that Franco and Hitler should win, and at the same time that the affection and gratitude of the Spanish people should be earned by Russia and not by Britain.

  For a year or more the Spanish Government was effectively under Russian control, mainly because Russia was the only country to come to the rescue. The growth of the Spanish Communist Party from a few thousands to a quarter of a million was directly the work of the British Tories.

  There has been a strong tendency to push these facts out of sight and even to claim Franco’s hostile ‘non-belligerency’ as a triumph for British diplomacy. Rather should the true history of the Spanish war be kept always in mind as an object-lesson in the folly and meanness of Power Politics. Nothing, indeed, redeems its story except the courage of the fighting-men on both sides, and the toughness of the civilian population of Loyalist Spain, who for years endured hunger and hardship unknown to us at the worst moments of war.

  [2593]

  Review of An Interlude in Spain by Charles d’Ydewalle, translated by Eric Sutton

  Observer, 24 December 1944

  Unwilling witnesses are generally accounted the most reliable, and Mr. Charles d’Ydewalle is at least partly an unwilling witness against Franco’s Spain. He is a Belgian journalist (evidently a devout Catholic), and during the Spanish Civil War he was a warm partisan of General Franco, in whose territory he appears to have spent some months. When his own country was subjugated by the Germans and he set out on the roundabout journey to England, he was quite confident that Nationalist Spain, whose ‘crusade’ he had supported as best he could, would offer no obstacle. It was therefore with some surprise that he found himself arrested and flung into jail almost as soon as he had set foot on Spanish soil.

  This was towards the end of 1941. He was not released until eight months later, and at no time did he discover what offence, if any, he was charged with. Presumably he had been arrested because his flight to England indicated Allied sympathies. He was incarcerated first of all in the Model Prison in Barcelona, which had been built to hold 700 prisoners and at this time was holding 8,000. Later he was placed in a concentration camp among refugees of many different nationalities. Here the conditions were comparatively sympathetic; it was possible to buy small luxuries; one could choose one’s hut mates, and there was international rivalry in the matter of digging tunnels under the barbed wire. It was the Model Prison that opened or partially opened Mr. d’Ydewalle’s eyes to the nature of the régime.

 
; At the end of 1941, nearly three years after the ending of the civil war, people were still being shot, in this prison alone, at the rate of five or six a week. In addition there was torture, presumably for the purpose of extracting confessions, and on occasion the torturer ‘went too far’. Political prisoners and ordinary criminals were more or less mixed up together, but the majority of the prisoners were left-overs from the civil war, usually serving sentences of thirty years. In many cases, Mr. d’Ydewalle noted, this would take them to the ripe age of ninety-five or so. The shootings were carried out with the maximum of cruelty. No one knew, until the actual morning of execution, whether he was to be shot or not.

  Early every morning there would be a trampling of boots and a clanking of bayonets along the corridor, and suddenly this door or that would be thrown open and a name called out. Later in the day the dead man’s mattress would be seen lying outside the cell door. Sometimes a man was reprieved and then shot a day or two later for some different offence. But there were no shootings on Sundays or holidays. The display of religiosity with which the life of the prison was conducted stuck in Mr. d’Ydewalle’s gizzard almost more than the cruelty.

  Mr. d’Ydewalle spent only a day or two in Spain as a free man, but in the concentration camp he noted that the wretched Spanish soldiers who guarded them were glad to beg scraps of food from the better-off internees. He does not record things like this with any satisfaction, and is reluctant to draw their full moral. To the end, indeed, he seems to have remained convinced that in the civil war Franco was in the right, and that it was only afterwards that things went wrong. In prison he sometimes comforted himself with the thought that the wretched victims round about him had been doing the same thing to Nationalist sympathisers only a few years before. He reiterates his belief in ‘red atrocities’, and shows more than a trace of anti-Semitism.

  The main impression that the book conveys is one of bewilderment. Why had he been locked up? How could the ‘glorious crusade’ have led to this kind of thing? He even expresses astonishment that a régime calling itself Catholic could lend its support to Hitler and Mussolini: which does seem to be carrying simplicity rather far, since General Franco can hardly be accused of having concealed his political affiliations.

  Naturally it is not easy for someone who in good faith supported the Nationalist cause at the time of the civil war to admit that the horrors of the Model Prison were implicit in the Nationalist régime from the beginning. But Mr. d’Ydewalle also had the handicap of coming from a comparatively orderly and well-governed country and therefore not having any preliminary understanding of totalitarianism.

  The essential fact about a totalitarian régime is that it has no laws. People are not punished for specific offences, but because they are considered to be politically or intellectually undesirable. What they have done or not done is irrelevant. It took Mr. d’Ydewalle some time to get used to this idea, and, as he observed, there were other Western European prisoners who had difficulty in grasping it as well. When he had been several months in jail some British soldiers, escaped from France, came to join him. He told them about the shootings. At the beginning they flatly disbelieved him, and only gradually, as mattress after mattress appeared outside this cell or that, came to realise that what he said was true: whereupon they commented, not inaptly, ‘Well, give me England every time.’

  This book is a useful footnote to history. The author’s simplicity of outlook is an advantage to him as a narrator. But, if one may make a guess, the next variant of General Franco who appears will not have Mr. d’Ydewalle’s support.

  [2944]

  Review of The Clash by Arturo Barea1

  Observer, 24 March 1946

  The third and final volume of Arturo Barea’s autobiography covers the period 1935–9, and is therefore largely a story of civil war. His private struggle and the failure of his first marriage cannot be separated from the general social tension of which the war was a result; and in his second marriage, which took place about the end of 1937, personal and political motives are even more closely intermingled. The book starts off in a Castilian village and ends up in Paris, but its essential subject is the siege of Madrid.

  Mr. Barea was in Madrid from the very start of the war, and remained there almost continuously until vague but irresistible political pressures drove him out of the country in the summer of 1938. He saw the wild enthusiasm and chaos of the early period, the expropriations, the massacres, the bombing and shelling of the almost helpless city, the gradual restoration of order, the three-sided struggle for power between the common people, the bureaucracy, and the foreign Communists. For about two years he held an important post in the Foreign Press Censorship, and for a while he delivered the ‘Voice of Madrid’ broadcasts, which scored a considerable success in Latin America. Before the war he had been an engineer employed in the Patent Office, a would-be writer who had not actually written anything, a believing Catholic disgusted by the Spanish Church, and a temperamental Anarchist with no close political affiliations. But it is most of all his peasant origin that fits him to describe the war from a specifically Spanish point of view.

  At the beginning fearful things happened. Mr. Barea describes the storming of the Madrid barracks, the flinging of live people out of upper windows, the revolutionary tribunals, the execution ground where the corpses lay about for days. Earlier, in describing the condition of the peasants and the behaviour of the landlords in the little village where he used to spend his week-ends, he has indicated part of the reason for these barbarities. His work in the Censorship Department, although he realised it to be useful and necessary, was a struggle first against red tape and then against backstairs intrigues. The censorship was never watertight, because most of the embassies were hostile to the Republic, and the journalists, irked by stupid restrictions – Mr. Barea’s first orders were not to let through ‘anything which did not indicate a Government victory’ – sabotaged in every way they could. Later, when the Republic’s prospects temporarily improved, there was further sabotage of the news at the editorial end, Italian prisoners being tactfully described as ‘Nationalists’ in order to keep up the fiction of non-intervention. Still later the Russians tightened their grip on the Republic, the bureaucrats who had fled when Madrid was in danger came back, and the position of Mr. Barea and his wife was gradually made impossible.

  At this period of the war there was a general elbowing-out of those who had borne the brunt in the early months, but there was the added trouble that Mr. Barea’s wife was a Trotskyist. That is to say, she was not a Trotskyist, but she was an Austrian Socialist who had quarrelled with the Communists, which, from the point of view of the political police, came to much the same thing. There were the usual episodes: sudden incursions by the police in the middle of the night, arrest, reinstatement, further arrest – all the peculiar, nightmare atmosphere of a country under divided control, where it is never quite certain who is responsible for what, and even the heads of the Government cannot protect their own subordinates against the secret police.

  One thing that this book brings home is how little we have heard about the Spanish civil war from Spaniards. To the Spaniards the war was not a game, as it was to the ‘Anti-Fascist Writers’ who held their congress in Madrid and ate banquets against a background of starvation. Mr. Barea had to look on helplessly at the intrigues of the foreign Communists, the antics of the English visitors and the sufferings of the Madrid populace, and to do so with a gradually growing certainty that the war was bound to be lost. As he says, the abandonment of Spain by France and Britain meant in practice that Nationalist Spain was dominated by Germany and Republican Spain by the U.S.S.R.: and as the Russians could not then afford to provoke open war with Germany, the Spanish people had to be slowly bombed, shelled and starved into a surrender which could be foreseen as early as the middle of 1937.

  Mr. Barea escaped into a France where foreigners got black looks and the man in the street heaved a sigh of relief at the Munich settlement
; finally he left France for Britain on the eve of the larger war. This is an exceptional book, and the middle section of it must be of considerable historical value.

  1. See p. 341, n. 1, above.

  Orwell’s Pamphlet Collection

  Orwell probably started collecting pamphlets about 1935–7 and carried on until at least March 1947. He thought he had between 1,200 and 2,000 and made more than one attempt to classify and catalogue them. He wished that after his death they should be donated to the British Museum and they are now held by the British Library, call number 1899 ss 1–21, 23–48, item 48 being a typed but incomplete catalogue. Orwell made a handwritten classified list of 364 pamphlets about 1946–7. He classified his nineteen Spanish Civil War pamphlets as Anarchist (An), Labour Party (LP), Left Socialist (LS) and Trotskyist (Tr). For a full account see Complete Works, 3733, XX/259–86 . The pamphlets listed under the heading ‘Spanish Civil War’ have Orwell’s classifications and the boxes in which they are to be found; notes within square brackets or smaller type are editorial. See also Orwell and Politics.

  SPANISH CIVIL WAR

  1. Civil War in Spain (B[ertram] D. Wolfe) [2932, n. 5] [WAP, (Tr) Box 3 (2) USA, 1937] Crick quotes from Wolfe’s eulogy of Andrés Nin; this, he says, ‘has several obvious parallels to Nineteen Eighty-Four’(634)