A Collection of Essays

by George Orwell

  VI

  The outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin -- at any rate not in Spain. After the summer of 1937 those with eyes in their heads realized that the Government could not win the war unless there was some profound change in the international set-up, and in deciding to fight on Negrin and the others may have been partly influenced by the expectation that the world war which actually broke out in 1939 was coming in 1938. The much-publicized disunity on the Government side was not a main cause of defeat. The Government militias were hurriedly raised, ill-armed and unimaginative in their military outlook, but they would have been the same if complete political agreement had existed from the start. At the outbreak of war the average Spanish factory-worker did not even know how to fire a rifle (there had never been universal conscription in Spain), and the traditional pacifism of the Left was a great handicap. The thousands of foreigners who served in Spain made good infantry, but there were very few experts of any kind among them. The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalize factories, demolish churches, and issue revolutionary manifestos would not have made the armies more efficient. The Fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modern arms and the others hadn't. No political strategy could offset that.

  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 proFascist, 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 Trotskyists 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".

  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 timetable, 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 Lerida and the rather sad voices of the wounded militiamen singing some song with a refrain that ended:

  "Una resolution,

  Luchar hast' al fin!"

  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,17 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 G.P.U. 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 symbolizes 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.

  17. Homage to Catalonia.

  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, Petain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst, Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverly 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, are great on the "changes of heart", much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system. Petain 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 working-man's life would contain compared with Petain's own. The damned impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary men, and what not who lecture the working-class Socialist for his "materialism"! All that the working man 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 ofte
n, 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 liveable 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 the 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 realize that the 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 Petain 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 leftwing 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 guardroom table;

  The strong hand and the subtle hand

  Whose palms are only able

  To meet within the sounds of guns,

  But oh! what peace I knew then

  In gazing on his battered face

  Purer than any woman's!

  For the flyblown 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 hide your head?

  For where is Manuel Gonzalez,

  And where is Pedro Aguilar,

  And where is Ramon 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.

  Written [Autumn 1942]; Sections I, II, III, and VII printed in New Road [June?] 1943; full version in S.J.; E.Y.E.; C.E.

  42. Letter to George Woodcock

  10a Mortimer Crescent

  NW6

  2 December 1942

  Dear Woodcock,

  I'm sorry I didn't get round to answering your letter earlier, but I am very busy these days. I am afraid I answered rather roughly in the Partisan Review controversy,18 I always do when I am attacked -- however, no malice either side, I hope.

  18. See 34.

  I can't help smiling at your (a) not accepting the fee after doing a broadcast for the B.B.C. & (b) "suspecting a trap" when asked to b'cast. As a matter of fact it was Mulk's19 idea to ask you. That particular b'cast is a bit of private lunacy we indulge in once a month & I would be surprised if it is listened-in to by 500 people. In any case there is no question of getting to the Indian masses with any sort of b'cast, because they don't possess radios, certainly not shortwave sets. In our outfit we are really only b'casting for the students, who, however, won't listen to anything except news & perhaps music while the political situation is what it is.

  19. Mulk Raj Anand.

  I am sorry that what I said abt "financially profitable" rankled -- I didn't mean it to apply to you or any of the others personally, merely to the whole process of literary racketeering abt which doubtless you know as well as I do.

  As to the ethics of b'casting & in general letting oneself be used by the British governing class. It's of little value to argue abt it, it is chiefly a question of whether one considers it more important to down the Nazis first or whether one believes doing this is meaningless unless one achieves one's own revolution first. But for heaven's sake don't think I don't see how they are using me. A subsidiary point is that one can't effectively remain outside the war & by working inside an institution like the B.B.C. one can perhaps deodorize it to some small extent. I doubt whether I shall stay in this job very much longer, but while here I consider I have kept our propaganda slightly less disgusting than it might otherwise have been. I am trying to get some of our b'casts for the Indian section published in book form.20 If this goes through you may see from the book that our b'casts, though of course much as all radio stuff is, aren't as bad as they might be. To appreciate this you have to be as I am in constant touch with propaganda Axis & Allied. Till then you don't realize what muck and filth is normally flowing through the air. I consider I have kept our little corner of it fairly clean.

  Yours

  Geo. Orwell

  20. Published as Talking to India, edited by George Orwell, 1943.

  1943

  43. W.B. Yeats

  One thing that Marxist criticism has not succeeded in doing is to trace the connexion between "tendency" and literary style. The subject-matter and imagery of a book can be explained in sociological terms, but its texture seemingly cannot. Yet some such connexion there must be. One knows, for instance, that a Socialist would not write like Chesterton or a Tory imperialist like Bernard Shaw, though how one knows it is not easy to say. In the case of Yeats, there must be some kind of connexion between his wayward, even tortured style of writing and his rather sinister vision of life. Mr Menon1 is chiefly concerned with the esoteric philosophy underlying Yeats's work, but the quotations which are scattered all through his interesting book serve to remind one how artificial Yeats's manner of writing was. As a rule, this artificiality is accepted as Irishism, or Yeats is even credited with simplicity because he uses short words, but in fact one seldom comes on six consecutive lines of his verse in which there is not an archaism or an affected turn of speech. To take the nearest example:

  1. The Development of William Butler Yeats by V. K. Narayana Menon.

  Grant me an old man's Frenzy,

  My self must I remake

  Till I am Timon and Lear

  Or that William Blake

  Who beat upon the wall

  Till Truth obeyed his call.

  The unnecessary "that" imports a feeling of affectation, and the same tendency is present in all but Yeats's best passages. One is seldom long away from a suspicion of "quaintness"
, something that links up not only with the nineties, the Ivory Tower and "calf covers of pissed-on green", but also with Rackham's drawings, Liberty art-fabrics and the Peter Pan never-never land, of which, after all, "The Happy Townland" is merely a more appetizing example. This does not matter, because, on the whole, Yeats gets away with it, and if his straining after effect is often irritating, it can also produce phrases ("the chill, footless years", "the mackerel-crowded seas") which suddenly overwhelm one like a girl's face seen across a room. He is an exception to the rule that poets do not use poetical language:

  How many centuries spent

  The sedentary soul

  In toils of measurement

  Beyond eagle or mole,

  Beyond hearing or seeing,

  Or Archimedes' guess,

  To raise into being

  That loveliness?

  Here he does not flinch from a squashy vulgar word like "loveliness", and after all it does not seriously spoil this wonderful passage. But the same tendencies, together with a sort of raggedness which is no doubt intentional, weaken his epigrams and polemical poems. For instance (I am quoting from memory) the epigram against the critics who damned The Playboy of the Western World:

  Once when midnight smote the air

  Eunuchs ran through Hell and met

  On every crowded street to stare

  Upon great Juan riding by;

  Even like these to rail and sweat,

  Staring upon his sinewy thigh.

  The power which Yeats has within himself gives him the analogy ready made and produces the tremendous scorn of the last line, but even in this short poem there are six or seven unnecessary words. It would probably have been deadlier if it had been neater.