Orwell in Spain

by George Orwell

  One has got to remember, too, just what imprisonment means in Spain at this moment. Apart from the frightful overcrowding of the temporary jails, the insanitary conditions, the lack of light and air and the filthy food, there is the complete absence of anything that we should regard as legality. There is, for instance, no nonsense about Habeas Corpus. According to the present law, or at any rate the present practice, you can be imprisoned for an indefinite time not merely without being tried but even without being charged; and until you have been charged the authorities can, if they choose, keep you ‘incommunicado’ – that is, without the right to communicate with a lawyer or anyone else in the outside world. It is easy to see how much the ‘confessions’ obtained in such circumstances are worth. The situation is all the worse for the poorer prisoners because the P.O.U.M. Red Aid, which normally furnishes prisoners with legal advice, has been suppressed along with the other P.O.U.M. institutions.

  But perhaps the most odious feature of the whole business was the fact that all news of what had happened was deliberately concealed, certainly for five days, and I believe for longer, from the troops on the Aragón front. As it happened, I was at the front from June 15 to 20. I had got to see a medical board and in doing so to visit various towns behind the front line, Siétamo, Barbastro, Monzón, etc. In all these places the P.O.U.M. militia headquarters, Red Aid centres and the like were functioning normally, and as far down the line as Lérida (only about 100 miles from Barcelona) and as late as June 20, not a soul had heard that the P.O.U.M. had been suppressed. All word of it had been kept out of the Barcelona papers, although, of course, the Valencia papers (which do not get to the Aragón front) were flaming with the story of Nin’s ‘treachery’. Together with a number of others I had the disagreeable experience of getting back to Barcelona to find that the P.O.U.M. had been suppressed in my absence. Luckily I was warned just in time and managed to make myself scarce, but other[s] were not so fortunate. Every P.O.U.M. militiaman who came down the line at this period had the choice of going straight into hiding or into jail – a really pleasant reception after three or four months in the front line. The motive for all this is obvious: the attack on Huesca was just beginning, and presumably the Government feared that if the P.O.U.M. militia knew what was happening they might refuse to march. I do not, as a matter of fact, believe that the loyalty of the militia would have been affected; still, they had a right to know the truth. There is something unspeakably ugly in sending men into battle (when I left Siétamo the fight was beginning and the first wounded were jolting in the ambulances down the abominable roads) and at the same time concealing from them that behind their back their party was being suppressed, their leaders denounced as traitors and their friends and relatives thrown into prison.

  The P.O.U.M. was by far the smallest of the revolutionary parties, and its suppression affects comparatively few people. In all probability the sum total of punishments will be a score or so of people shot or sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, a few hundreds ruined and a few thousands temporarily persecuted. Nevertheless, its suppression is symptomatically important. To begin with it should make clear to the outside world, what was already obvious to many observers in Spain, that the present Government has more points of resemblance to Fascism than points of difference. (This does not mean that it is not worth fighting for as against the more naked Fascism of Franco and Hitler. I myself had grasped by May the Fascist tendency of the Government, but I was willing to go back to the front and in fact did so.) Secondly, the elimination of the P.O.U.M. gives warning of the impending attack upon the Anarchists. These are the real enemy whom the Communists fear as they never feared the numerically insignificant P.O.U.M. The Anarchist leaders have now had a demonstration of the methods likely to be used against them; the only hope for the revolution, and probably for victory in the war, is that they will profit by the lesson and get ready to defend themselves in time.

  1. Raymond Challinor, in Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 54 (Winter 1989), 40, states: ‘Originally, Controversy was begun after the Independent Labour Party disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 1932. At first, it functioned as the Party’s internal bulletin… In 1936, however, its character completely changed. From then onwards, Controversy sought to be – and largely was – a journal where the many diverse views held within the working-class movement could be openly discussed without rancour.’ To acknowledge that its readership was much wider than that of the ILP, it changed its name in 1939 to Left Forum and then to Left. It ceased publication in May 1950. Challinor attributes much of its success to the character of its editor, Dr C. A. Smith, a London headmaster and later a University of London lecturer. Among those writing for the journal he lists Frank Borkenau, Max Eastman, Sidney Hook, Jomo Kenyatta, Victor Serge, August Thalheimer, Jay Lovestone, George Padmore, Marceau Pivert and Simone Weil.

  2. For the significance of the groups represented by initials, see Homage to Catalonia, pp. 179– 82 [VI/Appendix I, 201–5]. Relevant extracts and part of a letter from Hugh Thomas to the editors of CJEL are reprinted as a note to Orwell’s ‘Notes on the Spanish Militias’, below.

  3. Orwell later realized that it was not the Civil Guards, but a local section of Assault Guards, who seized the Barcelona Telephone Exchange. Shortly before he died, he gave instructions that the text of Homage to Catalonia be changed; see pp. 29–30 [VI/Textual Note].

  4. For Orwell’s later thoughts, see letters to H. N. Brailsford, 10 and 18 December 1937, below.

  5. Officers’ Training Corps, associated with the public-school system in England.

  6. Andrés Nin (1892–1973) was leader of the POUM. He had at one time been Trotsky’s secretary but broke with him when Trotsky spoke critically of the POUM (see Thomas, 523). He ‘underwent the customary Soviet interrogation’ suffered by those who were claimed to be ‘traitors to the cause’ and was then murdered, possibly in the royal park just north of Madrid. In later months the remaining POUM leaders were interrogated and tortured, some in the convent of Saint Ursula in Barcelona, ‘the Dachau of republican Spain’, as one POUM survivor described it. Nin was the only POUM leader to be murdered. However, Bob Smillie was thrown into jail in Valencia without just cause (see Homage to Catalonia, pp. 155–6 [VI/170–1]), where he died, according to his captors, of appendicitis. Thomas gives this account of Nin’s probable fate: ‘He… refused to sign documents admitting his guilt and that of his friends… What should they do?… the Italian Vidali (Carlos Contreras) suggested that a “nazi” attack to liberate Nin should be simulated. So, one dark night, probably 22 or 23 June, ten German members of the International Brigade assaulted the house in Alcalá where Nin was held… Nin was taken away and murdered… His refusal to admit his guilt probably saved the lives of his friends’ (705).

  Abstracts of Reports on the Spanish Civil War in the Daily Worker and News Chronicle, 1936–7

  [July and August 1937?]

  In a footnote to Homage to Catalonia, Orwell remarks, ‘In connection with this book I have had to go through the files of a good many English papers’ (p. 185 [VI/208] ). Some of the notes he made in his search have survived. These are reprinted in CW, X/290–306 .

  [384]

  To Amy Charlesworth

  1 August 1937

  The Stores, Wallington, Near Baldock, Herts

  Dear Miss Charlesworth,1

  Once again a long delay in answering your letter, I am afraid. I can only excuse myself by saying I had a lot to do in the month after getting back from Spain, and that I have only recently got my health back. The damaged hand and Spain were only indirectly connected – ie. I had blood-poisoning at the front and this recurred. It is all right now. The wound I got in Spain was a bullet through the neck, but it is all healed up and well except that I have lost part of my voice.

  You asked about the situation in Spain, and whether the rebels had not a case. I should not say that the rebels had no case, unless you believe that it is always wrong to rebel agai
nst a legally-established government, which in practice nobody does. Roughly speaking I should say that the rebels stand for two things that are more or less contradictory – for of course Franco’s side, like the Government side, consists of various parties who frequently quarrel bitterly among themselves. They stand on the one hand for an earlier form of society, feudalism, the Roman Catholic Church and so forth, and on the other hand for Fascism, which means an immensely regimented and centralised form of government, with certain features in common with Socialism, in that it means suppression of a good deal of private property and private enterprise, but always ultimately in the interest of the bigger capitalists, and therefore completely unsocialistic. I am wholeheartedly against both of these ideas, but it is fair to say that a case can be made out for both of them. Some of the Catholic writers, such as Chesterton, Christopher Dawson etc., can make out a very appealing though not logically convincing case for a more primitive form of society. I would not say that there is any case for Fascism itself, but I do think there is a case for many individual Fascists. I had a lot to say about this in my last book. Roughly speaking I would say that Fascism has a great appeal for certain simple and decent people who genuinely want to see justice done to the working class and do not grasp that they are being used as tools by the big capitalists. It would be absurd to imagine that every man on Franco’s side is a demon. But though the Fascist atrocities have probably been exaggerated, some of them undoubtedly happened and I think one can be certain that the Government has conducted the war much more humanely than the Fascists, even to the point of losing military opportunities, eg. by being unwilling to bomb towns where there were civilian populations.

  Meanwhile on the Government side there is a very complicated situation and the most terrible things are happening, which have been kept out of the English papers and which I can’t properly explain without expanding this letter into the size of a pamphlet. Perhaps I can summarise it like this: the Spanish war was not only a war but a revolution. When the Fascist rising broke out, the workers in various of the big towns, especially in Catalonia, not only defeated the local Fascists but took the opportunity of seizing land, factories etc. and setting up a rough form of workers’ government. Ever since then, and especially since about December of last year, the real struggle of the Spanish Government has been to crush the revolution and put things back to where they were before. They have now more or less succeeded and there is now going on a most dreadful reign of terror directed against everyone who is suspected of genuinely revolutionary leanings. It is a little difficult for English people to understand, in so much that the Communist Party, which we are accustomed to regard as revolutionary, has been the principal mover in this, and is now more or less in charge of the Spanish Government, though not officially, and is conducting the reign of terror. This had begun when I left Spain on June 23rd. The party in whose militia I had been serving, the P.O.U.M., was suppressed and every person connected with it whom the police could lay their hands on, including even wounded men in the sanatoriums, was thrown into jail without any kind of trial. I was lucky enough to get out of Spain, but many of my friends and acquaintances are still in jail and I am afraid there is the greatest fear that some of them will be shot, not for any definite offence but for opposition to the Communist Party. If you want to keep in touch with Spanish affairs, the only paper you can more or less rely on to tell you the truth is the New Leader. Or if you come across it read an excellent book that appeared recently called The Spanish Cockpit, by Franz Borkenau. The chapters at the end of this sum up the situation much better than I could.

  This seems to be quite a long letter after all. I must apologise for lecturing you about Spain, but what I saw there has upset me so badly that I talk and write about it to everybody. I am doing a book about it, of course. I suppose it will be out about next March.

  Yours very sincerely,

  Eric Blair (‘George Orwell’)

  P.S. [handwritten] I might have told you before that George Orwell is only a pen-name. I would much like to meet you some time. You sound the kind of person I like to know, but goodness knows when I shall be in your part of the world. I am keeping your address. Let me know if you ever move down London-way.

  1. Amy Charlesworth (1904–45), in a letter to Orwell of 6 October 1937, from Flixton, near Manchester, told him she had been married young, had had two children, had left her husband because he struck her so often, and was training to be a health visitor. She remarried, and when she wrote to Orwell in June 1944, she signed herself Mrs Gerry Byrne. Her husband wrote to Orwell in June 1945 to tell him that his wife had died three months earlier. He may have been Gerald Byrne (1905), a crime reporter for the Daily Herald in the mid-1930s.

  [386]

  To Charles Doran

  2 August 1937

  The Stores, Wallington, Near Baldock, Herts

  Dear Doran,1

  I don’t know your address, but I expect they will know it at the I.L.P. summer school, where I am going on Thursday. I was also there yesterday, to hear John McNair speak.

  I was very relieved when I saw young Jock Branthwaite, who has been staying with us, and learned that all of you who wished to had got safely out of Spain. I came up to the front on June 15th to get my medical discharge, but couldn’t come up to the line to see you because they kept sending me about from hospital to hospital. I got back to Barcelona to find that the P.O.U.M. had been suppressed in my absence, and they had kept it from the troops so successfully that on June 20th as far down the line as Lérida not a soul had heard about it, though the suppression had taken place on the 16th–17th. My first intimation was walking into the Hotel Continental and having Eileen and a Frenchman named Pivert,2 who was a very good friend to everyone during the trouble, rush up to me, seize me each by one arm and tell me to get out. Kopp had just recently been arrested in the Continental owing to the staff ringing up the police and giving him away. McNair, Cottman and I had to spend several days on the run, sleeping in ruined churches etc., but Eileen stayed in the hotel and, beyond having her room searched and all my documents seized, was not molested, possibly because the police were using her as a decoy duck for McNair and me. We slipped away very suddenly on the morning of the 23rd, and crossed the frontier without much difficulty. Luckily there was a first class and a dining car on the train, and we did our best to look like ordinary English tourists, which was the safest thing to do. In Barcelona one was fairly safe during the daytime, and Eileen and I visited Kopp several times in the filthy den where he and scores of others, including Milton,3 were imprisoned. The police had actually gone to the length of arresting the wounded P.O.U.M. men out of the Maurín, and I saw two men in the jail with amputated legs; also a boy of about ten. A few days ago we got some letters, dated July 7th, which Kopp had somehow managed to send out of Spain. They included a letter of protest to the Chief of Police. He said that not only had he and all the others been imprisoned for 18 days (much longer now, of course) without any trial or charge, but that they were being confined in places where they had hardly room to lie down, were half starved and in many cases beaten and insulted. We sent the letter on to McNair, and I believe after discussing the matter Maxton has arranged to see the Spanish ambassador and tell him that if something is not done, at any rate for the foreign prisoners, he will spill the beans in Parliament. McNair also tells me that there is a credible report in the French papers that the body of Nin, also I think other P.O.U.M. leaders, has been found shot in Madrid. I suppose it will be ‘suicide’, or perhaps appendicitis again.4

  Meanwhile it seems almost impossible to get anything printed about all this. As soon as I crossed the French frontier I wired to the New Statesman asking if they would like an article, and they wired back Yes, but when they saw my article (on the suppression of the P.O.U.M.), they said they were sorry but they could not publish the article, as it would ‘cause trouble’. To sugar the pill they sent me to review a very good book that was published recently, The Spanish Cockpi
t. But once again when they saw the review they were sorry they could not publish it as it ‘controverted editorial policy’, but they actually offered to pay for the article though unprinted – practically hush-money, you see. I am also having to change my publisher. As soon as Gollancz heard I had been with the P.O.U.M. he said he was afraid he would not be able to publish my book on Spain, though not a word of it was written yet. I haven’t definitely fixed up, but shall probably take it to Secker. It ought to come out about March if all is well.

  I went up to Bristol with some others to take part in a protest meeting about Stafford Cottman5 being expelled from the Y.C.L.6 with the words ‘we brand him as an enemy of the working class’ and similar expressions.

  Since then I heard that the Cottmans’ house had been shadowed by members of the Y.C.L. who attempt to question everyone who comes in and out. What a show! To think that we started off as heroic defenders of democracy and only six months later were Trotsky-Fascists sneaking over the border with the police on our heels. Meanwhile being a Trotsky-Fascist doesn’t seem to help us with the pro-Fascists in this country. This afternoon Eileen and I had a visit from the vicar, who doesn’t at all approve of our having been on the Government side. Of course we had to own up that it was true about the burning of the churches, but he cheered up a lot on hearing they were only Roman Catholic churches.