Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

lower-middle-class novels which are his greatest achievement stopped

  short at the other war and never really began again, and since 1920 he

  has squandered his talents in slaying paper dragons. But how much it is,

  after all, to have any talents to squander.

  LOOKING BACK ON THE SPANISH WAR (1942)

  1.

  First of all the physical memories, the sounds, the smells and the

  surfaces of things.

  It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the

  Spanish war I remember the week of so-called training that we received

  before being sent to the front--the huge cavalry barracks in Barcelona

  with its draughty stables and cobbled yards, the icy cold of the pump

  where one washed, the filthy meals made tolerable by pannikins of wine,

  the Trousered militia-women chopping firewood, and the roll-call in the

  early mornings where my prosaic English name made a sort of comic

  interlude among the resounding Spanish ones, Manuel Gonzalez, Pedro

  Aguilar, Ramon Fenellosa, Roque Ballaster, Jaime Domenech, Sebastian

  Viltron, Ramon Nuvo Bosch. I name those particular men because I remember

  the faces of all of them. Except for two who were mere riff-raff and have

  doubtless become good Falangists by this time, it is probable that all of

  them are dead. Two of them I know to be dead. The eldest would have been

  about twenty-five, the youngest sixteen.

  One of the essential experiences of war is never being able to escape

  from disgusting smells of human origin. Latrines are an overworked

  subject in war literature, and I would not mention them if it were not

  that the latrine in our barracks did its necessary bit towards puncturing

  my own illusions about the Spanish civil war. The Latin type of latrine,

  at which you have to squat, is bad enough at its best, but these were

  made of some kind of polished stone so slippery that it was all you could

  do to keep on your feet. In addition they were always blocked. Now I have

  plenty of other disgusting things in my memory, but I believe it was

  these latrines that first brought home to me the thought, so often to

  recur: 'Here we are, soldiers of a revolutionary army, defending

  Democracy against Fascism, fighting a war which is ABOUT something, and

  the detail of our lives is just as sordid and degrading as it could be in

  prison, let alone in a bourgeois army.' Many other things reinforced this

  impression later; for instance, the boredom and animal hunger of trench

  life, the squalid intrigues over scraps of food, the mean, nagging

  quarrels which people exhausted by lack of sleep indulge in.

  The essential horror of army life (whoever has been a soldier will know

  what I mean by the essential horror of army life) is barely affected by

  the nature of the war you happen to be fighting in. Discipline, for

  instance, is ultimately the same in all armies. Orders have to be obeyed

  and enforced by punishment if necessary, the relationship of officer and

  man has to be the relationship of superior and inferior. The picture of

  war set forth in books like ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT is

  substantially true. Bullets hurt, corpses stink, men under fire are often

  so frightened that they wet their trousers. It is true that the social

  background from which an army springs will colour its training, tactics

  and general efficiency, and also that the consciousness of being in the

  right can bolster up morale, though this affects the civilian population

  more than the troops. (People forget that a soldier anywhere near the

  front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or, above all,

  too tired to bother about the political origins of the war.) But the laws

  of nature are not suspended for a 'red' army any more than for a 'white'

  one. A louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you

  are fighting for happens to be just.

  Why is it worth while to point out anything so obvious? Because the bulk

  of the British and American intelligentsia were manifestly unaware of it

  then, and are now. Our memories are short nowadays, but look back a bit,

  dig out the files of NEW MASSES or the DAILY WORKER, and just have a look

  at the romantic warmongering muck that our left-wingers were spilling at

  that time. All the stale old phrases! And the unimaginative callousness

  of it! The sang-froid with which London faced the bombing of Madrid! Here

  I am not bothering about the counter-propagandists of the Right, the

  Lunns, Garvins ET HOC GENUS; they go without saying. But here were the

  very people who for twenty years had hooted and jeered at the 'glory' of

  war, at atrocity stories, at patriotism, even at physical courage, coming

  out with stuff that with the alteration of a few names would have fitted

  into the DAILY MAIL of 1918. If there was one thing that the British

  intelligentsia were committed to, it was the debunking version of war,

  the theory that war is all corpses and latrines and never leads to any

  good result. Well, the same people who in 1933 sniggered pityingly if you

  said that in certain circumstances you would fight for your country, in

  1937 were denouncing you as a Trotsky-Fascist if you suggested that the

  stories in NEW MASSES about freshly wounded men clamouring to get back

  into the fighting might be exaggerated. And the Left intelligentsia made

  their swing-over from 'War is hell' to 'War is glorious' not only with no

  sense of incongruity but almost without any intervening stage. Later the

  bulk of them were to make other transitions equally violent. There must

  be a quite large number of people, a sort of central core of the

  intelligentsia, who approved the 'King and Country' declaration in 1935,

  shouted for a' firm line against Germany' in 1937, supported the People's

  Convention in 1940, and are demanding a Second Front now.

  As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion

  which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a

  tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis. In the

  intelligentsia I should say they result rather from money and mere

  physical safety. At a given moment they may be 'pro-war' or 'anti-war',

  but in either case they have no realistic picture of war in their minds.

  When they enthused over the Spanish war they knew, of course, that people

  were being killed and that to be killed is unpleasant, but they did feel

  that for a soldier in the Spanish Republican army the experience of war

  was somehow not degrading. Somehow the latrines stank less, discipline

  was less irksome. You have only to glance at the NEW STATESMAN to see

  that they believed that; exactly similar blah is being written about the

  Red Army at this moment. We have become too civilized to grasp the

  obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to

  fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is

  often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and

  those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases. The fact that

  such a platitude is worth writing down shows what the years of RENTIER

  capitalism have done to us.

  2r />
  In connexion with what I have just said, a footnote, on atrocities.

  I have little direct evidence about the atrocities in the Spanish civil

  war. I know that some were committed by the Republicans, and far more

  (they are still continuing) by the Fascists. But what impressed me then,

  and has impressed me ever since, is that atrocities are believed in or

  disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone

  believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his

  own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew

  up a table of atrocities during the period between 1918 and the present;

  there was never a year when atrocities were not occurring somewhere or

  other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the Right

  believed in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any

  moment the situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday's

  proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a ridiculous lie, merely

  because the political landscape has changed.

  In the present war we are in the curious situation that our 'atrocity

  campaign' was done largely before the war started, and done mostly by the

  Left, the people who normally pride themselves on their incredulity. In

  the same period the Right, the atrocity-mongers of 1914-18, were gazing

  at Nazi Germany and flatly refusing to see any evil in it. Then as soon

  as war broke out it was the pro-Nazis of yesterday who were repeating

  horror stories, while the anti-Nazis suddenly found themselves doubting

  whether the Gestapo really existed. Nor was this solely the result of the

  Russo-German Pact. It was partly because before the war the Left had

  wrongly believed that Britain and Germany would never fight and were

  therefore able to be anti-German and anti-British simultaneously; partly

  also because official war-propaganda, with its disgusting hypocrisy and

  self-righteousness, always tends to make thinking people sympathize with

  the enemy. Part of the price we paid for the systematic lying of 1914-17

  was the exaggerated pro-German reaction which followed. During the years

  1918-33 you were hooted at in left-wing circles if you suggested that

  Germany bore even a fraction of responsibility for the war. In all the

  denunciations of Versailles I listened to during those years I don't

  think I ever once heard the question, 'What would have happened if

  Germany had won?' even mentioned, let alone discussed. So also with

  atrocities. The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters

  it. Recently I noticed that the very people who swallowed any and every

  horror story about the Japanese in Nanking in 1937 refused to believe

  exactly the same stories about Hong Kong in 1942. There was even a

  tendency to feel that the Nanking atrocities had become, as it were,

  retrospectively untrue because the British Government now drew attention

  to them.

  But unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they

  are lied about and made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen.

  The fact often adduced as a reason for scepticism--that the same horror

  stories come up in war after war--merely makes it rather more likely

  that these stories are true. Evidently they are widespread fantasies, and

  war provides an opportunity of putting them into practice. Also, although

  it has ceased to be fashionable to say so, there is little question that

  what one may roughly call the 'whites' commit far more and worse

  atrocities than the 'reds'. There is not the slightest doubt, for

  instance, about the behaviour of the Japanese in China. Nor is there much

  doubt about the long tale of Fascist outrages during the last ten years

  in Europe. The volume of testimony is enormous, and a respectable

  proportion of it comes from the German press and radio. These things

  really happened, that is the thing to keep one's eye on. They happened

  even though Lord Halifax said they happened. The raping and butchering in

  Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly

  Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees

  along the Spanish roads--they all happened, and they did not happen any

  the less because the DAILY TELEGRAPH has suddenly found out about them

  when it is five years too late.

  3

  Two memories, the first not proving anything in particular, the second, I

  think, giving one a certain insight into the atmosphere of a

  revolutionary period:

  Early one morning another man and I had gone out to snipe at the Fascists

  in the trenches outside Huesca. Their line and ours here lay three

  hundred yards apart, at which range our aged rifles would not shoot

  accurately, but by sneaking out to a spot about a hundred yards from the

  Fascist trench you might, if you were lucky, get a shot at someone

  through a gap in the parapet. Unfortunately the ground between was a flat

  beet field with no cover except a few ditches, and it was necessary to go

  out while it was still-dark and return soon after dawn, before the light

  became too good. This time no Fascists appeared, and we stayed too long

  and were caught by the dawn. We were in a ditch, but behind us were two

  hundred yards of flat ground with hardly enough cover for a rabbit. We

  were still trying to nerve ourselves to make a dash for it when there was

  an uproar and a blowing of whistles in the Fascist trench. Some of our

  aeroplanes were coming over. At this moment, a man presumably carrying a

  message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of

  the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his

  trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It

  is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a

  hundred yards, and also that I was thinking chiefly about getting back to

  our trench while the Fascists had their attention fixed on the

  aeroplanes. Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about

  the trousers. I had come here to shoot at 'Fascists'; but a man who is

  holding up his trousers isn't a 'Fascist', he is visibly a

  fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don't feel like shooting at

  him.

  What does this incident demonstrate? Nothing very much, because it is the

  kind of thing that happens all the time in all wars. The other is

  different. I don't suppose that in telling it I can make it moving to you

  who read it, but I ask you to believe that it is moving to me, as an

  incident characteristic of the moral atmosphere of a particular moment in

  time.

  One of the recruits who joined us while I was at the barracks was a

  wild-looking boy from the back streets of Barcelona. He was ragged and

  barefooted. He was also extremely dark (Arab blood, I dare say), and made

  gestures you do not usually see a European make; one in particular--the

  arm outstretched, the palm vertical--was a gesture characteristic of

  Indians. One day a bundle of cigars, which you could still buy dirt cheap

  at that time, was stolen out of my bunk. Rather foolishly I reported this

  to th
e officer, and one of the scallywags I have already mentioned

  promptly came forward and said quite untruly that twenty-five pesetas had

  been stolen from his bunk. For some reason the officer instantly decided

  that the brown-faced boy must be the thief. They were very hard on

  stealing in the militia, and in theory people could be shot for it. The

  wretched boy allowed himself to be led off to the guardroom to be

  searched. What most struck me was that he barely attempted to protest his

  innocence. In the fatalism of his attitude you could see the desperate

  poverty in which he had been bred. The officer ordered him to take his

  clothes off. With a humility which was horrible to me he stripped himself

  naked, and his clothes were searched. Of course neither the cigars nor

  the money were there; in fact he had not stolen them. What was most

  painful of all was that he seemed no less ashamed after his innocence had

  been established. That night I took him to the pictures and gave him

  brandy and chocolate. But that too was horrible--I mean the attempt to

  wipe out an injury with money. For a few minutes I had half believed him

  to be a thief, and that could not be wiped out.

  Well, a few weeks later at the front I had trouble with one of the men in

  my section. By this time I was a 'cabo', or corporal, in command of

  twelve men. It was static warfare, horribly cold, and the chief job was

  getting sentries to stay awake at their posts. One day a man suddenly

  refused to go to a certain post, which he said quite truly was exposed to

  enemy fire. He was a feeble creature, and I seized hold of him and began

  to drag him towards his post. This roused the feelings of the others

  against me, for Spaniards, I think, resent being touched more than we do.

  Instantly I was surrounded by a ring of shouting men:' Fascist! Fascist!

  Let that man go! This isn't a bourgeois army. Fascist!' etc., etc. As

  best I could in my bad Spanish I shouted back that orders had got to be

  obeyed, and the row developed into one of those enormous arguments by

  means of which discipline is gradually hammered out in revolutionary

  armies. Some said I was right, others said I was wrong. But the point is

  that the one who took my side the most warmly of all was the brown-faced

  boy. As soon as he saw what was happening he sprang into the ring and

  began passionately defending me. With his strange, wild, Indian gesture

  he kept exclaiming, 'He's the best corporal we've got!' (NO HAY CABO COMO

  EL!) Later on he applied for leave to exchange into my section.

  Why is this incident touching to me? Because in any normal circumstances

  it would have been impossible for good feelings ever to be re-established

  between this boy and myself. The implied accusation of theft would not

  have been made any better, probably somewhat worse, by my efforts to make

  amends. One of the effects of safe and civilized life is an immense

  oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions seem somewhat

  disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as

  ingratitude. But in Spain in 1936 we were not living in a normal time. It

  was a time when generous feelings and gestures were easier than they

  ordinarily are. I could relate a dozen similar incidents, not really

  communicable but bound up in my own mind with the special atmosphere of

  the time, the shabby clothes and the gay-coloured revolutionary posters,

  the universal use of the word 'comrade', the anti-Fascist ballads printed

  on flimsy paper and sold for a penny, the phrases like 'international

  proletarian solidarty', pathetically repeated by ignorant men who

  believed them to mean something. Could you feel friendly towards

  somebody, and stick up for him in a quarrel, after you had been

  ignominiously searched in his presence for property you were supposed to

  have stolen from him? No, you couldn't; but you might if you had both

  been through some emotionally widening experience. That is one of the