Homage to Catalonia

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

Orwell writes about the Spanish Civil War and occasionally touches on the fascists. He writes about the fractions that the government was more interested in fighting amongst themselves than the enemy. And with some indignation, tells on how lies travel half the world before the truth gets its shoes on.

🎨 Impressions

Orwell writes so damn well. It is mesmerizing to read his raw and pure tales from a war. It is fascinating how, in war, it is petty disputes and fighting that take the most energy. At the front, we are all together, but in the streets back home, we hiss at each other.

✍️ My Top Quotes

In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers' table.
It was not exactly a uniform. Perhaps a 'multiform' would be the proper name for it.
A Spaniard's generosity, in the ordinary sense of the word, is at times almost embarrassing.
The French were very brave, they said; adding enthusiastically: 'Más valientes que nosotros' 'Braver than we are!'
The one Spanish word that no foreigner can avoid learning is mañana - 'tomorrow' (literally, 'the morning'). Whenever it is conceivably possible, the business of today is put off until mañana.
The one Spanish word that no foreigner can avoid learning is mañana - 'tomorrow' (literally, 'the morning'). Whenever it is conceivably possible, the business of today is put off until mañana. This is so notorious that even the Spaniards themselves make jokes about it.
In Spain nothing, from a meal to a battle, ever happens at the appointed time.
It appeared that even in Barcelona there were hardly any bullfights nowadays; for some reason all the best matadors were Fascists.
War, to me, meant roaring projectiles and skipping shards of steel; above all it meant mud, lice, hunger, and cold.
IN trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last.
'This is not a war,' he used to say, 'it is a comic opera with an occasional death.'
The chief importance of the affair was that it taught me to read the war news in the papers with a more disbelieving eye. A day or two later the newspapers and the radio published reports of a tremendous attack with cavalry and tanks (up a perpendicular hill-side!) which had been beaten off by the heroic English.
When the fighting broke out on 18 July it is probable that every anti-Fascist in Europe felt a thrill of hope. For here at last, apparently, was democracy standing up to Fascism. For years past the so-called democratic countries had been surrendering to Fascism at every step.
If the war was lost democracy and revolution. Socialism and Anarchism, became meaningless words.
The Communist's emphasis is always on centralism and efficiency, the Anarchist's on liberty and equality.
It is also fair to the P.O.U.M. to say that though they might preach endless sermons on revolution and quote Lenin ad nauseam, they did not usually indulge in personal libel.
One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right.
The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting.
Since 1914-18 'war for democracy' has had a sinister sound.
In stationary warfare there are three things that all soldiers long for: a battle, more cigarettes, and a week's leave.
The human louse somewhat resembles a tiny lobster, and he lives chiefly in your trousers.
Become instinctive, revolution or no revolution. Obviously the Spanish Church will come back (as the saying goes, night and the Jesuits always return),
For in modern war no one scruples to use an ambulance for carrying ammunition.
Certainly the Andalusians were very ignorant. Few if any of them could read, and they seemed not even to know the one thing that everybody knows in Spain - which political party they belonged to.
The 'mystique' of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all.
From much of this propaganda you would have derived the impression that there was something disgraceful in having gone to the front voluntarily and something praiseworthy in waiting to be conscripted
People of all shades of opinion were saying forebodingly: 'There's going to be trouble before long.' The danger was quite simple and intelligible.
Have no particular love for the idealized 'worker' as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
As usual, Spanish standards of marksmanship had saved me. I was fired at several times from this building.
'the Russian rifle' (these rifles were sent to Spain by the U.S.S.R., but were, I believe, manufactured in America).
Assault Guards dropped their conquering air and relations became more friendly. It was noticeable that most of them had picked up a girl after a day or two.
'Oh, that doesn't matter. After all, you were only acting under orders.'
You could not, as before, 'agree to differ' and have drinks with a man who was supposedly your political opponent.
No one who was in Barcelona then, or for months later, will forget the horrible atmosphere produced by fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food queues, and prowling gangs of armed men.
Barcelona is a town with a long history of street-fighting. In such places things happen quickly, the factions are ready-made, everyone knows the local geography, and when the guns begin to shoot people take their places almost as in a fire-drill.
People do not begin building barricades unless they have received something that they regard as a provocation.
Again, there are the solitary men, 'usually Fascists', who are shooting from the roof-tops. Mr Langdon-Davies does not explain how he knew that these men were Fascists. Presumably he did not climb on to the roofs and ask them.
In the New Republic Mr Ralph Bates stated that the P.O.U.M. troops were 'playing football with the Fascists in no man's land' at a time when, as a matter of fact, the P.O.U.M. troops were suffering heavy casualties and a number of my personal friends were killed and wounded.
As for the two hundred 'full confessions', which, if they had existed, would have been enough to convict anybody, they have never been heard of again. They were, in fact, two hundred efforts of somebody's imagination.
The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.
As for the newspaper talk about this being a 'war for democracy', it was plain eyewash. No one in his senses supposed that there was any hope of democracy, even as we understand it in England or France, in a country so divided and exhausted as Spain would be when the war was over.
If we could drive Franco and his foreign mercenaries into the sea it might make an immense improvement in the world situation, even if Spain itself emerged with a stifling dictatorship and all its best men in jail. For that alone the war would have been worth winning.
It was like an allegorical picture of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one's heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war is glorious after all.
No one I met at this time - doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.
It was no use hanging on to the English notion that you are safe so long as you keep the law. Practically the law was what the police chose to make it.
Fortunately this was Spain and not Germany. The Spanish secret police had some of the spirit of the Gestapo, but not much of its Competence.
I know that in the middle of a huge and bloody war it is no use making too much fuss over an individual death. One aeroplane bomb in a crowded street causes more suffering than quite a lot of political persecution. But what angers one about a death like this is its utter pointlessness. To be killed in battle - yes, that is what one expects; but to be flung into jail, not even for any imaginary offence, but simply owing to dull blind spite, and then left to die in solitude - that is a different matter.
Few Spaniards possess the damnable efficiency and consistency that a modern totalitarian state needs.
I had been in Barcelona I went to have a look at the cathedral - a modern cathedral, and one of the most hideous buildings in the world. It has four crenellated spires exactly the shape of hock bottles. Unlike most of the churches in Barcelona it was not damaged during the revolution - it was spared because of its 'artistic value', people said. I think the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance, though they did hang a red and black banner between its spires.
London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen - all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.