16. War, Confusion, and Mud in Homage to Catalonia
Edition used: George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938), ed. Peter Davison (London: Penguin, 2003). Hereafter referred to as HC. Note: this discussion assumes you’ve read the book.
N.B. What follows is not intended as an introduction to the hugely intricate background to the Spanish Civil War, or to its causes, events, and aftermath. As the historian Antony Beevor writes, the conflict is ‘perhaps the best example of a subject which becomes more confusing when it is simplified.’[1] The discussion below assumes some familiarity with Homage to Catalonia and is meant as a starting point for discussion of the text. You can find a helpful timeline of the conflict here. The episode of the BBC 4 radio programme In Our Time devoted to the Spanish Civil War is also recommended—click here—as is the episode on Animal Farm—here—which includes discussion of Orwell’s Spanish Civil War background.
Orwell went to Spain ahead of Christmas Eve in 1936. He would stay there until mid-1937, taking part as many others did in the Spanish Civil War as a sympathetic combatant from another country—as someone who went to Spain because he felt the pull of allegiance to a cause.[2] In this case, as it was on so many other occasions for Orwell, the cause was socialism. Enlisting immediately in the militia of the POUM (in translation, the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification), or the ‘Spanish Trotskyists’, as he later called them, Orwell fought for the Soviet-backed Republican government against the rebel Nationalists under General Francisco Franco (who emerged, at the end of the war, as dictator of Spain until his death in 1975).[3] Orwell’s time in Spain included periods of combat on the Aragon front, which he found uncomfortable and physically disgusting, and an interlude in Barcelona, where he witnessed a sequence of fights between Spain’s revolutionary parties known as the ‘May Events’. These skirmishes were the violent culmination of tensions that had been simmering in the city for months, and they needed to be seen, in Orwell’s view, in the context of an international outrage—namely, the manner in which Spain’s Republican government was ‘crushing its own revolutionaries’ through ‘forcible suppression of political parties’, such as the POUM; ‘a stifling censorship of the Press’; and ‘ceaseless espionage and mass-imprisonment without trial’.[4] Spain, for Orwell, was an education not only in a war of Spaniard against Spaniard, but also of the political left against its own ranks. By mid-1937 he had become convinced that the Spanish government was far more afraid of the revolutionaries in its own back yard than it was of the Nationalists, with Hitler and Mussolini behind them.[5]
Soon after he returned to the front lines, in May, Orwell was shot in the throat by a fascist sniper. The bullet went into his neck on the left-hand side, just beneath the larynx, nearly killing him. Georges Kopp, a fellow international volunteer and Orwell’s battalion commander in the POUM, wrote in his injury report that the bullet travelled into Orwell’s body at ‘some 600 feet per second’ with a ‘cauterising temperature.’ Immediately after the impact, Orwell’s voice was ‘hoarse and feeble’, but he managed to cover ‘all the practical purposes of conversational speech.’ Kopp added with an almost comical matter-of-factness that Orwell’s breathing was ‘absolutely regular’, his sense of humour ‘untouched.’[6] Orwell wrote in a letter in July 1937 that the wound left him unable to sing, something his comrades didn’t regret.[7] In the book in which he recorded these experiences, Homage to Catalonia (1938), Orwell remembered being afraid that he’d get picked off randomly by ‘some total stranger with a sub-machine-gun’ (HC, p. 105), and being shot in the neck came close. The bullet’s violent impact gave him ‘the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion’ (HC, p. 143). Orwell’s first thought was for his wife, Eileen. His second, according to the account he gives in Homage to Catalonia, ‘was a violent resentment’ at having to depart the world which suited him ‘so well’ (HC, p. 145). He recalled the whole experience as ‘very interesting’ rather than terrifying, and ‘worth describing in detail’ (HC, p. 143). As ever, for Orwell even the most shocking experiences gave him valuable material for the calmest, most measured descriptions. In narrative, even a bullet could be put in its place.
Getting shot was the most vivid distillation of the ‘strange and moving experience’ of the Spanish Civil War as a whole, which showed Orwell ‘the spectacle of a people […] facing destiny with its eyes open.’[8] The war had a huge effect on him, shaping not only his impressions of Spain but also his anxieties about the modern media’s twisting assaults on truth and the representation of facts. It also showed him the brutal side of Communism in its Stalinist guise, in the form of the 1937 Republican crackdown on the POUM. The crackdown left its mark on him. He described it years later, in his preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm (1945) as an event of deep personal trauma:
in the middle of 1937, when the Communists gained control (or partial control) of the Spanish Government and began to hunt down the Trotskyists, we both found ourselves amongst the victims. We were very lucky to get out of Spain alive, and not even to have been arrested once. Many of our friends were shot, and others spent a long time in prison or simply disappeared.[9]
Orwell’s concerns about everything he saw in Spain flooded into Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Just as in these texts he was interested in the fate of decent souls under the crushing weight of totalitarianism, in Homage to Catalonia he wrote about the Spanish Civil War as a fight for the souls of ordinary people. ‘Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not?’, Orwell asked.[10] This is the question that haunts many of the animals, except the pigs, in Animal Farm, and Winston Smith, in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was the question that defined Orwell’s life. He never stopped asking it and he never stopped trying to find ways to stop decency from perishing in filth and dirt of one kind or another. That effort, in Spain, put Orwell on the side of the common man.
Who was this ‘common man’, exactly? An obvious answer is a man of the sort that Orwell puts right in the foreground in the opening chapter of Homage to Catalonia: a ‘tough-looking’ militiaman of ‘twenty-five or -six, with reddish-yellow hair and powerful shoulders’, and the look of someone ‘who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend’ (HC, p. 1). Orwell remembered this man, in his essay ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’, as a symbol of ‘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 who by the early 1940s were, ‘to the tune of several millions, rotting in forced-labour camps.’ The man’s shabbiness and innocence affirmed for Orwell the thought that in spite of all the ‘power politics and journalistic lying’ that made Spain so fractious, the ‘central issue’ of the civil war ‘was the attempt of people like this to win the decent life which they knew to be their birthright.’[11] What stuck with Orwell most was the fact that the militiaman shook his hand. In a handshake lay the future. This ordinary act summed up for Orwell what the civil war was being fought to protect: the chance for decency to survive in an increasingly improper world. The memory stayed with Orwell throughout his career, reappearing at the end of Homage to Catalonia, when he remembers another meaningful handshake, and in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in the moment when O’Brien shakes Winston’s hand in a gesture of apparent solidarity with his rebellion against Big Brother.[12] Among the many other torments Winston subsequently endures, among the most painful is his realization that this handshake, and the integrity it seemed to convey, was a lie.
Lies of one kind or another ran through all of Orwell’s Spanish experiences.[13] And the interconnected problems of truth and reliability, in turn, make Homage to Catalonia a more complex text than it might appear at first sight. Its demands on the modern reader come from the intricacies of the conflict it records, these being less familiar to contemporary audiences than they once were; from its mixture of narrative modes, which makes the book stylistically kinetic; and from Orwell’s inevitable subjectivity of perspective, from his viewpoint as a person writing about the civil war from the inside out, as it were, rather than from the outside in. Orwell’s version of events has been questioned. Mary Vincent, for example, writes that Homage to Catalonia gives the POUM ‘a renown out of all proportion to its importance’, and Orwell’s grasp of the more general political situation in Spain has also been questioned.[14] But Orwell’s motivations, his search for truth, for a truth, were sincere. He was keen to point out that the book was meant neither as a work of propaganda nor as a work excessively in favour of the POUM, and he stressed in Homage to Catalonia itself that the book was biased (HC, p. 222), emerging from his time in Spain in the thick of the conflict. He never had an exhaustive, top-down view of the civil war, even in retrospect when writing Homage to Catalonia itself. As Robert Colls puts it, ‘Orwell stuck to what his eyes did see and to the POUM position—though not necessarily in that order.’[15] Orwell knew that Homage to Catalonia almost certainly contained errors in fact and interpretation (HC, p. 231), as any book written so soon after a conflict of such scale and complexity inevitably would. Nevertheless, he thought that Homage to Catalonia could challenge the misleading versions of events given in the newspaper accounts of the time.
Orwell felt that this was particularly important in the case of the fighting in Barcelona, which to him had been sorely misrepresented. He stressed that, like everyone else who was there at the time, he saw only what happened in his immediate neighbourhood, and that ‘a completely accurate and unbiased account of the Barcelona fighting’ would remain impossible, because ‘the necessary records do not exist.’ He continued: ‘Future historians will have nothing to go upon except a mass of accusations and party propaganda’ (HC, p. 222). Yet Orwell insisted that he ‘saw and heard quite enough to be able to contradict many of the lies that [were] circulated’ (HC, p. 137) in the press at the time. For him, this was enough ‘to get the affair into some kind of perspective’ (HC, p. 222). Orwell hoped to be honest, and as a book of personal impressions about one of the twentieth century’s most pivotal wars, Homage to Catalonia remains hugely important. Many of the problems came, as Lisa Mullen explains, from Orwell’s problem in finding published newspaper reports with which to ‘support his personal recollections. Either he had hallucinated whole battles and other incidents, or the record was being carefully manipulated in real time.’ She adds: ‘This sense of epistemological uncertainty might make for bad history, but it has rich literary implications which Orwell would explore not only in Homage to Catalonia, but also in his later novels.’[16]
The war as Orwell experienced it—as it was there to be experienced—was a hugely complex affair of internal power struggles between ideological and military adversaries. He reiterated this view in a letter to the socialist writer Jack Common, to whom he described the conflict as ‘a blasted complicated story of political intrigue’.[17] It was a war that, as Orwell put it, suffered from a ‘plague of initials’:
When I came to Spain, and for some time afterwards, I was not only uninterested in the political situation but unaware of it. I knew there was a war on, but I had no notion of what kind of a war. If you had asked me why I had joined the [POUM] militia I should have answered: “To fight against Fascism,” and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: “Common decency.” […] The revolutionary atmosphere of Barcelona had attracted me deeply, but I had made no attempt to understand it. As for the kaleidoscope of political parties and trade unions, with their tiresome names—PSUC, POUM, FAI, CNT, UGT, JCI, JSU, AIT—they merely exasperated me. […] I knew that I was serving in something called the POUM (I had only joined the POUM militia rather than any other because I happened to arrive in Barcelona with ILP [Independent Labour Party] papers), but I did not realize that there were serious differences between the political parties. (HC, pp. 197-8)
Orwell was more informed than he lets on here about the war and the ‘political situation’ that generated it. Yet like many others involved and looking on, he did genuinely find the glut of ‘tiresome’ initialisms perplexing; they made ‘the details of inter-party polemics’ hard to understand and, in their baffling similarities, reflected the tangle of ‘parties and sub-parties’ (HC, p. 222) that made the civil war as much a matter of ‘inter-party feud[s]’ (HC, p. 213) within the political left as of the larger conflict between republicanism and nationalism. All the same, as Orwell came to discover, there were great differences between ‘sets of initials’ (HC, p. 198), and joining the ‘wrong’ faction could mean death.
At different times the civil war involved conflicts between groups on the political left who appeared to be fighting for the same cause. The situation has been described as something like ‘a set of Chinese boxes’, or a Russian matryoshka doll: ‘there was, inside the Fascist-Republican struggle, another struggle, that between the Communism of Madrid and the Anarchism of Barcelona.’[18] To some extent this was a consequence of how the militias, such as the POUM, had been amassed. ‘In the early days of Franco’s revolt’, as Orwell explained it, the militias were ‘hurriedly raised by the various trade unions and political parties; each was essentially a political organization, owing allegiance to its party as much as to the central Government’ (HC, p. 27) of the Spanish Republic. These loose affiliations between the militias and Spain’s central powers led to disaster, and in Orwell’s eyes to disaster for the POUM in particular in the form of a Stalinist crackdown on their members. When the POUM’s leadership was arrested, after months of conflict, many of its executive members, including Andreu Nin, were ‘disappeared’—captured, tortured, and executed. The result, for Orwell, was a new and terrifyingly immediate knowledge of authoritarian power. Just as his trip to the industrial north of England, recorded in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), changed Orwell’s politics, so too did his time in Spain. Robert Colls’s quips about these mutations are hard to beat: Orwell went ‘to Wigan with grave doubts about capitalism, and [left] it with grave doubts about socialism’; he went ‘to Spain an out-and-out anti-Fascist’, but returned from it as an ‘an out-and-out anti-Communist.’[19]
It’s often been remarked that Orwell’s experiences in Spain were among the most important political events of his life. They showed him what it was like to find yourself in a trench, immersed in mud and human filth; what it was like to feel the crushing eventlessness of front-line combat. More powerfully, for Orwell at any rate, they showed him how easily political allegiances could be forged and redefined on a whim, with lives reduced to the status of pawns in an ideological game fought out between ‘political theories’ (HC, p. 198).[20] Here, in other words, was the real beginning of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which took the lessons Orwell learned in Spain and applied them to England. Orwell noted that he joined the POUM militia ‘in order to fight against Fascism’ (HC, p. 86)—which he duly did. He noted in The Road to Wigan Pier that even as he was writing this earlier book ‘Spanish Fascist forces’ were bombing Madrid, and that it looked likely that before The Road to Wigan Pier got into print the world would have ‘another Fascist country to add to the list’.[21] Going to Spain to fight against fascism meant putting his money where his mouth was. If socialism was to gain rather than lose ground in the world, then one of the first things to be done was to resist fascism in body, mind, and spirit. Fighting with the POUM gave Orwell his chance. He fought the fascists on the ground, with bullets, and symbolically challenged, with ideas, what he called ‘the Fascist attitude of mind’, which in his view had been ‘gaining ground’ during the 1930s ‘among people who ought to know better.’[22]
War let Orwell vent his anger at the threat to common decency that was brewing in the form of an increasingly nationalistic, militaristic, and xenophobic political right. But the ‘central issue’ (HC, p. 201) in Spain, for Orwell, was what he saw as the internal suppression of revolutionary politics, by vested interests beyond their control, on the political left. The whole situation was a mess: a ‘muddle’ (HC, p. 174) of fragile idealism, betrayed hopes, distorted information, and missed opportunities. Orwell discovered, in the militias, ‘a sort of temporary working model of the classless society’ (HC, p. 28), a ‘crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like’ (HC, p. 88). He also learned what ‘systematic propaganda’ (HC, p. 96) against such groups, along with what he felt was a newspaper cover-up designed to conceal the Republican crackdown on the POUM, looked like as it happened. Propaganda and posturing muddied the waters. The gap between newspaper versions of events on the front line and Orwell’s combat experiences made him read the war news ‘with a more disbelieving eye’ (HC, p. 47). Spain in general gave Orwell first-hand knowledge of how ‘war-propaganda’, with its ‘screaming and lies and hatred’, tends to come ‘from people who are not fighting’ (HC, p. 214). It showed him with a new intensity something he already knew: that there can be huge differences between versions of events; that there can be an ‘official’ line, and the political will to silence those who seek to oppose or contradict it. Orwell muddled through all of this, and Homage to Catalonia is in many respects a book about getting by—about making it, just; about surviving. In Orwell’s case, muddling through civil war-torn Spain meant escaping death on the front lines and avoiding arrest in Barcelona. But if muddling through also meant getting through figuratively muddied waters, its most literal incarnation meant getting muddy. Muddling through was a matter of muddling through wet earth, dirt, and slime.
Homage to Catalonia is a book of mud. The mud Orwell encountered at the front was at different times ‘unspeakable’ (HC, p. 68), but Homage to Catalonia rarely refrains from speaking about it. Cataloguing the ‘morasses of mud’ (HC, p. 82) that made combat such an awful matter of claggy stickiness and grimy overload, the book pays a great deal of attention to the grease and viscosity of muddy substance—to flooded dug-outs in which feet sink and spade-handles bend (HC, pp. 142-3); to jammed-up, unusable weapons (HC, p. 74); to the clank and splash of horrid squelching (HC, p. 69); to how mud and muck flood into trenches and dreams alike (HC, p. 89). Orwell came to know mud as a sign: of being stuck, literally and metaphorically, in place—in the same place, maybe forever. He also knew it as a sign of danger, of being near ‘grey, muddy, cold place[s], full of roaring lorries and shabby troops’ (HC, p. 164). Adapting the hymn line ‘the trivial round, the common task’, which features importantly in A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), into ‘the daily—more particularly nightly—round, the common task’, Orwell puts watery earth at the front of his war-consciousness: ‘Sentry-go, patrols, digging; mud, rain, shrieking winds, and occasional snow’ (HC, p. 49). Mud sucked men down, retaining their stench. Orwell’s line about a deserted fortification is indicative: ‘Into the cleft immediately behind the position all the refuse of months had been tipped—a deep festering bed of breadcrusts, excrement, and rusty tins’ (HC, p. 19). The wintry landscapes he fought in had a kind of marvellousness to them as long as you could forget that ‘every mountain-top was occupied by troops and was therefore littered with tin cans and crusted with dung’ (HC, p. 25).
Like the courtyard at La Granja filled with a revolting ‘litter of rusty tins, mud, mule dung, and decaying food’ (HC, p. 56), Orwell’s Spain was all too often a matter of disgusting sludge. Homage to Catalonia presents this as a fact of experience, of what being there was like, how it felt, sounded, and reeked. Its other main concern with mud lies in the idea of the muddy as a metaphor for different kinds of confusion; Homage to Catalonia follows the trail of countless First World War poems, novels, dramas, and memoirs in using mud as a trope for the immersive bewilderments and awful engulfments of front-line trench combat.[23] Mud-horror stayed with Orwell, resurfacing in Coming Up for Air (1939) in George Bowling’s memories of being ‘covered with mud from head to foot’ in the trenches of the First World War.[24] Homage to Catalonia also suggests that the idea of muddiness articulated the condition of Spain as Orwell experienced it during his time there in 1937. Mud, for Orwell, was mess, disorder, tedium, death. It also meant vagueness and ambiguousness—doubt. Mud put Orwell in states between things, between solidness and wateriness. This in-betweenness articulated the raw physicality of combat even as it expressed the muddied condition of knowledge in a war that had something of the chessboard about it. Conflict of the kind Orwell witnessed and was thrown into, in Spain, made him feel like a pawn being pushed about by different kinds of ‘huge evil intelligence’ (HC, p. 159). His reiterated attention to mud and muddying suggests that he saw the situation as a matter of black and white mingling so thoroughly as to leave little more than muddy greyness.
The most important example of this idea in Homage to Catalonia—an idea that gave him food for thought all the way through the next decade—is the redefinability of events, their susceptibility to being interpreted differently by those looking at them from afar. This made Spain an education in mud, but also in muddying, in making things blurred, disorderly, tangled up. Much of Orwell’s attention about these things was paid to what happened, or what supposedly happened, in Barcelona, and to the ‘orgy of lying in the newspapers’ (HC, p. 161) that made the situation still harder to understand. But Homage to Catalonia shows how so much of Orwell’s time in Spain demanded to be interpreted through the idea of muddied ambiguity: the feeling of the ground giving way beneath your feet, the complexities of a nation riven by bitter resentments between warring ideological factions, the spectacle of a war without clear-cut antagonists, the suspicion of powers backed up by other powers behind them. Spain gave Orwell the evidence of where the world was going—of where it had already got to. In this respect, it was a defining moment in his life. Homage to Catalonia allowed it to rush back upon him in a ‘far more vivid’ (HC, p. 194) manner than the feeling of actually being there, on the ground, in a trench, on a roof, in hospital, running for his life. Like all of his autobiographical narratives, Homage to Catalonia turned history into form, giving it all the clarity and candour of a man caught up in events, trying desperately, imaginatively to make them make sense.
[1] Antony Beevor, The Spanish Civil War (1982; London: Cassell, 1999), p. 7.
[2] Robert Colls provides arguably the most accessible overview of Orwell’s time in Spain in George Orwell: English Rebel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 72-108. A more detailed account can be found in D. J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2003), pp. 200-34,
[3] The phrase ‘Spanish Trotskyists’ is taken from Orwell’s Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, in Animal Farm (1945), ed. Peter Davison and introd. Julian Symons (London: Everyman’s Library, 1993), pp. 108-13, at p. 110.
[4] George Orwell, ‘Spilling the Spanish Beans’ (1937), in The Complete Works of George Orwell—Volume 11: Facing Unpleasant Facts, 1937-1939, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), pp. 41-6, at p. 41.
[5] For more information, see Orwell’s ‘Eye-Witness in Barcelona’ (1937), in Facing Unpleasant Facts, pp. 54-60.
[6] Georges Kopp, ‘Orwell’s Wound’, in Facing Unpleasant Facts, pp. 23-6, at p. 24.
[7] Letter to Rayner Heppenstall (31 July 1937), in Facing Unpleasant Facts, pp. 53-4, at p. 54.
[8] Orwell, ‘Caesarean Section in Spain’ (1939), in Facing Unpleasant Facts, pp. 332-5, at p. 333.
[9] ‘Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm’, p. 110.
[10] Orwell, ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’ (1942?), in The Complete Works of George Orwell—Volume 13: All Propaganda is Lies, 1941-1942, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, rev. edn (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), pp. 497-511, at p. 510.
[11] Ibid., p. 509.
[12] Orwell reiterated the value of the militiaman’s handshake in his poem ‘The Italian Soldier Shook my Hand’ (1942), which considers the ‘strong hand and the subtle hand / Whose palms are only able / To meet within the sound of guns’ (George Orwell, The Complete Poetry, ed. Dione Venables (Comford: Finlay Publisher, 2015), p. 41).
[13] Hence his remark, in ‘Spilling the Spanish Beans’, that the conflict ‘produced a richer crop of lies than any event since the Great War of 1914-18’ (Facing Unpleasant Facts, p. 41).
[14] Mary Vincent, Spain, 1833-2002: People and State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 146. See also Paul Preston, ‘Lights and Shadows in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies (23 October 2017), online. Bill Alexander wrote in 1984 as follows: ‘Every school student taking O or A Level examinations in modern history is told to read George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia in order to gain an understanding of the Spanish War of 1936-1939. This is as useful as studying the Second World War from the story of a small group of soldiers in some quiet corner, far from the main fronts of El Alamein, Stalingrad, or Normandy’ (‘George Orwell and Spain’, in Christopher Norris (ed.), Inside the Myth—Orwell: Views from the Left (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984), pp. 85-102, at p. 85.
[15] Colls, George Orwell: English Rebel, p. 86.
[16] George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938), ed. Lisa Mullen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. xviii. Mullen adds elsewhere: ‘the same quality of uncertainty and partiality’ in Homage to Catalonia ‘which frustrates historians makes the book richer and more interesting as a text’ (p. xiii).
[17] Letter to Jack Common (October? 1937), in Facing Unpleasant Facts, pp. 93-4, at p. 93.
[18] Patrick Reilly, George Orwell: The Age’s Adversary (1986; Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p. 173.
[19] Ibid., p. 79.
[20] This idea is echoed in Orwell’s claim that he felt, having been on the front line, ‘a sort of passive object, doing nothing in return for [his] rations except to suffer from cold and lack of sleep’ (HC, p. 86).
[21] Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), introd. Richard Hoggart (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 159.
[22] Ibid., p. 197.
[23] See Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), especially chapter 1, ‘Slimescapes’ (pp. 35-72).
[24] George Orwell, Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air, introd. John Carey (London: Everyman’s Library, 2011), p. 538.