Title:      Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Author:     George Orwell
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Author:     George Orwell





Chapter 1



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.

He was a tough-looking youth of twenty-five or six, with reddish-yellow hair
and powerful shoulders. His peaked leather cap was pulled fiercely over one eye.
He was standing in profile to me, his chin on his breast, gazing with a puzzled
frown at a map which one of the officers had open on the table. Something in his
face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw
away his life for a friend--the kind efface you would expect in an Anarchist,
though as likely as not he was a Communist. There were both candour and ferocity
in it; also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their
supposed superiors. Obviously he could not make head or tail of the map;
obviously he regarded map-reading as a stupendous intellectual feat. I hardly
know why, but I have seldom seen anyone--any man, I mean--to whom I have taken
such an immediate liking. While they were talking round the table some remark
brought it out that I was a foreigner. The Italian raised his head and said
quickly:

'Italiano?'

I answered in my bad Spanish: 'No, Ingles. Y tu?'

'Italiano.'

As we went out he stepped across the room and gripped my hand very hard.
Queer, the affection you can feel for a stranger! It was as though his spirit
and mine had momentarily succeeded in bridging the gulf of language and
tradition and meeting in utter intimacy. I hoped he liked me as well as I liked
him. But I also knew that to retain my first impression of him I must not see
him again; and needless to say I never did see him again. One was always making
contacts of that kind in Spain.

I mention this Italian militiaman because he has stuck vividly in my memory.
With his shabby uniform and fierce pathetic face he typifies for me the special
atmosphere of that time. He is bound up with all my memories of that period of
the war--the red flags in Barcelona, the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers
creeping to the front, the grey war-stricken towns farther up the line, the
muddy, ice-cold trenches in the mountains.

This was in late December 1936, less than seven months ago as I write, and
yet it is a period that has already receded into enormous distance. Later events
have obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or
1905, for that matter. I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper
articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time
and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The
Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was
still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it
probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was
ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was
something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been
in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building
of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with
the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the
hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost
every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were
being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an
inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been
collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers
looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial
forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Senior' or 'Don' or
even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' and 'Thou', and said
'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias'. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first
experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a
lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and
all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and
black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in
clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs
of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of
people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing
revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the
crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town
in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small
number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all.
Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some
variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in
it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I
recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also I
believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers'
State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or
voluntarily come over to the workers' side; I did not realize that great numbers
of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as
proletarians for the time being.

Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The
town had a gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings were in poor repair, the
streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air--raids, the shops were mostly
shabby and half-empty. Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there
was a shortage of coal, sugar, and petrol, and a really serious shortage of
bread. Even at this period the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards long.
Yet so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was
no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very
few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gipsies. Above
all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having
suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying
to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the
barbers' shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists)
solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves. In the streets were
coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes. To anyone
from the hard-boiled, sneering civilization of the English--speaking races there
was something rather pathetic in the literalness with which these idealistic
Spaniards took the hackneyed phrases of revolution. At that time revolutionary
ballads of the naivest kind, all about proletarian brotherhood and the
wickedness of Mussolini, were being sold on the streets for a few centimes each.
I have often seen an illiterate militiaman buy one of these ballads, laboriously
spell out the words, and then, when he had got the hang of it, begin singing it
to an appropriate tune.

All this time I was at the Lenin Barracks, ostensibly in training for the
front. When I joined the militia I had been told that I should be sent to the
front the next day, but in fact I had to wait while a fresh centuria was got
ready. The workers' militias, hurriedly raised by the trade unions at the
beginning of the war, had not yet been organized on an ordinary army basis. The
units of command were the 'section', of about thirty men, the centuria, of about
a hundred men, and the 'column', which in practice meant any large number of
men. The Lenin Barracks was a block of splendid stone buildings with a riding--
school and enormous cobbled courtyards; it had been a cavalry barracks and had
been captured during the July fighting. My centuria slept in one of the stables,
under the stone mangers where the names of the cavalry chargers were still
inscribed. All the horses had been seized and sent to the front, but the whole
place still smelt of horse-piss and rotten oats. I was at the barracks about a
week. Chiefly I remember the horsy smells, the quavering bugle-calls (all our
buglers were amateurs--I first learned the Spanish bugle-calls by listening to
them outside the Fascist lines), the tramp-tramp of hobnailed boots in the
barrack yard, the long morning parades in the wintry sunshine, the wild games of
football, fifty a side, in the gravelled riding--school. There were perhaps a
thousand men at the barracks, and a score or so of women, apart from the
militiamen's wives who did the cooking. There were still women serving in the
militias, though not very many. In the early battles they had fought side by
side with the men as a matter of course. It is a thing that seems natural in
time of revolution. Ideas were changing already, however. The militiamen had to
be kept out of the riding-school while the women were drilling there because
they laughed at the women and put them off. A few months earlier no one would
have seen anything comic in a woman handling a gun.

The whole barracks was in the state of filth and chaos to which the militia
reduced every building they occupied and which seems to be one of the
by-products of revolution. In every comer you came upon piles of smashed
furniture, broken saddles, brass cavalry-helmets, empty sabre-scabbards, and
decaying food. There was frightful wastage of food, especially bread. From my
barrack-room alone a basketful of bread was thrown away at every meal--a
disgraceful thing when the civilian population was short of it. We ate at long
trestle-tables out of permanently greasy tin pannikins, and drank out of a
dreadful thing called a porron. A porron is a sort of glass bottle with a
pointed spout from which a thin jet of wine spurts out whenever you tip it up;
you can thus drink from a distance, without touching it with your lips, and it
can be passed from hand to hand. I went on strike and demanded a drinking-cup as
soon as I saw a porron in use. To my eye the things were altogether too like
bed-bottles, especially when they were filled with white wine.

By degrees they were issuing the recruits with uniforms, and because this was
Spain everything was issued piecemeal, so that it was never quite certain who
had received what, and various of the things we most needed, such as belts and
cartridge-boxes, were not issued till the last moment, when the train was
actually waiting to take us to the front. I have spoken of the militia
'uniform', which probably gives a wrong impression. It was not exactly a
uniform. Perhaps a 'multiform' would be the proper name for it. Everyone's
clothes followed the same general plan, but they were never quite the same in
any two cases. Practically everyone in the army wore corduroy knee-breeches, but
there the uniformity ended. Some wore puttees, others corduroy gaiters, others
leather leggings or high boots. Everyone wore a zipper jacket, but some of the
jackets were of leather, others of wool and of every conceivable colour. The
kinds of cap were about as numerous as their wearers. It was usual to adorn the
front of your cap with a party badge, and in addition nearly every man. wore a
red or red and black handkerchief round his throat. A militia column at that
time was an extraordinary-looking rabble. But the clothes had to be issued as
this or that factory rushed them out, and they were not bad clothes considering
the circumstances. The shirts and socks were wretched cotton things, however,
quite useless against cold. I hate to think of what the militiamen must have
gone through in the earlier months before anything was organized. I remember
coming upon a newspaper of only about two months earlier in which one of the
P.O.U.M. leaders, after a visit to the front, said that he would try to see to
it that 'every militiaman had a blanket'. A phrase to make you shudder if you
have ever slept in a trench.

On my second day at the barracks there began what was comically called
'instruction'. At the beginning there were frightful scenes of chaos. The
recruits were mostly boys of sixteen or seventeen from the back streets of
Barcelona, full of revolutionary ardour but completely ignorant of the meaning
of war. It was impossible even to get them to stand in line. Discipline did not
exist; if a man disliked an order he would step out of the ranks and argue
fiercely with the officer. The lieutenant who instructed us was a stout,
fresh-faced, pleasant young man who had previously been a Regular Army officer,
and still looked like one, with his smart carriage and spick-and-span uniform.
Curiously enough he was a sincere and ardent Socialist. Even more than the men
themselves he insisted upon complete social equality between all ranks. I
remember his pained surprise when an ignorant recruit addressed him as 'Senor'.
'What! Senor? Who is that calling me Senor? Are we not all comrades?' I doubt
whether it made his job any easier. Meanwhile the raw recruits were getting no
military training that could be of the slightest use to them. I had been told
that foreigners were not obliged to attend 'instruction' (the Spaniards, I
noticed, had a pathetic belief that all foreigners knew more of military matters
than themselves), but naturally I turned out with the others. I was very anxious
to learn how to use a machine-gun; it was a weapon I had never had a chance to
handle. To my dismay I found that we were taught nothing about the use of
weapons. The so-called instruction was simply parade-ground drill of the most
antiquated, stupid kind; right turn, left turn, about turn, marching at
attention in column of threes and all the rest of that useless nonsense which I
had learned when I was fifteen years old. It was an extraordinary form for the
training of a guerilla army to take. Obviously if you have only a few days in
which to train a soldier, you must teach him the things he will most need; how
to take cover, how to advance across open ground, how to mount guards and build
a parapet--above all, how to use his weapons. Yet this mob of eager children,
who were going to be thrown into the front line in a few days' time, were not
even taught how to fire a rifle or pull the pin out of a bomb. At the time I did
not grasp that this was because there were no weapons to be had. In the P.O.U.M.
militia the shortage of rifles was so desperate that fresh troops reaching the
front always had to take their rifles from the troops they relieved in the line.
In the whole of the Lenin Barracks there were, I believe, no rifles except those
used by the sentries.

After a few days, though still a complete rabble by any ordinary standard, we
were considered fit to be seen in public, and in the mornings we were marched
out to the public gardens on the hill beyond the Plaza de Espana. This was the
common drill-ground of all the party militias, besides the Carabineros and the
first contingents of the newly formed Popular Army. Up in the public gardens it
was a strange and heartening sight. Down every path and alley-way, amid the
formal flower-beds, squads and companies of men marched stiffly to and fro,
throwing out their chests and trying desperately to look like soldiers. All of
them were unarmed and none completely in uniform, though on most of them the
militia uniform was breaking out in patches here and there. The procedure was
always very much the same. For three hours we strutted to and fro (the Spanish
marching step is very short and rapid), then we halted, broke the ranks, and
flocked thirstily to a little grocer's shop which was half-way down the hill and
was doing a roaring trade in cheap wine. Everyone was very friendly to me. As an
Englishman I was something of a curiosity, and the Carabinero officers made much
of me and stood me drinks. Meanwhile, whenever I could get our lieutenant into a
corner, I was clamouring to be instructed in the use of a machine-gun. I used to
drag my Hugo's dictionary out of my pocket and start on him in my villainous
Spanish:

'To se manejar fusil. Mo se manejar ametralladora. Quiero apprender
ametralladora. Quando vamos apprender ametralladora?'

The answer was always a harassed smile and a promise that there should be
machine-gun instruction manana. Needless to say manana never came. Several days
passed and the recruits learned to march in step and spring to attention almost
smartly, but if they knew which end of a rifle the bullet came out of, that was
all they knew. One day an armed Carabinero strolled up to us when we were
halting and allowed us to examine his rifle. It turned out that in the whole of
my section no one except myself even knew how to load the rifle, much less how
to take aim.

All this time I was having the usual struggles with the Spanish language.
Apart from myself there was only one Englishman at the barracks, and nobody even
among the officers spoke a word of French. Things were not made easier for me by
the fact that when my companions spoke to one another they generally spoke in
Catalan. The only way I could get along was to carry everywhere a small
dictionary which I whipped out of my pocket in moments of crisis. But I would
sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make
friends in Spain I Within a day or two there was a score of militiamen who
called me by my Christian name, showed me the ropes, and overwhelmed me with
hospitality. I am not writing a book of propaganda and I do not want to idealize
the P.O.U.M. militia. The whole militia--system had serious faults, and the men
themselves were a mixed lot, for by this time voluntary recruitment was falling
off and many of the best men were already at the front or dead. There was always
among us a certain percentage who were completely useless. Boys of fifteen were
being brought up for enlistment by their parents, quite openly for the sake of
the ten pesetas a day which was the militiaman's wage; also for the sake of the
bread which the militia received in plenty and could smuggle home to their
parents. But I defy anyone to be thrown as I was among the Spanish working class
--I ought perhaps to say the Catalan working class, for apart from a few
Aragonese and Andalusians I mixed only with Catalans--and not be struck by
their essential decency; above all, their straightforwardness and generosity. A
Spaniard's generosity, in the ordinary sense of the word, is at times almost
embarrassing. If you ask him for a cigarette he will force the whole packet upon
you. And beyond this there is generosity in a deeper sense, a real largeness of
spirit, which I have met with again and again in the most unpromising
circumstances. Some of the journalists and other foreigners who travelled in
Spain during the war have declared that in secret the Spaniards were bitterly
jealous of foreign aid. All I can say is that I never observed anything of the
kind. I remember that a few days before I left the barracks a group of men
returned on leave from the front. They were talking excitedly about their
experiences and were full of enthusiasm for some French troops who had been next
to them at Huesca. The French were very brave, they said; adding
enthusiastically: 'Mas valientes que nosotros'--'Braver than we are!' Of course
I demurred, whereupon they explained that the French knew more of the art of war
--were more expert with bombs, machine-guns, and so forth. Yet the remark was
significant. An Englishman would cut his hand off sooner than say a thing like
that.

Every foreigner who served in the militia spent his first few weeks in
learning to love the Spaniards and in being exasperated by certain of their
characteristics. In the front line my own exasperation sometimes reached the
pitch of fury. The Spaniards are good at many things, but not at making war. All
foreigners alike are appalled by their inefficiency, above all their maddening
unpunctuality. The one Spanish word that no foreigner can avoid learning is
manana--'tomorrow' (literally, 'the morning'). Whenever it is conceivably
possible, the business of today is put off until manana. 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. As a general rule things
happen too late, but just occasionally--just so that you shan't even be able to
depend on their happening late--they happen too early. A train which is due to
leave at eight will normally leave at any time between nine and ten, but perhaps
once a week, thanks to some private whim of the engine-driver, it leaves at half
past seven. Such things can be a little trying. In theory I rather admire the
Spaniards for not sharing our Northern time-neurosis; but unfortunately I share
it myself.

After endless rumours, mananas, and delays we were suddenly ordered to the
front at two hours' notice, when much of our equipment was still unissued. There
were terrible tumults in the quartermaster's store; in the end numbers of men
had to leave without their full equipment. The barracks had promptly filled with
women who seemed to have sprung up from the ground and were helping their
men-folk to roll their blankets and pack their kit-bags. It was rather
humiliating that I had to be shown how to put on my new leather cartridge-boxes
by a Spanish girl, the wife of Williams, the other English militiaman. She was a
gentle, dark-eyed, intensely feminine creature who looked as though her life--
work was to rock a cradle, but who as a matter of fact had fought bravely in the
street-battles of July. At this time she was carrying a baby which was born just
ten months after the outbreak of war and had perhaps been begotten behind a
barricade.

The train was due to leave at eight, and it was about ten past eight when the
harassed, sweating officers managed to marshal us in the barrack square. I
remember very vividly the torchlit scene--the uproar and excitement, the red
flags flapping in the torchlight, the massed ranks of militiamen with their
knapsacks on their backs and their rolled blankets worn bandolier-wise across
the shoulder; and the shouting and the clatter of boots and tin pannikins, and
then a tremendous and finally successful hissing for silence; and then some
political commissar standing beneath a huge rolling red banner and making us a
speech in Catalan. Finally they marched us to the station, taking the longest
route, three or four miles, so as to show us to the whole town. In the Ramblas
they halted us while a borrowed band played some revolutionary tune or other.
Once again the conquering-hero stuff--shouting and enthusiasm, red flags and
red and black flags everywhere, friendly crowds thronging the pavement to have a
look at us, women waving from the windows. How natural it all seemed then; how
remote and improbable now! The train was packed so tight with men that there was
barely room even on the floor, let alone on the seats. At the last moment
Williams's wife came rushing down the platform and gave us a bottle of wine and
a foot of that bright red sausage which tastes of soap and gives you diarrhoea.
The train crawled out of Catalonia and on to the plateau of Aragon at the normal
wartime speed of something under twenty kilometres an hour.




Chapter 2



BARBASTRO, though a long way from the front line, looked bleak and chipped.
Swarms of militiamen in shabby uniforms wandered up and down the streets, trying
to keep warm. On a ruinous wall I came upon a poster dating from the previous
year and announcing that 'six handsome bulls' would be killed in the arena on
such and such a date. How forlorn its faded colours looked! Where were the
handsome bulls and the handsome bull-fighters now? It appeared that even in
Barcelona there were hardly any bullfights nowadays; for some reason all the
best matadors were Fascists.

They sent my company by lorry to Sietamo, then westward to Alcubierre, which
was just behind the line fronting Zaragoza. Sietamo had been fought over three
times before the Anarchists finally took it in October, and parts of it were
smashed to pieces by shell-fire and most of the houses pockmarked by
rifle-bullets. We were 1500 feet above sea-level now. It was beastly cold, with
dense mists that came swirling up from nowhere. Between Sietamo and Alcubierre
the lorry--driver lost his way (this was one of the regular features of the war)
and we were wandering for hours in the mist. It was late at night when we
reached Alcubierre. Somebody shepherded us through morasses of mud into a
mule-stable where we dug ourselves down into the chaff and promptly fell asleep.
Chaff is not bad to sleep in when it is clean, not so good as hay but better
than straw. It was only in the morning light that I discovered that the chaff
was full of breadcrusts, torn newspapers, bones, dead rats, and jagged milk
tins.

We were near the front line now, near enough to smell the characteristic
smell of war--in my experience a smell of excrement and decaying food.
Alcubierre had never been shelled and was in a better state than most of the
villages immediately behind the line. Yet I believe that even in peacetime you
could not travel in that part of Spain without being struck by the peculiar
squalid misery of the Aragonese villages. They are built like fortresses, a mass
of mean little houses of mud and stone huddling round the church, and even in
spring you see hardly a flower anywhere; the houses have no gardens, only
back-yards where ragged fowls skate over the beds of mule-dung. It was vile
weather, with alternate mist and rain. The narrow earth roads had been churned
into a sea of mud, in places two feet deep, through which the lorries struggled
with racing wheels and the peasants led their clumsy carts which were pulled by
strings of mules, sometimes as many as six in a string, always pulling tandem.
The constant come-and-go of troops had reduced the village to a state of
unspeakable filth. It did not possess and never had possessed such a thing as a
lavatory or a drain of any kind, and there was not a square yard anywhere where
you could tread without watching your step. The church had long been used as a
latrine; so had all the fields for a quarter of a mile round. I never think of
my first two months at war without thinking of wintry stubble fields whose edges
are crusted with dung.

Two days passed and no rifles were issued to us. When you had been to the
Comite de Guerra and inspected the row of holes in the wall--holes made by
rifle-volleys, various Fascists having been executed there--you had seen all
the sights that Alcubierre contained. Up in the front line things were obviously
quiet; very few wounded were coming in. The chief excitement was the arrival of
Fascist deserters, who were brought under guard from the front line. Many of the
troops opposite us on this part of the line were not Fascists at all, merely
wretched conscripts who had been doing their military service at the time when
war broke out and were only too anxious to escape. Occasionally small batches of
them took the risk of slipping across to our lines. No doubt more would have
done so if their relatives had not been in Fascist territory. These deserters
were the first 'real' Fascists I had ever seen. It struck me that they were
indistinguishable from ourselves, except that they wore khaki overalls. They
were always ravenously hungry when they arrived--natural enough after a day or
two of dodging about in no man's land, but it was always triumphantly pointed to
as a proof that the Fascist troops were starving. I watched one of them being
fed in a peasant's house. It was somehow rather a pitiful sight. A tall boy of
twenty, deeply windburnt, with his clothes in rags, crouched over the fire
shovelling a pannikinful of stew into himself at desperate speed; and all the
while his eyes flitted nervously round the ring of militiamen who stood watching
him. I think he still half-believed that we were bloodthirsty 'Reds' and were
going to shoot him as soon as he had finished his meal; the armed man who
guarded him kept stroking his shoulder and making reassuring noises. On one
memorable day fifteen deserters arrived in a single batch. They were led through
the village in triumph with a man riding in front of them on a white horse. I
managed to take a rather blurry photograph which was stolen from me later.

On our third morning in Alcubierre the rifles arrived. A sergeant with a
coarse dark-yellow face was handing them out in the mule-stable. I got a shock
of dismay when I saw the thing they gave me. It was a German Mauser dated 1896--
more than forty years old! It was rusty, the bolt was stiff, the wooden
barrel-guard was split; one glance down the muzzle showed that it was corroded
and past praying for. Most of the rifles were equally bad, some of them even
worse, and no attempt was made to give the best weapons to the men who knew how
to use them. The best rifle of the lot, only ten years old, was given to a half--
witted little beast of fifteen, known to everyone as the maricoon (Nancy-boy).
The sergeant gave us five minutes' 'instruction', which consisted in explaining
how you loaded a rifle and how you took the bolt to pieces. Many of the
militiamen had never had a gun in their hands before, and very few, I imagine,
knew what the sights were for. Cartridges were handed out, fifty to a man, and
then the ranks were formed and we strapped our kits on our backs and set out for
the front line, about three miles away.

The centuria, eighty men and several dogs, wound raggedly up the road. Every
militia column had at least one dog attached to it as a mascot. One wretched
brute that marched with us had had P.O.U.M. branded on it in huge letters and
slunk along as though conscious that there was something wrong with its
appearance. At the head of the column, beside the red flag, Georges Kopp, the
stout Belgian commandante, was riding a black horse; a little way ahead a youth
from the brigand-like militia cavalry pranced to and fro, galloping up every
piece of rising ground and posing himself in picturesque attitudes at the
summit. The splendid horses of the Spanish cavalry had been captured in large
numbers during the revolution and handed over to the militia, who, of course,
were busy riding them to death.

The road wound between yellow infertile fields, untouched since last year's
harvest. Ahead of us was the low sierra that lies between Alcubierre and
Zaragoza. We were getting near the front line now, near the bombs, the
machine-guns, and the mud. In secret I was frightened. I knew the line was quiet
at present, but unlike most of the men about me I was old enough to remember the
Great War, though not old enough to have fought in it. War, to me, meant roaring
projectiles and skipping shards of steel; above all it meant mud, lice, hunger,
and cold. It is curious, but I dreaded the cold much more than I dreaded the
enemy. The thought of it had been haunting me all the time I was in Barcelona; I
had even lain awake at nights thinking of the cold in the trenches, the
stand-to's in the grisly dawns, the long hours on sentry-go with a frosted
rifle, the icy mud that would slop over my boot-tops. I admit, too, that I felt
a kind of horror as I looked at the people I was marching among. You cannot
possibly conceive what a rabble we looked. We straggled along with far less
cohesion than a flock of sheep; before we had gone two miles the rear of the
column was out of sight. And quite half of the so-called men were children--but
I mean literally children, of sixteen years old at the very most. Yet they were
all happy and excited at the prospect of getting to the front at last. As we
neared the line the boys round the red flag in front began to utter shouts of
'Visca P.O.U.M.!' 'Fascistas--maricones!' and so forth--shouts which were meant
to be war-like and menacing, but which, from those childish throats, sounded as
pathetic as the cries of kittens. It seemed dreadful that the defenders of the
Republic should be this mob of ragged children carrying worn-out rifles which
they did not know how to use. I remember wondering what would happen if a
Fascist aeroplane passed our way whether the airman would even bother to dive
down and give us a burst from his machine--gun. Surely even from the air he
could see that we were not real soldiers?

As the road struck into the sierra we branched off to the right and climbed a
narrow mule-track that wound round the mountain-side. The hills in that part of
Spain are of a queer formation, horseshoe-shaped with flattish tops and very
steep sides running down into immense ravines. On the higher slopes nothing
grows except stunted shrubs and heath, with the white bones of the limestone
sticking out everywhere. The front line here was not a continuous line of
trenches, which would have been impossible in such mountainous country; it was
simply a chain of fortified posts, always known as 'positions', perched on each
hill-top. In the distance you could see our 'position' at the crown of the
horseshoe; a ragged barricade of sand-bags, a red flag fluttering, the smoke of
dug-out fires. A little nearer, and you could smell a sickening sweetish stink
that lived in my nostrils for weeks afterwards. 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.

The company we were relieving were getting their kits together. They had been
three months in the line; their uniforms were caked with mud, their boots
falling to pieces, their faces mostly bearded. The captain commanding the
position, Levinski by name, but known to everyone as Benjamin, and by birth a
Polish Jew, but speaking French as his native language, crawled out of his
dug-out and greeted us. He was a short youth of about twenty-five, with stiff
black hair and a pale eager face which at this period of the war was always very
dirty. A few stray bullets were cracking high overhead. The position was a semi--
circular enclosure about fifty yards across, with a parapet that was partly
sand-bags and partly lumps of limestone. There were thirty or forty dug-outs
running into the ground like rat-holes. Williams, myself, and Williams's Spanish
brother-in-law made a swift dive for the nearest unoccupied dug-out that looked
habitable. Somewhere in front an occasional rifle banged, making queer rolling
echoes among the stony hills. We had just dumped our kits and were crawling out
of the dug-out when there was another bang and one of the children of our
company rushed back from the parapet with his face pouring blood. He had fired
his rifle and had somehow managed to blow out the bolt; his scalp was torn to
ribbons by the splinters of the burst cartridge--case. It was our first
casualty, and, characteristically, self--inflicted.

In the afternoon we did our first guard and Benjamin showed us round the
position. In front of the parapet there ran a system of narrow trenches hewn out
of the rock, with extremely primitive loopholes made of piles of limestone.
There were twelve sentries, placed at various points in the trench and behind
the inner parapet. In front of the trench was the barbed wire, and then the
hillside slid down into a seemingly bottomless ravine; opposite were naked
hills, in places mere cliffs of rock, all grey and wintry, with no life
anywhere, not even a bird. I peered cautiously through a loophole, trying to
find the Fascist trench.

'Where are the enemy?'

Benjamin waved his hand expansively. 'Over zere.' (Benjamin spoke English--
terrible English.)

'But where?'

According to my ideas of trench warfare the Fascists would be fifty or a
hundred yards away. I could see nothing--seemingly their trenches were very
well concealed. Then with a shock of dismay I saw where Benjamin was pointing;
on the opposite hill-top, beyond the ravine, seven hundred metres away at the
very least, the tiny outline of a parapet and a red-and-yellow flag--the
Fascist position. I was indescribably disappointed. We were nowhere near them!
At that range our rifles were completely useless. But at this moment there was a
shout of excitement. Two Fascists, greyish figurines in the distance, were
scrambling up the naked hill-side opposite. Benjamin grabbed the nearest man's
rifle, took aim, and pulled the trigger. Click! A dud cartridge; I thought it a
bad omen.

The new sentries were no sooner in the trench than they began firing a
terrific fusillade at nothing in particular. I could see the Fascists, tiny as
ants, dodging to and fro behind their parapet, and sometimes a black dot which
was a head would pause for a moment, impudently exposed. It was obviously no use
firing. But presently the sentry on my left, leaving his post in the typical
Spanish fashion, sidled up to me and began urging me to fire. I tried to explain
that at that range and with these rifles you could not hit a man except by
accident. But he was only a child, and he kept motioning with his rifle towards
one of the dots, grinning as eagerly as a dog that expects a pebble to be
thrown. Finally I put my sights up to seven hundred and let fly. The dot
disappeared. I hope it went near enough to make him jump. It was the first time
in my life that I had fired a gun at a human being.

Now that I had seen the front I was profoundly disgusted. They called this
war! And we were hardly even in touch with the enemy! I made no attempt to keep
my head below the level of the trench. A little while later, however, a bullet
shot past my ear with a vicious crack and banged into the parados behind. Alas!
I ducked. All my life I had sworn that I would not duck the first time a bullet
passed over me; but the movement appears to be instinctive, and almost everybody
does it at least once.




Chapter 3



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. Except at night, when a surprise--attack
was always conceivable, nobody bothered about the enemy. They were simply remote
black insects whom one occasionally saw hopping to and fro. The real
preoccupation of both armies was trying to keep warm.

I ought to say in passing that all the time I was in Spain I saw very little
fighting. I was on the Aragon front from January to May, and between January and
late March little or nothing happened on that front, except at Teruel. In March
there was heavy fighting round Huesca, but I personally played only a minor part
in it. Later, in June, there was the disastrous attack on Huesca in which
several thousand men were killed in a single day, but I had been wounded and
disabled before that happened. The things that one normally thinks of as the
horrors of war seldom happened to me. No aeroplane ever dropped a bomb anywhere
near me, I do not think a shell ever exploded within fifty yards of me, and I
was only in hand-to-hand fighting once (once is once too often, I may say). Of
course I was often under heavy machine-gun fire, but usually at longish. ranges.
Even at Huesca you were generally safe enough if you took reasonable
precautions.

Up here, in the hills round Zaragoza, it was simply the mingled boredom and
discomfort of stationary warfare. A life as uneventful as a city clerk's, and
almost as regular. Sentry-go, patrols, digging; digging, patrols, sentry-go. On
every hill-top. Fascist or Loyalist, a knot of ragged, dirty men shivering round
their flag and trying to keep warm. And all day and night the meaningless
bullets wandering across the empty valleys and only by some rare improbable
chance getting home on a human body.

Often I used to gaze round the wintry landscape and marvel at the futility of
it all. The inconclusiveness of such a kind of war! Earlier, about October,
there had been savage fighting for all these hills; then, because the lack of
men and arms, especially artillery, made any large-scale operation impossible,
each army had dug itself in and settled down on the hill-tops it had won. Over
to our right there was a small outpost, also P.O.U.M., and on the spur to our
left, at seven o'clock of us, a P.S.U.C. position faced a taller spur with
several small Fascist posts dotted on its peaks. The so-called line zigzagged to
and fro in a pattern that would have been quite unintelligible if every position
had not flown a flag. The P.O.U.M. and P.S.U.C. flags were red, those of the
Anarchists red and black; the Fascists generally flew the monarchist flag
(red-yellow-red), but occasionally they flew the flag of the Republic
(red-yellow-purple). The scenery was stupendous, if you could forget that every
mountain--top was occupied by troops and was therefore littered with tin cans
and crusted with dung. To the right of us the sierra bent south--eastwards and
made way for the wide, veined valley that stretched across to Huesca. In the
middle of the plain a few tiny cubes sprawled like a throw of dice; this was the
town of Robres, which was in Loyalist possession. Often in the mornings the
valley was hidden under seas of cloud, out of which the hills rose flat and
blue, giving the landscape a strange resemblance to a photographic negative.
Beyond Huesca there were more hills of the same formation as our own, streaked
with a pattern of snow which altered day by day. In the far distance the
monstrous peaks of the Pyrenees, where the snow never melts, seemed to float
upon nothing. Even down in the plain everything looked dead and bare. The hills
opposite us were grey and wrinkled like the skins of elephants. Almost always
the sky was empty of birds. I do not think I have ever seen a country where
there were so few birds. The only birds one saw at any time were a kind of
magpie, and the coveys of partridges that startled one at night with their
sudden whirring, and, very rarely, the flights of eagles that drifted slowly
over, generally followed by rifle-shots which they did not deign to notice.

At night and in misty weather, patrols were sent out in the valley between
ourselves and the Fascists. The job was not popular, it was too cold and too
easy to get lost, and I soon found that I could get leave to go out on patrol as
often as I wished. In the huge jagged ravines there were no paths or tracks of
any kind; you could only find your way about by making successive journeys and
noting fresh landmarks each time. As the bullet flies the nearest Fascist post
was seven hundred metres from our own, but it was a mile and a half by the only
practicable route. It was rather fun wandering about the dark valleys with the
stray bullets flying high overhead like redshanks whistling. Better than
night-time were the heavy mists, which often lasted all day and which had a
habit of clinging round the hill-tops and leaving the valleys clear. When you
were anywhere near the Fascist lines you had to creep at a snail's pace; it was
very difficult to move quietly on those hill-sides, among the crackling shrubs
and tinkling limestones. It was only at the third or fourth attempt that I
managed to find my way to the Fascist lines. The mist was very thick, and I
crept up to the barbed wire to listen. I could hear the Fascists talking and
singing inside. Then to my alarm I heard several of them coming down the hill
towards me. I cowered behind a bush that suddenly seemed very small, and tried
to cock my rifle without noise. However, they branched off and did not come
within sight of me. Behind the bush where I was hiding I came upon various
relics of the earlier fighting--a pile of empty cartridge-cases, a leather cap
with a bullet-hole in it, and a red flag, obviously one-of our own. I took it
back to the position, where it was unsentimentally torn up for
cleaning-rags.

I had been made a corporal, or cabo, as it was called, as soon as we reached
the front, and was in command of a guard of twelve men. It was no sinecure,
especially at first. The centuria was an untrained mob composed mostly of boys
in their teens. Here and there in the militia you came across children as young
as eleven or twelve, usually refugees from Fascist territory who had been
enlisted as militiamen as the easiest way of providing for them. As a rule they
were employed on light work in the rear, but sometimes they managed to worm
their way to the front line, where they were a public menace. I remember one
little brute throwing a hand-grenade into the dug-out fire 'for a joke'. At
Monte Pocero I do not think there was anyone younger than fifteen, but the
average age must have been well under twenty. Boys of this age ought never to be
used in the front line, because they cannot stand the lack of sleep which is
inseparable from trench warfare. At the beginning it was almost impossible to
keep our position properly guarded at night. The wretched children of my section
could only be roused by dragging them out of their dug-outs feet foremost, and
as soon as your back was turned they left their posts and slipped into shelter;
or they would even, in spite of the frightful cold, lean up against the wall of
the trench and fall fast asleep. Luckily the enemy were very unenterprising.
There were nights when it seemed to me that our position could be stormed by
twenty Boy Scouts armed with airguns, or twenty Girl Guides armed with
battledores, for that matter.

At this time and until much later the Catalan militias were still on the same
basis as they had been at the beginning of the war. In the early days of
Franco's revolt the militias had been 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. When the
Popular Army, which was a 'non-political' army organized on more or less
ordinary lines, was raised at the beginning of 1937, the party militias were
theoretically incorporated in it. But for a long time the only changes that
occurred were on paper; the new Popular Army troops did not reach the Aragon
front in any numbers till June, and until that time the militia-system remained
unchanged. The essential point of the system was social equality between
officers and men. Everyone from general to private drew the same pay, ate the
same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of complete equality. If
you wanted to slap the general commanding the division on the back and ask him
for a cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it curious. In theory at
any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy. It was understood
that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an
order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There
were officers and N.C.O.S. but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense;
no titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to
produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless
society. Of course there was no perfect equality, but there was a nearer
approach to it than I had ever seen or than I would have thought conceivable in
time of war.

But I admit that at first sight the state of affairs at the front horrified
me. How on earth could the war be won by an army of this type? It was what
everyone was saying at the time, and though it was true it was also
unreasonable. For in the circumstances the militias could not have been much
better than they were. A modern mechanized army does not spring up out of the
ground, and if the Government had waited until it had trained troops at its
disposal, Franco would never have been resisted. Later it became the fashion to
decry the militias, and therefore to pretend that the faults which were due to
lack of training and weapons were the result of the equalitarian system.
Actually, a newly raised draft 'of militia was an undisciplined mob not because
the officers called the private 'Comrade' but because raw troops are always an
undisciplined mob. In practice the democratic 'revolutionary' type of discipline
is more reliable than might be expected. In a workers' army discipline is
theoretically voluntary. It is based on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of
a bourgeois conscript army is based ultimately on fear. (The Popular Army that
replaced the militias was midway between the two types.) In the militias the
bullying and abuse that go on in an ordinary army would never have been
tolerated for a moment. The normal military punishments existed, but they were
only invoked for very serious offences. When a man refused to obey an order you
did not immediately get him punished; you first appealed to him in the name of
comradeship. Cynical people with no experience of handling men will say
instantly that this would never 'work', but as a matter of fact it does 'work'
in the long run. The discipline of even the worst drafts of militia visibly
improved as time went on. In January the job of keeping a dozen raw recruits up
to the mark almost turned my hair grey. In May for a short while I was
acting-lieutenant in command of about thirty men, English and Spanish. We had
all been under fire for months, and I never had the slightest difficulty in
getting an order obeyed or in getting men to volunteer for a dangerous job.
'Revolutionary' discipline depends on political consciousness--on an
understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but
it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square. The
journalists who sneered at the militia-system seldom remembered that the
militias had to hold the line while the Popular Army was training in the rear.
And it is a tribute to the strength of 'revolutionary' discipline that the
militias stayed in the field-at all. For until about June 1937 there was nothing
to keep them there, except class loyalty. Individual deserters could be shot--
were shot, occasionally--but if a thousand men had decided to walk out of the
line together there was no force to stop them. A conscript army in the same
circumstances--with its battle-police removed--would have melted away. Yet the
militias held the line, though God knows they won very few victories, and even
individual desertions were not common. In four or five months in the P.O.U.M.
militia I only heard of four men deserting, and two of those were fairly
certainly spies who had enlisted to obtain information. At the beginning the
apparent chaos, the general lack of training, the fact that you often had to
argue for five minutes before you could get an order obeyed, appalled and
infuriated me. I had British Army ideas, and certainly the Spanish militias were
very unlike the British Army. But considering the circumstances they were better
troops than one had any right to expect.

Meanwhile, firewood--always firewood. Throughout that period there is
probably no entry in my diary that does not mention firewood, or rather the lack
of it. We were between two and three thousand feet above sea-level, it was mid
winter and the cold was unspeakable. The temperature was not exceptionally low,
on many nights it did not even freeze, and the wintry sun often shone for an
hour in the middle of the day; but even if it was not really cold, I assure you
that it seemed so. Sometimes there were shrieking winds that tore your cap off
and twisted your hair in all directions, sometimes there were mists that poured
into the trench like a liquid and seemed to penetrate your bones; frequently it
rained, and even a quarter of an hour's rain was enough to make conditions
intolerable. The thin skin of earth over the limestone turned promptly into a
slippery grease, and as you were always walking on a slope it was impossible to
keep your footing. On dark nights I have often fallen half a dozen times in
twenty yards; and this was dangerous, because it meant that the lock of one's
rifle became jammed with mud. For days together clothes, boots, blankets, and
rifles were more or less coated with mud. I had brought as many thick clothes as
I could carry, but many of the men were terribly underclad. For the whole
garrison, about a hundred men, there were only twelve great-coats, which had to
be handed from sentry to sentry, and most of the men had only one blanket. One
icy night I made a list in my diary of the clothes I was wearing. It is of some
interest as showing the amount of clothes the human body can carry. I was
wearing a thick vest and pants, a flannel shirt, two pull-overs, a woollen
jacket, a pigskin jacket, corduroy breeches, puttees, thick socks, boots, a
stout trench-coat, a muffler, lined leather gloves, and a woollen cap.
Nevertheless I was shivering like a jelly. But I admit I am unusually sensitive
to cold.

Firewood was the one thing that really mattered. The point about the firewood
was that there was practically no firewood to be had. Our miserable mountain had
not even at its best much vegetation, and for months it had been ranged over by
freezing militiamen, with the result that everything thicker than one's finger
had long since been burnt. When we were not eating, sleeping, on guard, or on
fatigue-duty we were in the valley behind the position, scrounging for fuel. All
my memories of that time are memories of scrambling up and down the almost
perpendicular slopes, over the jagged limestone that knocked one's boots to
pieces, pouncing eagerly on tiny twigs of wood. Three people searching for a
couple of hours could collect enough fuel to keep the dug-out fire alight for
about an hour. The eagerness of our search for firewood turned us all into
botanists. We classified according to their burning qualities every plant that
grew on the mountain-side; the various heaths and grasses that were good to
start a fire with but burnt out in a few minutes, the wild rosemary and the tiny
whin bushes that would burn when the fire was well alight, the stunted oak tree,
smaller than a gooseberry bush, that was practically unburnable. There was a
kind of dried-up reed that was very good for starting fires with, but these grew
only on the hill-top to the left of the position, and you had to go under fire
to get them. If the Fascist machine-gunners saw you they gave you a drum of
ammunition all to yourself. Generally their aim was high and the bullets sang
overhead like birds, but sometime they crackled and chipped the limestone
uncomfortably close, whereupon you flung yourself on your face. You went on
gathering reeds, however; nothing mattered in comparison with firewood.

Beside the cold the other discomforts seemed petty. Of course all of us were
permanently dirty. Our water, like our food, came on mule-back from Alcubierre,
and each man's share worked out at about a quart a day. It was beastly water,
hardly more transparent than milk. Theoretically it was for drinking only, but I
always stole a pannikinful for washing in the mornings. I used to wash one day
and shave the next; there was never enough water for both. The position stank
abominably, and outside the little enclosure of the barricade there was
excrement everywhere. Some of the militiamen habitually defecated in the trench,
a disgusting thing when one had to walk round it in the darkness. But the dirt
never worried me. Dirt is a thing people make too much fuss about. It is
astonishing how quickly you get used to doing without a handkerchief and to
eating out of the tin pannikin in which you also wash. Nor was sleeping in one's
clothes any hardship after a day or two. It was of course impossible to take
one's clothes and especially one's boots off at night; one had to be ready to
turn out instantly in case of an attack. In eighty nights I only took my clothes
off three times, though I did occasionally manage to get them off in the
daytime. It was too cold for lice as yet, but rats and mice abounded. It is
often said that you don't find rats and mice in the same place, but you do when
there is enough food for them.

In other ways we were not badly off. The food was good enough and there was
plenty of wine. Cigarettes were still being issued at the rate of a packet a
day, matches were issued every other day, and there was even an issue of
candles. They were very thin candles, like those on a Christmas cake, and were
popularly supposed to have been looted from churches. Every dug-out was issued
daily with three inches of candle, which would bum for about twenty minutes. At
that time it was still possible to buy candles, and I had brought several pounds
of them with me. Later on the famine of matches and candles made life a misery.
You do not realize the importance of these things until you lack them. In a
night-alarm, for instance, when everyone in the dug--out is scrambling for his
rifle and treading on everybody else's face, being able to strike a light may
make the difference between life and death. Every militiaman possessed a
tinder-lighter and several yards of yellow wick. Next to his rifle it was his
most important possession. The tinder-lighters had the great advantage that they
could be struck in a wind, but they would only smoulder, so that they were no
use for lighting a fire. When the match famine was at its worst our only way of
producing a flame was to pull the bullet out of a cartridge and touch the
cordite off with a tinder-lighter.

It was an extraordinary life that we were living--an extraordinary way to be
at war, if you could call it war. The whole militia chafed against the inaction
and clamoured constantly to know why we were not allowed to attack. But it was
perfectly obvious that there would be no battle for a long while yet, unless the
enemy started it. Georges Kopp, on his periodical tours of inspection, was quite
frank with us. 'This is not a war,' he used to say, 'it is a comic opera with an
occasional death.' As a matter of fact the stagnation on the Aragon front had
political causes of which I knew nothing at that time; but the purely military
difficulties--quite apart from the lack of reserves of men--were obvious to
anybody.

To begin with, there was the nature of the country. The front line, ours and
the Fascists', lay in positions of immense natural strength, which as a rule
could only be approached from one side. Provided a few trenches have been dug,
such places cannot be taken by infantry, except in overwhelming numbers. In our
own position or most of those round us a dozen men with two machine-guns could
have held off a battalion. Perched on the hill-tops as we were, we should have
made lovely marks for artillery; but there was no artillery. Sometimes I used to
gaze round the landscape and long--oh, how passionately!--for a couple of
batteries of guns. One could have destroyed the enemy positions one after
another as easily as smashing nuts with a hammer. But on our side the guns
simply did not exist. The Fascists did occasionally manage to bring a gun or two
from Zaragoza and fire a very few shells, so few that they never even found the
range and the shells plunged harmlessly into the empty ravines. Against
machine-guns and without artillery there are only three things you can do: dig
yourself in at a safe distance--four hundred yards, say--advance across the
open and be massacred, or make small-scale night-attacks that will not alter the
general situation. Practically the alternatives are stagnation or suicide.

And beyond this there was the complete lack of war materials of every
description. It needs an effort to realize how badly the militias were armed at
this time. Any public school O.T.C. in England is far more like a modern army
than we were. The badness of our weapons was so astonishing that it is worth
recording in detail.

For this sector of the front the entire artillery consisted of four
trench-mortars with fifteen rounds for each gun. Of course they were far too
precious to be fired and the mortars were kept in Alcubierre. There were
machine-guns at the rate of approximately one to fifty men; they were oldish
guns, but fairly accurate up to three or four hundred yards. Beyond this we had
only rifles, and the majority of the rifles were scrap-iron. There were three
types of rifle in use. The first was the long Mauser. These were seldom less
than twenty years old, their sights were about as much use as a broken
speedometer, and in most of them the rifling was hopelessly corroded; about one
rifle in ten was not bad, however. Then there was the short Mauser, or
mousqueton, really a cavalry weapon. These were more popular than the others
because they were lighter to carry and less nuisance in a trench, also because
they were comparatively new and looked efficient. Actually they were almost
useless. They were made out of reassembled parts, no bolt belonged to its rifle,
and three-quarters of them could be counted on to jam after five shots. There
were also a few Winchester rifles. These were nice to shoot with, but they were
wildly inaccurate, and as their cartridges had no clips they could only be fired
one shot at a time. Ammunition was so scarce that each man entering the line was
only issued with fifty rounds, and most of it was exceedingly bad. The
Spanish-made cartridges were all refills and would jam even the best rifles. The
Mexican cartridges were better and were therefore reserved for the machine-guns.
Best of all was the German-made ammunition, but as this came only from prisoners
and deserters there was not much of it. I always kept a clip of German or
Mexican ammunition in my pocket for use in an emergency. But in practice when
the emergency came I seldom fired my rifle; I was too frightened of the beastly
thing jamming and too anxious to reserve at any rate one round that would go
off.

We had no tin hats, no bayonets, hardly any revolvers or pistols, and not
more than one bomb between five or ten men. The bomb in use at this time was a
frightful object known as the 'F.A.I. bomb', it having been produced by the
Anarchists in the early days of the war. It was on the principle of a Mills
bomb, but the lever was held down not by a pin but a piece of tape. You broke
the tape and then got rid of the bomb with the utmost possible speed. It was
said of these bombs that they were 'impartial'; they killed the man they were
thrown at and the man who threw them. There were several other types, even more
primitive but probably a little less dangerous--to the thrower, I mean. It was
not till late March that I saw a bomb worth throwing.

And apart from weapons there was a shortage of all the minor necessities of
war. We had no maps or charts, for instance. Spain has never been fully
surveyed, and the only detailed maps of this area were the old military ones,
which were almost all in the possession of the Fascists. We had no
range-finders, no telescopes, no periscopes, no field-glasses except for a few
privately-owned pairs, no flares or Very lights, no wire-cutters, no armourers'
tools, hardly even any cleaning materials. The Spaniards seemed never to have
heard of a pull-through and looked on in surprise when I constructed one. When
you wanted your rifle cleaned you took it to the sergeant, who possessed a long
brass ramrod which was invariably bent and therefore scratched the rifling.
There was not even any gun oil. You greased your rifle with olive oil, when you
could get hold of it; at different times I have greased mine with vaseline, with
cold cream, and even with bacon-fat. Moreover, there were no lanterns or
electric torches--at this time there was not, I believe, such a thing as an
electric torch throughout the whole of our sector of the front, and you could
not buy one nearer than Barcelona, and only with difficulty even there.

As time went on, and the desultory rifle-fire rattled among the hills, I
began to wonder with increasing scepticism whether anything would ever happen to
bring a bit of life, or rather a bit of death, into this cock-eyed war. It was
pneumonia that we were fighting against, not against men. When the trenches are
more than five hundred yards apart no one gets hit except by accident. Of course
there were casualties, but the majority of them were self-inflicted. If I
remember rightly, the first five men I saw wounded in Spain were all wounded by
our own weapons--I don't mean intentionally, but owing to accident or
carelessness. Our worn-out rifles were a danger in themselves. Some of them had
a nasty trick of going off if the butt was tapped on the ground; I saw a man
shoot himself through the hand owing to this. And in the darkness the raw
recruits were always firing at one another. One evening when it was barely even
dusk a sentry let fly at me from a distance of twenty yards; but he missed me by
a yard--goodness knows how many times the Spanish standard of marksmanship has
saved my life. Another time I had gone out on patrol in the mist and had
carefully warned the guard commander beforehand. But in coming back I stumbled
against a bush, the startled sentry called out that the Fascists were coming,
and I had the pleasure of hearing the guard commander order everyone to open
rapid fire in my direction. Of course I lay down and the bullets went harmlessly
over me. Nothing will convince a Spaniard, at least a young Spaniard, that
fire-arms are dangerous. Once, rather later than this, I was photographing some
machine-gunners with their gun, which was pointed directly towards me.

'Don't fire,' I said half-jokingly as I focused the camera.

'Oh no, we won't fire.'

The next moment there was a frightful roar and a stream of bullets tore past
my face so close that my cheek was stung by grains of cordite. It was
unintentional, but the machine-gunners considered it a great joke. Yet only a
few days earlier they had seen a mule-driver accidentally shot by a political
delegate who was playing the fool with an automatic pistol and had put five
bullets in the mule-driver's lungs.

The difficult passwords which the army was using at this time were a minor
source of danger. They were those tiresome double passwords in which one word
has to be answered by another. Usually they were of an elevating and
revolutionary nature, such as Cultura--progreso, or Seremos--invencibles, and
it was often impossible to get illiterate sentries to remember these
highfalutin' words. One night, I remember, the password was Cataluna--eroica,
and a moonfaced peasant lad named Jaime Domenech approached me, greatly puzzled,
and asked me to explain.

'Eroica--what does eroica mean?'

I told him that it meant the same as valiente. A little while later he was
stumbling up the trench in the darkness, and the sentry challenged him:

'Alto! Cataluna!'

'Valiente!' yelled Jaime, certain that he was saying the right thing.

Bang!

However, the sentry missed him. In this war everyone always did miss everyone
else, when it was humanly possible.




Chapter 4



WHEN I had been about three weeks in the line a contingent of twenty or
thirty men, sent out from England by the I.L.P., arrived at Alcubierre, and in
order to keep the English on this front together Williams and I were sent to
join them. Our new position was at Monte Oscuro, several miles farther west and
within sight of Zaragoza.

The position was perched on a sort of razor-back of limestone with dug-outs
driven horizontally into the cliff like sand-martins' nests. They went into the
ground for prodigious distances, and inside they were pitch dark and so low that
you could not even kneel in them, let alone stand. On the peaks to the left of
us there were two more P.O.U.M. positions, one of them an object of fascination
to every man in the line, because there were three militiawomen there who did
the cooking. These women were not exactly beautiful, but it was found necessary
to put the position out of bounds to men of other companies. Five hundred yards
to our right there was a P.S.U.C. post at the bend of the Alcubierre road. It
was just here that the road changed hands. At night you could watch the lamps of
our supply-lorries winding out from Alcubierre and, simultaneously, those of the
Fascists coming from Zaragoza. You could see Zaragoza itself, a thin string of
lights like the lighted portholes of a ship, twelve miles south-westward. The
Government troops had gazed at it from that distance since August 1936, and they
are gazing at it still.

There were about thirty of ourselves, including one Spaniard (Ramon,
Williams's brother-in-law), and there were a dozen Spanish machine--gunners.
Apart from the one or two inevitable nuisances--for, as everyone knows, war
attracts riff-raff--the English were an exceptionally good crowd, both
physically and mentally. Perhaps the best of the bunch was Bob Smillie--the
grandson of the famous miners' leader--who afterwards died such an evil and
meaningless death in Valencia. It says a lot for the Spanish character that the
English and the Spaniards always got on well together, in spite of the language
difficulty. All Spaniards, we discovered, knew two English expressions. One was
'O.K., baby', the other was a word used by the Barcelona whores in their
dealings with English sailors, and I am afraid the compositors would not print
it.

Once again there was nothing happening all along the line: only the random
crack of bullets and, very rarely, the crash of a Fascist mortar that sent
everyone running to the top trench to see which hill the shells were bursting
on. The enemy was somewhat closer to us here, perhaps three or four hundred
yards away. Their nearest position was exactly opposite ours, with a machine-gun
nest whose loopholes constantly tempted one to waste cartridges. The Fascists
seldom bothered with rifle-shots, but sent bursts of accurate machine-gun fire
at anyone who exposed himself. Nevertheless it was ten days or more before we
had our first casualty. The troops opposite us were Spaniards, but according to
the deserters there were a few German N.C.O.S. among them. At some time in the
past there had also been Moors there--poor devils, how they must have felt the
cold!--for out in no man's land there was a dead Moor who was one of the sights
of the locality. A mile or two to the left of us the line ceased to be
continuous and there was a tract of country, lower-lying and thickly wooded,
which belonged neither to the Fascists nor ourselves. Both we and they used to
make daylight patrols there. It was not bad fun in a Boy Scoutish way, though I
never saw a Fascist patrol nearer than several hundred yards. By a lot of
crawling on your belly you could work your way partly through the Fascist lines
and could even see the farm-house flying the monarchist flag, which was the
local Fascist headquarters. Occasionally we gave it a rifle-volley and then
slipped into cover before the machine-guns could locate us. I hope we broke a
few windows, but it was a good eight hundred metres away, and with our rifles
you could not make sure of hitting even a house at that range.

The weather was mostly clear and cold; sometimes sunny at midday, but always
cold. Here and there in the soil of the hill-sides you found the green beaks of
wild crocuses or irises poking through; evidently spring was coming, but coming
very slowly. The nights were colder than ever. Coming off guard in the small
hours we used to rake together what was left of the cook-house fire and then
stand in the red-hot embers. It was bad for your boots, but it was very good for
your feet. But there were mornings when the sight of the dawn among the
mountain--tops made it almost worth while to be out of bed at godless hours. I
hate mountains, even from a spectacular point of view. But sometimes the dawn
breaking behind the hill-tops in our rear, the first narrow streaks of gold,
like swords slitting the darkness, and then the growing light and the seas of
carmine cloud stretching away into inconceivable distances, were worth watching
even when you had been up all night, when your legs were numb from the knees
down, and you were sullenly reflecting that there was no hope of food for
another three hours. I saw the dawn oftener during this campaign than during the
rest of my life put together--or during the part that is to come, I hope.

We were short-handed here, which meant longer guards and more fatigues. I was
beginning to suffer a little from the lack of sleep which is inevitable even in
the quietest kind of war. Apart from guard-duties and patrols there were
constant night-alarms and stand--to's, and in any case you can't sleep properly
in a beastly hole in the ground with your feet aching with the cold. In my first
three or four months in the line I do not suppose I had more than a dozen
periods of twenty-four hours that were completely without sleep; on the other
hand I certainly did not have a dozen nights of full sleep. Twenty or thirty
hours' sleep in a week was quite a normal amount. The effects of this were not
so bad as might be expected; one grew very stupid, and the job of climbing up
and down the hills grew harder instead of easier, but one felt well and one was
constantly hungry--heavens, how hungry! All food seemed good, even the eternal
haricot beans which everyone in Spain finally learned to hate the sight of. Our
water, what there was of it, came from miles away, on the backs of mules or
little persecuted donkeys. For some reason the Aragon peasants treated their
mules well but their donkeys abominably. If a donkey refused to go it was quite
usual to kick him in the testicles. The issue of candles had ceased, and matches
were running short. The Spaniards taught us how to make olive oil lamps out of a
condensed milk tin, a cartridge-clip, and a bit of rag. When you had any olive
oil, which was not often, these things would burn with a smoky flicker, about a
quarter candle power, just enough to find your rifle by.

There seemed no hope of any real fighting. When we left Monte Pocero I had
counted my cartridges and found that in nearly three weeks I had fired just
three shots at the enemy. They say it takes a thousand bullets to kill a man,
and at this rate it would be twenty years before I killed my first Fascist. At
Monte Oscuro the lines were closer and one fired oftener, but I am reasonably
certain that I never hit anyone. As a matter of fact, on this front and at this
period of the war the real weapon was not the rifle but the megaphone. Being
unable to kill your enemy you shouted at him instead. This method of warfare is
so extraordinary that it needs explaining.

Wherever the lines were within hailing distance of one another there was
always a good deal of shouting from trench to trench. From ourselves: 'Fascistas
--maricones!' From the Fascists: ''Viva Espana! Viva Franco!'--or, when they
knew that there were English opposite them: 'Go home, you English! We don't want
foreigners here!' On the Government side, in the party militias, the shouting of
propaganda to undermine the enemy morale had been developed into a regular
technique. In every suitable position men, usually machine-gunners, were told
off for shouting-duty and provided with megaphones. Generally they shouted a
set-piece, full of revolutionary sentiments which explained to the Fascist
soldiers that they were merely the hirelings of international capitalism, that
they were fighting against their own class, etc., etc., and urged them to come
over to our side. This was repeated over and over by relays of men; sometimes it
continued almost the whole night. There is very little doubt that it had its
effect; everyone agreed that the trickle of Fascist deserters was partly caused
by it. If one comes to think of it, when some poor devil of a sentry--very
likely a Socialist or Anarchist trade union member who has been conscripted
against his will--is freezing at his post, the slogan 'Don't fight against your
own class!' ringing again and again through the darkness is bound to make an
impression on him. It might make just the difference between deserting and not
deserting. Of course such a proceeding does not fit in with the English
conception of war. I admit I was amazed and scandalized when I first saw it
done. The idea of trying to convert your enemy instead of shooting him! I now
think that from any point of view it was a legitimate manoeuvre. In ordinary
trench warfare, when there is no artillery, it is extremely difficult to inflict
casualties on the enemy without receiving an equal number yourself. If you can
immobilize a certain number of men by making them desert, so much the better;
deserters are actually more useful to you than corpses, because they can give
information. But at the beginning it dismayed all of us; it made us fed that the
Spaniards were not taking this war of theirs sufficiently seriously. The man who
did the shouting at the P.S.U.C. post down on our right was an artist at the
job. Sometimes, instead of shouting revolutionary slogans he simply told the
Fascists how much better we were fed than they were. His account of the
Government rations was apt to be a little imaginative.' Buttered toast!'--you
could hear his voice echoing across the lonely valley--'We're just sitting down
to buttered toast over here! Lovely slices of buttered toast!' I do not doubt
that, like the rest of us, he had not seen butter for weeks or months past, but
in the icy night the news of buttered toast probably set many a Fascist mouth
watering. It even made mine water, though I knew he was lying.

One day in February we saw a Fascist aeroplane approaching. As usual, a
machine-gun was dragged into the open and its barrel cocked up, and everyone lay
on his back to get a good aim. Our isolated positions were not worth bombing,
and as a rule the few Fascist aeroplanes that passed our way circled round to
avoid machine-gun fire. This time the aeroplane came straight over, too high up
to be worth shooting at, and out of it came tumbling not bombs but white
glittering things that turned over and over in the air. A few fluttered down
into the position. They were copies of a Fascist newspaper, the Heraldo de
Aragon, announcing the fall of Malaga.

That night the Fascists made a sort of abortive attack. I was just getting
down into kip, half dead with sleep, when there was a heavy stream of bullets
overhead and someone shouted into the dug-out: 'They're attacking!' I grabbed my
rifle and slithered up to my post, which was at the top of the position, beside
the machine-gun. There was utter darkness and diabolical noise. The fire of, I
think five machine-guns was pouring upon us, and there was a series of heavy
crashes caused by the Fascists flinging bombs over their own parapet in the most
idiotic manner. It was intensely dark. Down in the valley to the left of us I
could see the greenish flash of rifles where a small party of Fascists, probably
a patrol, were chipping in. The bullets were flying round us in the darkness,
crack-zip-crack. A few shells came whistling over, but they fell nowhere near us
and (as usual in this war) most of them failed to explode. I had a bad moment
when yet another machine-gun opened fire from the hill-top in our rear--
actually a gun that had been brought up to support us, but at the time it looked
as though we were surrounded. .Presently our own machine-gun jammed, as it
always did jam with those vile cartridges, and the ramrod was lost in the
impenetrable darkness. Apparently there was nothing that one could do except
stand still and be shot at. The Spanish machine-gunners disdained to take cover,
in fact exposed themselves deliberately, so I had to do likewise. Petty though
it was, the whole experience was very interesting. It was the first time that I
had been properly speaking under fire, and to my humiliation I found that I was
horribly frightened. You always, I notice, feel the same when you are under
heavy fire--not so much afraid of being hit as afraid because you don't know
where you will be hit. You are wondering all the while just where the bullet
will nip you, and it gives your whole body a most unpleasant sensitiveness.

After an hour or two the firing slowed down and died away. Meanwhile we had
had only one casualty. The Fascists had advanced a couple of machine-guns into
no man's land, but they had kept a safe distance and made no attempt to storm
our parapet. They were in fact not attacking, merely wasting cartridges and
making a cheerful noise to celebrate the fall of Malaga. 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 Fascists told us that Malaga had fallen we set it down as a lie, but
next day there were more convincing rumours, and it must have been a day or two
later that it was admitted officially. By degrees the whole disgraceful story
leaked out--how the town had been evacuated without firing a shot, and how the
fury of the Italians had fallen not upon the troops, who were gone, but upon the
wretched civilian population, some of whom were pursued and machine-gunned for a
hundred miles. The news sent a sort of chill all along the line, for, whatever
the truth may have been, every man in the militia believed that the loss of
Malaga was due to treachery. It was the first talk I had heard of treachery or
divided aims. It set up in my mind the first vague doubts about this war in
which, hitherto, the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple.

In mid February we left Monte Oscuro and were sent, together with all the
P.O.U.M. troops in this sector, to make a part of the army besieging Huesca. It
was a fifty-mile lorry journey across the wintry plain, where the clipped vines
were not yet budding and the blades of the winter barley were just poking
through the lumpy soil. Four kilometres from our new trenches Huesca glittered
small and clear like a city of dolls' houses. Months earlier, when Sietamo was
taken, the general commanding the Government troops had said gaily: 'Tomorrow
we'll have coffee in Huesca.' It turned out that he was mistaken. There had been
bloody attacks, but the town did not fall, and 'Tomorrow we'll have coffee in
Huesca' had become a standing joke throughout the army. If I ever go back to
Spain I shall make a point of having a cup of coffee in Huesca.




Chapter 5



ON the eastern side of Huesca, until late March, nothing happened--almost
literally nothing. We were twelve hundred metres from the enemy. When the
Fascists were driven back into Huesca the Republican Army troops who held this
part of the line had not been over-zealous in their advance, so that the line
formed a kind of pocket. Later it would have to be advanced--a ticklish job
under fire--but for the present the enemy might as well have been nonexistent;
our sole preoccupation was keeping warm and getting enough to eat. As a matter
of fact there were things in this period that interested me greatly, and I will
describe some of them later. But I shall be keeping nearer to the order of
events if I try here to give some account of the internal political situation on
the Government side.

At the beginning I had ignored the political side of the war, and it was only
about this time that it began to force itself upon my attention. If you are not
interested in the horrors of party politics, please skip; I am trying to keep
the political parts of this narrative in separate chapters for precisely that
purpose. But at the same time it would be quite impossible to write about the
Spanish war from a purely military angle. It was above all things a political
war. No event in it, at any rate during the first year, is intelligible unless
one has some grasp of the inter-party struggle that was going on behind the
Government lines.

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 what kind of a war. If you had asked me why I had
joined the 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.' I had accepted the News Chronicle-New Statesman version of the war as
the defence of civilization against a maniacal outbreak by an army of Colonel
Blimps in the pay of Hitler. 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--
P.S.U.C., P.O.U.M., F.A.I., C.N.T., U.G.T., J.C.I., J.S.U., A.I.T.--they merely
exasperated me. It looked at first sight as though Spain were suffering from a
plague of initials. I knew that I was serving in something called the P.O.U.M.
(I had only joined the P.O.U.M. militia rather than any other because I happened
to arrive in Barcelona with I.L.P. papers), but I did not realize that there
were serious differences between the political parties. At Monte Pocero, when
they pointed to the position on our left and said:

'Those are the Socialists' (meaning the P.S.U.C.), I was puzzled and said:
'Aren't we all Socialists?' I thought it idiotic that people fighting for their
lives should have separate parties; my attitude always was, 'Why can't we drop
all this political nonsense and get on with the war?' This of course was the
correct' anti-Fascist' attitude which had been carefully disseminated by the
English newspapers, largely in order to prevent people from grasping the real
nature of the struggle. But in Spain, especially in Catalonia, it was an
attitude that no one could or did keep up indefinitely. Everyone, however
unwillingly, took sides sooner or later. For even if one cared nothing for the
political parties and their conflicting 'lines', it was too obvious that one's
own destiny was involved. As a militiaman one was a soldier against Franco, but
one was also a pawn in an enormous struggle that was being fought out between
two political theories. When I scrounged for firewood on the mountainside and
wondered whether this was really a war or whether the News Chronicle had made it
up, when I dodged the Communist machine-guns in the Barcelona riots, when I
finally fled from Spain with the police one jump behind me--all these things
happened to me in that particular way because I was serving in the P.O.U.M.
militia and not in the P.S.U.C. So great is the difference between two sets of
initials!

To understand the alignment on the Government side one has got to remember
how the war started. 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. The
Japanese had been allowed to do as they liked in Manchuria. Hitler had walked
into power and proceeded to massacre political opponents of all shades.
Mussolini had bombed the Abyssinians while fifty-three nations (I think it was
fifty-three) made pious noises 'off'. But when Franco tried to overthrow a
mildly Left-wing Government the Spanish people, against all expectation, had
risen against him. It seemed--possibly it was--the turning of the tide.

But there were several points that escaped general notice. To begin with,
Franco was not strictly comparable with Hitler or Mussolini. His rising was a
military mutiny backed up by the aristocracy and the Church, and in the main,
especially at the beginning, it was an attempt not so much to impose Fascism as
to restore feudalism. This meant that Franco had against him not only the
working class but also various sections of the liberal bourgeoisie--the very
people who are the supporters of Fascism when it appears in a more modern form.
More important than this was the fact that the Spanish working class did not, as
we might conceivably do in England, resist Franco in the name of 'democracy' and
the status quo', their resistance was accompanied by--one might almost say it
consisted of--a definite revolutionary outbreak. Land was seized by the
peasants; many factories and most of the transport were seized by the trade
unions; churches were wrecked and the priests driven out or killed. The Daily
Mail, amid the cheers of the Catholic clergy, was able to represent Franco as a
patriot delivering his country from hordes of fiendish 'Reds'.

For the first few months of the war Franco's real opponent was not so much
the Government as the trade unions. As soon as the rising broke out the
organized town workers replied by calling a general strike and then by demanding
--and, after a struggle, getting--arms from the public arsenals. If they had
not acted spontaneously and more or less independently it is quite conceivable
that Franco would never have been resisted. There can, of course, be no
certainty about this, but there is at least reason for thinking it. The
Government had made little or no attempt to forestall the rising, which had been
foreseen for a long time past, and when the trouble started its attitude was
weak and hesitant, so much so, indeed, that Spain had three premiers in a single
day. [Note 1, below] Moreover, the one step that could save the immediate situation,
the arming of the workers, was only taken unwillingly and in response to violent
popular clamour. However, the arms were distributed, and in the big towns of
eastern Spain the Fascists were defeated by a huge effort, mainly of the working
class, aided by some of the armed forces (Assault Guards, etc.) who had remained
loyal. It was the kind of effort that could probably only be made by people who were
fighting with a revolutionary intention--i.e. believed that they were fighting
for something better than the status quo. In the various centres of revolt it is
thought that three thousand people died in the streets in a single day. Men and
women armed only with sticks of dynamite rushed across the open squares and
stormed stone buildings held by trained soldiers with machine-guns. Machine-gun
nests that the Fascists had placed at strategic spots were smashed by rushing
taxis at them at sixty miles an hour. Even if one had heard nothing of the
seizure of the land by the peasants, the setting up of local Soviets, etc., it
would be hard to believe that the Anarchists and Socialists who were the
backbone of the resistance were doing this kind of thing for the preservation of
capitalist democracy, which especially in the Anarchist view was no more than a
centralized swindling machine.

[Note 1. Quiroga, Barrios, and Giral. The first two refused to distribute arms
to the trade unions.]

Meanwhile the workers had weapons in their hands, and at this stage they
refrained from giving them up. (Even a year later it was computed that the
Anarcho-Syndicalists in Catalonia possessed 30,000 rifles.) The estates of the
big pro-Fascist landlords were in many places seized by the peasants. Along with
the collectivization of industry and transport there was an attempt to set up
the rough beginnings of a workers' government by means of local committees,
workers' patrols to replace the old pro-capitalist police forces, workers'
militias based on the trade unions, and so forth. Of course the process was not
uniform, and it went further in Catalonia than elsewhere. There were areas where
the institutions of local government remained almost untouched, and others where
they existed side by side with revolutionary committees. In a few places
independent Anarchist communes were set up, and some of them remained in being
till about a year later, when they were forcibly suppressed by the Government.
In Catalonia, for the first few months, most of the actual power was in the
hands of the Anarcho-syndicalists, who controlled most of the key industries.
The thing that had happened in Spain was, in fact, not merely a civil war, but
the beginning of a revolution. It is this fact that the anti-Fascist press
outside Spain has made it its special business to obscure. The issue has been
narrowed down to 'Fascism versus democracy' and the revolutionary aspect
concealed as much as possible. In England, where the Press is more centralized
and the public more easily deceived than elsewhere, only two versions of the
Spanish war have had any publicity to speak of: the Right-wing version of
Christian patriots versus Bolsheviks dripping with blood, and the Left-wing
version of gentlemanly republicans quelling a military revolt. The central issue
has been successfully covered up.

There were several reasons for this. To begin with, appalling lies about
atrocities were being circulated by the pro-Fascist press, and well-meaning
propagandists undoubtedly thought that they were aiding the Spanish Government
by denying that Spain had 'gone Red'. But the main reason was this: that, except
for the small revolutionary groups which exist in all countries, the whole world
was determined, upon preventing revolution in Spain. In particular the Communist
Party, with Soviet Russia behind it, had thrown its whole weight against the
revolution. It was the Communist thesis that revolution at this stage would be
fatal and that what was to be aimed at in Spain was not workers' control, but
bourgeois democracy. It hardly needs pointing out why 'liberal' capitalist
opinion took the same line. Foreign capital was heavily invested in Spain. The
Barcelona Traction Company, for instance, represented ten millions of British
capital; and meanwhile the trade unions had seized all the transport in
Catalonia. If the revolution went forward there would be no compensation, or
very little; if the capitalist republic prevailed, foreign investments would be
safe. And since the revolution had got to be crushed, it greatly simplified
things to pretend that no revolution had happened. In this way the real
significance of every event could be covered up; every shift of power from the
trade unions to the central Government could be represented as a necessary step
in military reorganization. The situation produced was curious in the extreme.
Outside Spain few people grasped that there was a revolution; inside Spain
nobody doubted it. Even the P.S.U.C. newspapers. Communist-controlled and more
or less committed to an anti-revolutionary policy, talked about 'our glorious
revolution'. And meanwhile the Communist press in foreign countries was shouting
that there was no sign of revolution anywhere; the seizure of factories, setting
up of workers' committees, etc., had not happened--or, alternatively, had
happened, but 'had no political significance'. According to the Daily Worker (6
August 1936) those who said that the Spanish people were fighting for social
revolution, or for anything other than bourgeois democracy, were' downright
lying scoundrels'. On the other hand, Juan Lopez, a member of the Valencia
Government, declared in February 1937 that 'the Spanish people are shedding
their blood, not for the democratic Republic and its paper Constitution, but
for . . . a revolution'. So it would appear that the downright lying scoundrels
included members of the Government for which we were bidden to fight. Some of
the foreign anti-Fascist papers even descended to the pitiful lie of pretending
that churches were only attacked when they were used as Fascist fortresses.
Actually churches were pillaged everywhere and as a matter of course, because it
was perfectly well understood that the Spanish Church was part of the capitalist
racket. In six months in Spain I only saw two undamaged churches, and until
about July 1937 no churches were allowed to reopen and hold services, except for
one or two Protestant churches in Madrid.

But, after all, it was only the beginning of a revolution, not the complete
thing. Even when the workers, certainly in Catalonia and possibly elsewhere, had
the power to do so, they did not overthrow or completely replace the Government.
Obviously they could not do so when Franco was hammering at the gate and
sections of the middle class were on their side. The country was in a
transitional state that was capable either of developing in the direction of
Socialism or of reverting to an ordinary capitalist republic. The peasants had
most of the land, and they were likely to keep it, unless Franco won; all large
industries had been collectivized, but whether they remained collectivized, or
whether capitalism was reintroduced, would depend finally upon which group
gained control. At the beginning both the Central Government and the Generalite
de Cataluna (the semi-autonomous Catalan Government) could definitely be said to
represent the working class. The Government was headed by Caballero, a Left-wing
Socialist, and contained ministers representing the U.G.T. (Socialist trade
unions) and the C.N.T. (Syndicalist unions controlled by the Anarchists). The
Catalan Generalite was for a while virtually superseded by an anti-Fascist
Defence Committee [Note 2, below] consisting mainly of delegates from the trade
unions. Later the Defence Committee was dissolved and the Generalite was
reconstituted so as to represent the unions and the various Left-wing parties.
But every subsequent reshuffling of the Government was a move towards the Right.
First the P.O.U.M. was expelled from the Generalite; six months later Caballero
was replaced by the Right-wing Socialist Negrin; shortly afterwards the C.N.T.
was eliminated from the Government; then the U.G.T.; then the C.N.T. was turned
out of the Generalite; finally, a year after the outbreak of war and revolution,
there remained a Government composed entirely of Right-wing Socialists, Liberals,
and Communists.

[Note 2. Comite Central de Milicias Antifascistas.
Delegates were chosen in proportion to the membership of their organizations.
Nine delegates represented the trade unions, three the Catalan Liberal parties,
and two the various Marxist parties (P.O.U.M., Communists, and others).]

The general swing to the Right dates from about October-November 1936, when
the U.S.S.R. began to supply arms to the Government and power began to pass from
the Anarchists to the Communists. Except Russia and Mexico no country had had
the decency to come to the rescue of the Government, and Mexico, for obvious
reasons, could not supply arms in large quantities. Consequently the Russians
were in a position to dictate terms. There is very little doubt that these terms
were, in substance, 'Prevent revolution or you get no weapons', and that the
first move against the revolutionary elements, the expulsion of the P.O.U.M.
from the Catalan Generalite, was done under orders from the U.S.S.R. It has been
denied that any direct pressure was exerted by the Russian Government, but the
point is not of great importance, for the Communist parties of all countries can
be taken as carrying out Russian policy, and it is not denied that the Communist
Party was the chief mover first against the P.O.U.M., later against the
Anarchists and against Caballero's section of the Socialists, and, in general,
against a revolutionary policy. Once the U.S.S.R. had intervened the triumph of
the Communist Party was assured. To begin with, gratitude to Russia for the arms
and the fact that the Communist Party, especially since the arrival of the
International Brigades, looked capable of winning the war, immensely raised the
Communist prestige. Secondly, the Russian arms were supplied via the Communist
Party and the parties allied to them, who saw to it that as few as possible got
to their political opponents. [Note 3, below] Thirdly, by proclaiming
a non-revolutionary policy the Communists were able to gather in
all those whom the extremists had scared. It was easy, for instance, to rally
the wealthier peasants against the collectivization policy of the Anarchists.
There was an enormous growth in the membership of the party, and the influx was
largely from the middle class--shopkeepers, officials, army officers,
well-to-do peasants, etc., etc. The war was essentially a triangular struggle.
The fight against Franco had to continue, but the simultaneous aim of the
Government was to recover such power as remained in the hands of the trade
unions. It was done by a series of small moves--a policy of pin-pricks, as
somebody called it--and on the whole very cleverly. There was no general and
obvious counter-revolutionary move, and until May 1937 it was scarcely necessary
to use force. The workers could always be brought to heel by an argument that is
almost too obvious to need stating: 'Unless you do this, that, and the other we
shall lose the war.' In every case, needless to say, it appeared that the thing
demanded by military necessity was the surrender of something that the workers
had won for themselves in 1936. But the argument could hardly fail, because to
lose the war was the last thing that the revolutionary parties wanted; if the
war was lost democracy and revolution. Socialism and Anarchism, became
meaningless words. The Anarchists, the only revolutionary party that was big
enough to matter, were obliged to give way on point after point. The process of
collectivization was checked, the local committees were got rid of, the workers
patrols were abolished and the pre-war police forces, largely reinforced and
very heavily armed, were restored, and various key industries which had been
under the control of the trade unions were taken over by the Government (the
seizure of the Barcelona Telephone Exchange, which led to the May fighting, was
one incident in this process); finally, most important of all, the workers'
militias, based on the trade unions, were gradually broken up and redistributed
among the new Popular Army, a 'non-political' army on semi-bourgeois lines, with
a differential pay rate, a privileged officer-caste, etc., etc. In the special
circumstances this was the really decisive step; it happened later in Catalonia
than elsewhere because it was there that the revolutionary parties were
strongest. Obviously the only guarantee that the workers could have of retaining
their winnings was to keep some of the armed forces under their own control. As
usual, the breaking-up of the militias was done in the name of military
efficiency; and no one denied that a thorough military reorganization was
needed. It would, however, have been quite possible to reorganize the militias
and make them more efficient while keeping them under direct control of the
trade unions; the main purpose of the change was to make sure that the
Anarchists did not possess an army of their own. Moreover, the democratic spirit
of the militias made them breeding-grounds for revolutionary ideas. The
Communists were well aware of this, and inveighed ceaselessly and bitterly
against the P.O.U.M. and Anarchist principle of equal pay for all ranks. A
general 'bourgeoisification', a deliberate destruction of the equalitarian
spirit of the first few months of the revolution, was taking place. All happened
so swiftly that people making successive visits to Spain at intervals of a few
months have declared that they seemed scarcely to be visiting the same country;
what had seemed on the surface and for a brief instant to be a workers' State
was changing before one's eyes into an ordinary bourgeois republic with the
normal division into rich and poor. By the autumn of 1937 the 'Socialist' Negrin
was declaring in public speeches that 'we respect private property', and members
of the Cortes who at the beginning of the war had had to fly the country because
of their suspected Fascist sympathies were returning to Spain. The whole process
is easy to understand if one remembers that it proceeds from the temporary
alliance that Fascism, in certain forms, forces upon the bourgeois and the
worker. This alliance, known as the Popular Front, is in essential an alliance
of enemies, and it seems probable that it must always end by one partner
swallowing the other. The only unexpected feature in the Spanish situation--and
outside Spain it has caused an immense amount of misunderstanding--is that
among the parties on the Government side the Communists stood not upon the
extreme Left, but upon the extreme Right. In reality this should cause no
surprise, because the tactics of the Communist Party elsewhere, especially in
France, have made it clear that Official Communism must be regarded, at any rate
for the time being, as an anti-revolutionary force. The whole of Comintern
policy is now subordinated (excusably, considering the world situation) to the
defence of U.S.S.R., which depends upon a system of military alliances. In
particular, the U.S.S.R. is in alliance with France, a capitalist-imperialist
country. The alliance is of little use to Russia unless French capitalism is
strong, therefore Communist policy in France has got to be anti-revolutionary.
This means not only that French Communists now march behind the tricolour and
sing the Marseillaise, but, what is more important, that they have had to drop
all effective agitation in the French colonies. It is less than three years
since Thorez, the Secretary of the French Communist Party, was declaring that
the French workers would never be bamboozled into fighting against their German
comrades; [Note 4, below] he is now one of the loudest-lunged patriots
in France. The clue to the behaviour of the Communist Party in any country
is the military relation of that country, actual or potential, towards the
U.S.S.R. In England, for instance, the position is still uncertain,
hence the English Communist Party is still hostile to the National
Government, and, ostensibly, opposed to rearmament. If, however,
Great Britain enters into an alliance or military understanding with the
U.S.S.R., the English Communist, like the French Communist, will have no choice
but to become a good patriot and imperialist; there are premonitory signs of
this already. In Spain the Communist 'line' was undoubtedly influenced by the
fact that France, Russia's ally, would strongly object to a revolutionary
neighbour and would raise heaven and earth to prevent the liberation of Spanish
Morocco. The Daily Mail, with its tales of red revolution financed by Moscow,
was even more wildly wrong than usual. In reality it was the Communists above
all others who prevented revolution in Spain. Later, when the Right-wing forces
were in full control, the Communists showed themselves willing to go a great
deal further than the Liberals in hunting down the revolutionary leaders.
[Note 5, below]

[Note 3. This was why there were so few Russian arms on
the Aragon front, where the troops were predominantly Anarchist. Until April
1937 the only Russian weapon I saw--with the exception of some aeroplanes which
may or may not have been Russian--was a solitary sub-machine-gun.]

[Note 4. In the Chamber of Deputies, March 1935.]

[Note 5. For the best account of the interplay between
the parties on the Government side, see Franz Borkenau's The Spanish Cockpit.
This is by a long way the ablest book that has yet appeared on the Spanish war.]

I have tried to sketch the general course of the Spanish revolution during
its first year, because this makes it easier to understand the situation at any
given moment. But I do not want to suggest that in February I held all of the
opinions that are implied in what I have said above. To begin with, the things
that most enlightened me had not yet happened, and in any case my sympathies
were in some ways different from what they are now. This was partly because the
political side of the war bored me and I naturally reacted against the viewpoint
of which I heard most--i.e. the P.O.U.M.-I.L.P. viewpoint. The Englishmen I was
among were mostly I.L.P. members, with a few C.P. members among them, and most
of them were much better educated politically than myself. For weeks on end,
during the dull period when nothing was happening round Huesca, I found myself
in the middle of a political discussion that practically never ended. In the
draughty evil-smelling barn of the farm-house where we were billeted, in the
stuffy blackness of dug-outs, behind the parapet in the freezing midnight hours,
the conflicting party 'lines' were debated over and over. Among the Spaniards it
was the same, and most of the newspapers we saw made the inter-party feud their
chief feature. One would have had to be deaf or an imbecile not to pick up some
idea of what the various parties stood for.

From the point of view of political theory there were only three parties that
mattered, the P.S.U.C., the P.O.U.M., and the C.N.T.-F.A.I., loosely described
as the Anarchists. I take the P.S.U.C. first, as being the most important; it
was the party that finally triumphed, and even at this time it was visibly in
the ascendant.

It is necessary to explain that when one speaks of the P.S.U.C. 'line' one
really means the Communist Party 'line'. The P.S.U.C. (Partido Socialista
Unificado de Cataluna) was the Socialist Party of Catalonia; it had been formed
at the beginning of the war by the fusion of various Marxist parties, including
the Catalan Communist Party, but it was now entirely under Communist control and
was affiliated to the Third International. Elsewhere in Spain no formal
unification between Socialists and Communists had taken place, but the Communist
viewpoint and the Right-wing Socialist viewpoint could everywhere be regarded as
identical. Roughly speaking, the P.S.U.C. was the political organ of the U.G.T.
(Union General de Trabajadores), the Socialist trade unions. The membership of
these unions throughout Spain now numbered about a million and a half. They
contained many sections of the manual workers, but since the outbreak of war
they had also been swollen by a large influx of middle-class members, for in the
early 'revolutionary' days people of all kinds had found it useful to join
either the U.G.T. or the C.N.T. The two blocks of unions overlapped, but of the
two the C.N.T. was more definitely a working-class organization. The P.S.U.C.
was therefore a party partly of the workers and partly of the small bourgeoisie
--the shopkeepers, the officials, and the wealthier peasants.

The P.S.U.C. 'line' which was preached in the Communist and pro--Communist
press throughout the world, was approximately this:

'At present nothing matters except winning the war; without victory in the
war all else is meaningless. Therefore this is not the moment to talk of
pressing forward with the revolution. We can't afford to alienate the peasants
by forcing Collectivization upon them, and we can't afford to frighten away the
middle classes who were fighting on our side. Above all for the sake of
efficiency we must do away with revolutionary chaos. We must have a strong
central government in place of local committees, and we must have a properly
trained and fully militarized army under a unified command. Clinging on to
fragments of workers' control and parroting revolutionary phrases is worse than
useless; it is not merely obstructive, but even counterrevolutionary, because it
leads to divisions which can be used against us by the Fascists. At this stage
we are not fighting for the dictatorship of the proletariat, we are fighting for
parliamentary democracy. Whoever tries to turn the civil war into a social
revolution is playing into the hands of the Fascists and is in effect, if not in
intention, a traitor.'

The P.O.U.M. 'line' differed from this on every point except, of course, the
importance of winning the war. The P.O.U.M. (Partido Obrero de Unificacion
Marxista) was one of those dissident Communist parties which have appeared in
many countries in the last few years as a result of the opposition to
'Stalinism'; i.e. to the change, real or apparent, in Communist policy. It was
made up partly of ex-Communists and partly of an earlier party, the Workers' and
Peasants' Bloc. Numerically it was a small party, [Note 6, below] with not
much influence outside Catalonia, and chiefly important because it contained an
unusually high proportion of politically conscious members. In Catalonia its
chief stronghold was Lerida. It did not represent any block of trade unions. The
P.O.U.M. militiamen were mostly C.N.T. members, but the actual party-members
generally belonged to the U.G.T. It was, however, only in the C.N.T. that the
P.O.U.M. had any influence. The P.O.U.M. 'line' was approximately this:

[Note 6. The figures for the P.O.U.M. membership are
given as: July 1936, 10,000; December 1936, 70,000; June 1937, 40,000. But these
are from P.O.U.M. sources; a hostile estimate would probably divide them by
four. The only thing one can say with any certainty about the membership of the
Spanish political parties is that every party over-estimates its own
numbers.]

'It is nonsense to talk of opposing Fascism by bourgeois "democracy".
Bourgeois "democracy" is only another name for capitalism, and so is Fascism; to
fight against Fascism on behalf of "democracy" is to fight against one form of
capitalism on behalf of a second which is liable to turn into the first at any
moment. The only real alternative to Fascism is workers' control. If you set up
any less goal than this, you will either hand the victory to Franco, or, at
best, let in Fascism by the back door. Meanwhile the workers must cling to every
scrap of what they have won; if they yield anything to the semi--bourgeois
Government they can depend upon being cheated. The workers' militias and
police-forces must be preserved in their present form and every effort to
"bourgeoisify" them must be resisted. If the workers do not control the armed
forces, the armed forces will control the workers. The war and the revolution
are inseparable.'

The Anarchist viewpoint is less easily defined. In any case the loose term
'Anarchists' is used to cover a multitude of people of very varying opinions.
The huge block of unions making up the C.N.T. (Confederacion Nacional de
Trabajadores), with round about two million members in all, had for its
political organ the F.A.I. (Federacion Anarquista Iberica), an actual Anarchist
organization. But even the members of the F.A.I., though always tinged, as
perhaps most Spaniards are, with the Anarchist philosophy, were not necessarily
Anarchists in the purest sense. Especially since the beginning of the war they
had moved more in the direction of ordinary Socialism, because circumstances had
forced them to take part in centralized administration and even to break all
their principles by entering the Government. Nevertheless they differed
fundamentally from the Communists in so much that, like the P.O.U.M., they aimed
at workers' control and not a parliamentary democracy. They accepted the
P.O.U.M. slogan: 'The war and the revolution are inseparable', though they were
less dogmatic about it. Roughly speaking, the C.N.T.-F.A.I. stood for: (i)
Direct control over industry by the workers engaged in each industry, e.g.
transport, the textile factories, etc.; (2) Government by local committees and
resistance to all forms of centralized authoritarianism; (3) Uncompromising
hostility to the bourgeoisie and the Church. The last point, though the least
precise, was the most important. The Anarchists were the opposite of the
majority of so-called revolutionaries in so much that though their principles
were rather vague their hatred of privilege and injustice was perfectly genuine.
Philosophically, Communism and Anarchism are poles apart. Practically--i.e. in
the form of society aimed at--the difference is mainly one of emphasis, but it
is quite irreconcilable. The Communist's emphasis is always on centralism and
efficiency, the Anarchist's on liberty and equality. Anarchism is deeply rooted
in Spain and is likely to outlive Communism when the Russian influence is
withdrawn. During the first two months of the war it was the Anarchists more
than anyone else who had saved the situation, and much later than this the
Anarchist militia, in spite of their indiscipline, were notoriously the best
fighters among the purely Spanish forces. From about February 1937 onwards the
Anarchists and the P.O.U.M. could to some extent be lumped together. If the
Anarchists, the P.O.U.M., and the Left wing of the Socialists had had the sense
to combine at the start and press a realistic policy, the history of the war
might have been different. But in the early period, when the revolutionary
parties seemed to have the game in their hands, this was impossible. Between the
Anarchists and the Socialists there were ancient jealousies, the P.O.U.M., as
Marxists, were sceptical of Anarchism, while from the pure Anarchist standpoint
the 'Trotskyism' of the P.O.U.M. was not much preferable to the 'Stalinism' of
the Communists. Nevertheless the Communist tactics tended to drive the two
parties together. When the P.O.U.M. joined in the disastrous fighting in
Barcelona in May, it was mainly from an instinct to stand by the C.N.T., and
later, when the P.O.U.M. was suppressed, the Anarchists were the only people who
dared to raise a voice in its defence.

So, roughly speaking, the alignment of forces was this. On the one side the
C.N.T.-F.A.I., the P.O.U.M., and a section of the Socialists, standing for
workers' control: on the other side the Right-wing Socialists, Liberals, and
Communists, standing for centralized government and a militarized army.

It is easy to see why, at this time, I preferred the Communist viewpoint to
that of the P.O.U.M. The Communists had a definite practical policy, an
obviously better policy from the point of view of the common sense which looks
only a few months ahead. And certainly the day-to-day policy of the P.O.U.M.,
their propaganda and so forth, was unspeakably bad; it must have been so, or
they would have been able to attract a bigger mass-following. What clinched
everything was that the Communists--so it seemed to me--were getting on with
the war while we and the Anarchists were standing still. This was the general
feeling at the time. The Communists had gained power and a vast increase of
membership partly by appealing to the middle classes against the
revolutionaries, but partly also because they were the only people who looked
capable of winning the war. The Russian arms and the magnificent defence of
Madrid by troops mainly under Communist control had made the Communists the
heroes of Spain. As someone put it, every Russian aeroplane that flew over our
heads was Communist propaganda. The revolutionary purism of the P.O.U.M., though
I saw its logic, seemed to me rather futile. After all, the one thing that
mattered was to win the war.

Meanwhile there was the diabolical inter-party feud that was going on in the
newspapers, in pamphlets, on posters, in books--everywhere. At this time the
newspapers I saw most often were the P.O.U.M. papers La Batalla and Adelante,
and their ceaseless carping against the 'counter-revolutionary' P.S.U.C. struck
me as priggish and tiresome. Later, when I studied the P.S.U.C. and Communist
press more closely, I realized that the P.O.U.M. were almost blameless compared
with their adversaries. Apart from anything else, they had much smaller
opportunities. Unlike the Communists, they had no footing in any press outside
their own country, and inside Spain they were at an immense disadvantage because
the press censorship was mainly under Communist control, which meant that the
P.O.U.M. papers were liable to be suppressed or fined if they said anything
damaging. 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. Also they kept their polemics mainly to newspaper
articles. Their large coloured posters, designed for a wider public (posters are
important in Spain, with its large illiterate population), did not attack rival
parties, but were simply anti--Fascist or abstractedly revolutionary; so were
the songs the militiamen sang. The Communist attacks were quite a different
matter. I shall have to deal with some of these later in this book. Here I can
only give a brief indication of the Communist line of attack.

On the surface the quarrel between the Communists and the P.O.U.M. was one of
tactics. The P.O.U.M. was for immediate revolution, the Communists not. So far
so good; there was much to be said on both sides. Further, the Communists
contended that the P.O.U.M. propaganda divided and weakened the Government
forces and thus endangered the war; again, though finally I do not agree, a good
case could be made out for this. But here the peculiarity of Communist tactics
came in. Tentatively at first, then more loudly, they began to assert that the
P.O.U.M. was splitting the Government forces not by bad judgement but by
deliberate design. The P.O.U.M. was declared to be no more than a gang of
disguised Fascists, in the pay of Franco and Hitler, who were pressing a
pseudo-revolutionary policy as a way of aiding the Fascist cause. The P.O.U.M.
was a 'Trotskyist' organization and 'Franco's Fifth Column'. This implied that
scores of thousands of working-class people, including eight or ten thousand
soldiers who were freezing in the front-line trenches and hundreds of foreigners
who had come to Spain to fight against Fascism, often sacrificing their
livelihood and their nationality by doing so, were simply traitors in the pay of
the enemy. And this story was spread all over Spain by means of posters, etc.,
and repeated over and over in the Communist and pro-Communist press of the whole
world. I could fill half a dozen books with quotations if I chose to collect
them.

This, then, was what they were saying about us: we were Trotskyists,
Fascists, traitors, murderers, cowards, spies, and so forth. I admit it was not
pleasant, especially when one thought of some of the people who were responsible
for it. It is not a nice thing to see a Spanish boy of fifteen carried down the
line on a stretcher, with a dazed white face looking out from among the
blankets, and to think of the sleek persons in London and Paris who are writing
pamphlets to prove that this boy is a Fascist in disguise. 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. The P.S.U.C.
militiamen whom I knew in the line, the Communists from the International
Brigade whom I met from time to time, never called me a Trotskyist or a traitor;
they left that kind of thing to the journalists in the rear. The people who
wrote pamphlets against us and vilified us in the newspapers all remained safe
at home, or at worst in the newspaper offices of Valencia, hundreds of miles
from the bullets and the mud. And apart from the libels of the inter-party feud,
all the usual war-stuff, the tub-thumping, the heroics, the vilification of the
enemy--all these were done, as usual, by people who were not fighting and who
in many cases would have run a hundred miles sooner than fight. 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. [Note 7, below] I do
earnestly feel that on our side--the Government side--this war was different
from ordinary, imperialistic wars; but from the nature of the war-propaganda you
would never have guessed it. The fighting had barely started when the newspapers
of the Right and Left dived simultaneously into the same cesspool of abuse. We
all remember the Daily Mail's poster: 'REDS CRUCIFY NUNS', while to the Daily
Worker Franco's Foreign Legion was 'composed of murderers, white-slavers,
dope-fiends, and the offal of every European country'. As late as October 1937
the New Statesman was treating us to tales of Fascist barricades made of the
bodies of living children (a most unhandy thing to make barricades with), and Mr
Arthur Bryant was declaring that 'the sawing-off of a Conservative tradesman's
legs' was 'a commonplace' in Loyalist Spain. The people who write that kind of
stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for
fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the
journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line
trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to
me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when
the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a
jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

[Note 7. I should like to make an exception of the Manchester Guardian.
In connexion with this book I have had to go through the files of a good many
English papers. Of our larger papers, the Manchester Guardian is the only one
that leaves me with an increased respect for its honesty.]

As far as the journalistic part of it went, this war was a racket like all
other wars. But there was this difference, that whereas the journalists usually
reserve their most murderous invective for the enemy, in this case, as time went
on, the Communists and the P.O.U.M. came to write more bitterly about one
another than about the Fascists. Nevertheless at the time I could not bring
myself to take it very seriously. The inter-party feud was annoying and even
disgusting, but it appeared to me as a domestic squabble. I did not believe that
it would alter anything or that there was any really irreconcilable difference
of policy. I grasped that the Communists and Liberals had set their faces
against allowing the revolution to go forward; I did not grasp that they might
be capable of swinging it back.

There was a good reason for this. All this time I was at the front, and at
the front the social and political atmosphere did not change. I had left
Barcelona in early January and I did not go on leave till late April; and all
this time--indeed, till later--in the strip of Aragon controlled by Anarchist
and P.O.U.M. troops, the same conditions persisted, at least outwardly. The
revolutionary atmosphere remained as I had first known it. General and private,
peasant and militiaman, still met as equals; everyone drew the same pay, wore
the same clothes, ate the same food, and called everyone else 'thou' and
'comrade'; there was no boss-class, no menial-class, no beggars, no prostitutes,
no lawyers, no priests, no boot-licking, no cap-touching. I was breathing the
air of equality, and I was simple enough to imagine that it existed all over
Spain. I did not realize that more or less by chance I was isolated among the
most revolutionary section of the Spanish working class.

So, when my more politically educated comrades told me that one could not
take a purely military attitude towards the war, and that the choice lay between
revolution and Fascism, I was inclined to laugh at them. On the whole I accepted
the Communist viewpoint, which boiled down to saying: 'We can't talk of
revolution till we've won the war', and not the P.O.U.M. viewpoint, which boiled
down to saying: 'We must go forward or we shall go back.' When later on I
decided that the P.O.U.M. were right, or at any rate righter than the
Communists, it was not altogether upon a point of theory. On paper the Communist
case was a good one; the trouble was that their actual behaviour made it
difficult to believe that they were advancing it in good faith. The
often-repeated slogan: 'The war first and the revolution afterwards', though
devoutly believed in by the average P.S.U.C. militiaman, who honestly thought
that the revolution could continue when the war had been won, was eyewash. The
thing for which the Communists were working was not to postpone the Spanish
revolution till a more suitable time, but to make sure that it never happened.
This became more and more obvious as time went on, as power was twisted more and
more out of working-class hands, and as more and more revolutionaries of every
shade were flung into jail. Every move was made in the name of military
necessity, because this pretext was, so to speak, ready-made, but the effect was
to drive the workers back from an advantageous position and into a position in
which, when the war was over, they would find it impossible to resist the
reintroduction of capitalism. Please notice that I am saying nothing against the
rank-and-file Communists, least of all against the thousands of Communists who
died heroically round Madrid. But those were not the men who were directing
party policy. As for the people higher up, it is inconceivable that they were
not acting with their eyes open.

But, finally, the war was worth winning even if the revolution was lost. And
in the end I came to doubt whether, in the long run, the Communist policy made
for victory. Very few people seem to have reflected that a different policy
might be appropriate at different periods of the war. The Anarchists probably
saved the situation in the first two months, but they were incapable of
organizing resistance beyond a certain point; the Communists probably saved the
situation in October-December, but to win the war outright was a different
matter. In England the Communist war-policy has been accepted without question,
because very few criticisms of it have been allowed to get into print and
because its general line--do away with revolutionary chaos, speed up
production, militarize the army--sounds realistic and efficient. It is worth
pointing out its inherent weakness.

In order to check every revolutionary tendency and make the war as much like
an ordinary war as possible, it became necessary to throw away the strategic
opportunities that actually existed. I have described how we were armed, or not
armed, on the Aragon front. There is very little doubt that arms were
deliberately withheld lest too many of them should get into the hands of the
Anarchists, who would afterwards use them for a revolutionary purpose;
consequently the big Aragon offensive which would have made Franco draw back
from Bilbao, and possibly from Madrid, never happened. But this was
comparatively a small matter. What was more important was that once the war had
been narrowed down to a 'war for democracy' it became impossible to make any
large-scale appeal for working-class aid abroad. If we face facts we must admit
that the working class of the world has regarded the Spanish war with
detachment. Tens of thousands of individuals came to fight, but the tens of
millions behind them remained apathetic. During the first year of the war the
entire British public is thought to have subscribed to various 'aid Spain' funds
about a quarter of a million pounds--probably less than half of what they spend
in a single week on going to the pictures. The way in which the working class in
the democratic countries could really have helped her Spanish comrades was by
industrial action--strikes and boycotts. No such thing ever even began to
happen. The Labour and Communist leaders everywhere declared that it was
unthinkable; and no doubt they were right, so long as they were also shouting at
the tops of their voices that' red' Spain was not 'red'. Since 1914-18 'war for
democracy' has had a sinister sound. For years past the Communists themselves
had been teaching the militant workers in all countries that 'democracy' was a
polite name for capitalism. To say first 'Democracy is a swindle', and then
'Fight for democracy!' is not good tactics. If, with the huge prestige of Soviet
Russia behind them, they had appealed to the workers of the world in the name
not of 'democratic Spain', but of 'revolutionary Spain', it is hard to believe
that they would not have got a response.

But what was most important of all, with a non-revolutionary policy it was
difficult, if not impossible, to strike at Franco's rear. By the summer of 1937
Franco was controlling a larger population than the Government--much larger, if
one counts in the colonies--with about the same number of troops. As everyone
knows, with a hostile population at your back it is impossible to keep an army
in the field without an equally large army to guard your communications,
suppress sabotage, etc. Obviously, therefore, there was no real popular movement
in Franco's rear. It was inconceivable that the people in his territory, at any
rate the town-workers and the poorer peasants, liked or wanted Franco, but with
every swing to the Right the Government's superiority became less apparent. What
clinches everything is the case of Morocco. Why was there no rising in Morocco?
Franco was trying to set up an infamous dictatorship, and the Moors actually
preferred him to the Popular Front Government! The palpable truth is that no
attempt was made to foment a rising in Morocco, because to do so would have
meant putting a revolutionary construction on the war. The first necessity, to
convince the Moors of the Government's good faith, would have been to proclaim
Morocco liberated. And we can imagine how pleased the French would have been by
that! The best strategic opportunity of the war was flung away in the vain hope
of placating French and British capitalism. The whole tendency of the Communist
policy was to reduce the war to an ordinary, non-revolutionary war in which the
Government was heavily handicapped. For a war of that kind has got to be won by
mechanical means, i.e. ultimately, by limitless supplies of weapons; and the
Government's chief donor of weapons, the U.S.S.R., was at a great disadvantage,
geographically, compared with Italy and Germany. Perhaps the P.O.U.M. and
Anarchist slogan: 'The war and the revolution are inseparable', was less
visionary than it sounds.

I have given my reasons for thinking that the Communist anti--revolutionary
policy was mistaken, but so far as its effect upon the war goes I do not hope
that my judgement is right. A thousand times I hope that it is wrong. I would
wish to see this war won by any means whatever. And of course we cannot tell yet
what may happen. The Government may swing to the Left again, the Moors may
revolt of their own accord, England may decide to buy Italy out, the war may be
won by straightforward military means--there is no knowing. I let the above
opinions stand, and time will show how far I am right or wrong.

But in February 193^ I did not see things quite in this light. I was sick of
the inaction on the Aragon front and chiefly conscious that I had not done my
fair share of the fighting. I used to think of the recruiting poster in
Barcelona which demanded accusingly of passers-by: 'What have you done for
democracy ?' and feel that I could only answer:' I have drawn my rations.' When
I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist--after all, if
each of us killed one they would soon be extinct--and I had killed nobody yet,
had hardly had the chance to do so. And of course I wanted to go to Madrid.
Everyone in the army, whatever his political opinions, always wanted to go to
Madrid. This would probably mean exchanging into the International Column, for
the P.O.U.M. had now very few troops at Madrid and the Anarchists not so many as
formerly.

For the present, of course, one had to stay in the line, but I told everyone
that when we went on leave I should, if possible, exchange into the
International Column, which meant putting myself under Communist control.
Various people tried to dissuade me, but no one attempted to interfere. It is
fair to say that there was very little heresy-hunting in the P.O.U.M., perhaps
not enough, considering their special circumstances; short of being a
pro-Fascist no one was penalized for holding the wrong political opinions. I
spent much of my time in the militia in bitterly criticizing the P.O.U.M.
'line', but I never got into trouble for it. There was not even any pressure
upon one to become a political member of the party, though I think the majority
of the militiamen did so. I myself never joined the party--for which
afterwards, when the P.O.U.M. was suppressed, I was rather sorry.




Chapter 6




MEANWHILE, the daily--more particularly nightly--round, the common task.
Sentry-go, patrols, digging; mud, rain, shrieking winds, and occasional snow. It
was not till well into April that the nights grew noticeably warmer. Up here on
the plateau the March days were mostly like an English March, with bright blue
skies and nagging winds. The winter barley was a foot high, crimson buds were
forming on the cherry trees (the line here ran through deserted orchards and
vegetable gardens), and if you searched the ditches you could find violets and a
kind of wild hyacinth like a poor specimen of a bluebell. Immediately behind the
line there ran a wonderful, green, bubbling stream, the first transparent water
I had seen since coming to the front. One day I set my teeth and crawled into
the river to have my first bath in six weeks. It was what you might call a brief
bath, for the water was mainly snow-water and not much above freezing-point.

Meanwhile nothing happened, nothing ever happened. The English had got into
the habit of saying that this wasn't a war, it was a bloody pantomime. We were
hardly under direct fire from the Fascists. The only danger was from stray
bullets, which, as the lines curved forward on either side, came from several
directions. All the casualties at this time were from strays. Arthur Clinton got
a mysterious bullet that smashed his left shoulder and disabled his arm,
permanently, I am afraid. There was a little shell-fire, but it was
extraordinarily ineffectual. The scream and crash of the shells was actually
looked upon as a mild diversion. The Fascists never dropped their shells on our
parapet. A few hundred yards behind us there was a country house, called La
Granja, with big farm-buildings, which was used as a store, headquarters, and
cook-house for this sector of the line. It was this that the Fascist gunners
were trying for, but they were five or six kilometres away and they never aimed
well enough to do more than smash the windows and chip the walls. You were only
in danger if you happened to be coming up the road when the firing started, and
the shells plunged into the fields on either side of you. One learned almost
immediately the mysterious art of knowing by the sound of a shell how close it
will fall. The shells the Fascists were firing at this period were wretchedly
bad. Although they were 150 mm. they only made a crater about six feet wide by
four deep, and at least one in four failed to explode. There were the usual
romantic tales of sabotage in the Fascist factories and unexploded shells in
which, instead of the charge, there was found a scrap of paper saying 'Red
Front', but I never saw one. The truth was that the shells were hopelessly old;
someone picked up a brass fuse-cap stamped with the date, and it was 1917. The
Fascist guns were of the same make and calibre as our own, and the unexploded
shells were often reconditioned and fired back. There was said to be one old
shell with a nickname of its own which travelled daily to and fro, never
exploding.

At night small patrols used to be sent into no man's land to lie in ditches
near the Fascist lines and listen for sounds (bugle-calls, motor-horns, and so
forth) that indicated activity in Huesca. There was a constant come-and-go of
Fascist troops, and the numbers could be checked to some extent from listeners'
reports. We always had special orders to report the ringing of church bells. It
seemed that the Fascists always heard mass before going into action. In among
the fields and orchards there were deserted mud-walled huts which it was safe to
explore with a lighted match when you had plugged up the windows. Sometimes you
came on valuable pieces of loot such as a hatchet or a Fascist water-bottle
(better than ours and greatly sought after). You could explore in the daytime as
well, but mostly it had to be done crawling on all fours. It was queer to creep
about in those empty, fertile fields where everything had been arrested just at
the harvest-moment. Last year's crops had never been touched. The unpruned vines
were snaking across the ground, the cobs on the standing maize had gone as hard
as stone, the mangels and sugar-beets were hyper--trophied into huge woody
lumps. How the peasants must have cursed both armies! Sometimes parties of men
went spud-gathering in no man's land. About a mile to the right of us, where the
lines were closer together, there was a patch of potatoes that was frequented
both by the Fascists and ourselves. We went there in the daytime, they only at
night, as it was commanded by our machine-guns. One night to our annoyance they
turned out en masse and cleared up the whole patch. We discovered another patch
farther on, where there was practically no cover and you had to lift the
potatoes lying on your belly--a fatiguing job. If their machine-gunners spotted
you, you had to flatten yourself out like a rat when it squirms under a door,
with the bullets cutting up the clods a few yards behind you. It seemed worth it
at the time. Potatoes were getting very scarce. If you got a sackful you could
take them down to the cook-house and swap them for a water-bottleful of
coffee.

And still nothing happened, nothing ever looked like happening. 'When are we
going to attack? Why don't we attack?' were the questions you heard night and
day from Spaniard and Englishman alike. When you think what fighting means it is
queer that soldiers want to fight, and yet undoubtedly they do. In stationary
warfare there are three things that all soldiers long for: a battle, more
cigarettes, and a week's leave. We were somewhat better armed now than before.
Each man had a hundred and fifty rounds of ammunition instead of fifty, and by
degrees we were being issued with bayonets, steel helmets, and a few bombs.
There were constant rumours of forthcoming battles, which I have since thought
were deliberately circulated to keep up the spirits of the troops. It did not
need much military knowledge to see that there would be no major action on this
side of Huesca, at any rate for the time being. The strategic point was the road
to Jaca, over on the other side. Later, when the Anarchists made their attacks
on the Jaca road, our job was to make 'holding attacks' and force the Fascists
to divert troops from the other side.

During all this time, about six weeks, there was only one action on our part
of the front. This was when our Shock Troopers attacked the Manicomio, a disused
lunatic asylum which the Fascists had converted into a fortress. There were
several hundred refugee Germans serving with the P.O.U.M. They were organized in
a special battalion called the Batallon de Cheque, and from a military point of
view they were on quite a different level from the rest of the militia--indeed,
were more like soldiers than anyone I saw in Spain, except the Assault Guards
and some of the International Column. The attack was mucked up, as usual. How
many operations in this war, on the Government side, were not mucked up, I
wonder? The Shock Troops took the Manicomio by storm, but the troops, of I
forget which militia, who were to support them by seizing the neighbouring hill
that commanded the Manicomio, were badly let down. The captain who led them was
one of those Regular Army officers of doubtful loyalty whom the Government
persisted in employing. Either from fright or treachery he warned the Fascists
by flinging a bomb when they were two hundred yards away. I am glad to say his
men shot him dead on the spot. But the surprise-attack was no surprise, and the
militiamen were mown down by heavy fire and driven off the hill, and at
nightfall the Shock Troops had to abandon the Manicomio. Through the night the
ambulances filed down the abominable road to Sietamo, killing the badly wounded
with their joltings.

All of us were lousy by this time; though still cold it was warm enough for
that. I have had a big experience of body vermin of various kinds, and for sheer
beastliness the louse beats everything I have encountered. Other insects,
mosquitoes for instance, make you suffer more, but at least they aren't resident
vermin. The human louse somewhat resembles a tiny lobster, and he lives chiefly
in your trousers. Short of burning all your clothes there is no known way of
getting rid of him. Down the seams of your trousers he lays his glittering white
eggs, like tiny grains of rice, which hatch out and breed families of their own
at horrible speed. I think the pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate
their pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war, indeed! In war
all soldiers are lousy, at least when it is warm enough. The men who fought at
Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae--every one of them
had lice crawling over his testicles. We kept the brutes down to some extent by
burning out the eggs and by bathing as often as we could face it. Nothing short
of lice could have driven me into that ice-cold river.

Everything was running short--boots, clothes, tobacco, soap, candles,
matches, olive oil. Our uniforms were dropping to pieces, and many of the men
had no boots, only rope-soled sandals. You came on piles of worn-out boots
everywhere. Once we kept a dug-out fire burning for two days mainly with boots,
which are not bad fuel. By this time my wife was in Barcelona and used to send
me tea, chocolate, and even cigars when such things were procurable, but even in
Barcelona everything was running short, especially tobacco. The tea was a
godsend, though we had no milk and seldom any sugar. Parcels were constantly
being sent from England to men in the contingent but they never arrived; food,
clothes, cigarettes--everything was either refused by the Post Office or seized
in France. Curiously enough, the only firm that succeeded in sending packets of
tea--even, on one memorable occasion, a tin of biscuits--to my wife was the
Army and Navy Stores. Poor old Army and Navy! They did their duty nobly, but
perhaps they might have felt happier if the stuff had been going to Franco's
side of the barricade. The shortage of tobacco was the worst of all. At the
beginning we had been issued with a packet of cigarettes a day, then it got down
to eight cigarettes a day, then to five. Finally there were ten deadly days when
there was no issue of tobacco at all. For the first time, in Spain, I saw
something that you see every day in London--people picking up fag-ends.

Towards the end of March I got a poisoned hand that had to be lanced and put
in a sling. I had to go into hospital, but it was not worth sending me to
Sietamo for such a petty injury, so I stayed in the so--called hospital at
Monflorite, which was merely a casualty clearing station. I was there ten days,
part of the time in bed. The practicantes (hospital assistants) stole
practically every valuable object I possessed, including my camera and all my
photographs. At the front everyone stole, it was the inevitable effect of
shortage, but the hospital people were always the worst. Later, in the hospital
at Barcelona, an American who had come to join the International Column on a
ship that was torpedoed by an Italian submarine, told me how he was carried
ashore wounded, and how, even as they lifted him into the ambulance, the
stretcher-bearers pinched his wrist-watch.

While my arm was in the sling I spent several blissful days wandering about
the country-side. Monflorite was the usual huddle of mud and stone houses, with
narrow tortuous alleys that had been churned by lorries till they looked like
the craters of the moon. The church had been badly knocked about but was used as
a military store. In the whole neighbourhood there were only two farm-houses of
any size, Torre Lorenzo and Torre Fabian, and only two really large buildings,
obviously the houses of the landowners who had once lorded it over the
countryside; you could see their wealth reflected in the miserable huts of the
peasants. Just behind the river, close to the front line, there was an enormous
flour-mill with a country-house attached to it. It seemed shameful to see the
huge costly machine rusting useless and the wooden flour-chutes torn down for
firewood. Later on, to get firewood for the troops farther back, parties of men
were sent in lorries to wreck the place systematically. They used to smash the
floorboards of a room by bursting a hand-grenade in it. La Granja, our store and
cook-house, had possibly at one time been a convent. It had huge courtyards and
out-houses, covering an acre or more, with stabling for thirty or forty horses.
The country-houses in that part of Spain are of no interest architecturally, but
their farm-buildings, of lime-washed stone with round arches and magnificent
roof-beams, are noble places, built on a plan that has probably not altered for
centuries. Sometimes it gave you a sneaking sympathy with the Fascist ex-owners
to see the way the militia treated the buildings they had seized. In La Granja
every room that was not in use had been turned into a latrine--a frightful
shambles of smashed furniture and excrement. The little church that adjoined it,
its walls perforated by shell-holes, had its floor inches deep in dung. In the
great courtyard where the cooks ladled out the rations the litter of rusty tins,
mud, mule dung, and decaying food was revolting. It gave point to the old army
song:

    There are rats, rats,
    Rats as big as cats,
    In the quartermaster's store!

The ones at La Granja itself really were as big as cats, or nearly; great
bloated brutes that waddled over the beds of muck, too impudent even to run away
unless you shot at them.

Spring was really here at last. The blue in the sky was softer, the air grew
suddenly balmy. The frogs were mating noisily in the ditches. Round the
drinking-pool that served for the village mules I found exquisite green frogs
the size of a penny, so brilliant that the young grass looked dull beside them.
Peasant lads went out with buckets hunting for snails, which they roasted alive
on sheets of tin. As soon as the weather improved the peasants had turned out
for the spring ploughing. It is typical of the utter vagueness in which the
Spanish agrarian revolution is wrapped that I could not even discover for
certain whether the land here was collectivized or whether the peasants had
simply divided it up among themselves. I fancy that in theory it was
collectivized, this being P.O.U.M. and Anarchist territory. At any rate the
landowners were gone, the fields were being cultivated, and people seemed
satisfied. The friendliness of the peasants towards ourselves never ceased to
astonish me. To some of the older ones the war must have seemed meaningless,
visibly it produced a shortage of everything and a dismal dull life for
everybody, and at the best of times peasants hate having troops quartered upon
them. Yet they were invariably friendly--I suppose reflecting that, however
intolerable we might be in other ways, we did stand between them and their
one-time landlords. Civil war is a queer thing. Huesca was not five miles away,
it was these people's market town, all of them had relatives there, every week
of their lives they had gone there to sell their poultry and vegetables. And now
for eight months an impenetrable barrier of barbed wire and machine-guns had
lain between. Occasionally it slipped their memory. Once I was talking to an old
woman who was carrying one of those tiny iron lamps in which the Spaniards bum
olive oil. 'Where can I buy a lamp like that?' I said.' In Huesca,' she said
without thinking, and then we both laughed. The village girls were splendid
vivid creatures with coal-black hair, a swinging walk, and a straightforward,
man-to-man demeanour which was probably a by-product of the revolution.

Men in ragged blue shirts and black corduroy breeches, with broad--brimmed
straw hats, were ploughing the fields behind teams of mules with rhythmically
flopping ears. Their ploughs were wretched things, only stirring the soil, not
cutting anything we should regard as a furrow. All the agricultural implements
were pitifully antiquated, everything being governed by the expensiveness of
metal. A broken ploughshare, for instance, was patched, and then patched again,
till sometimes it was mainly patches. Rakes and pitchforks were made of wood.
Spades, among a people who seldom possessed boots, were unknown; they did their
digging with a clumsy hoe like those used in India. There was a kind of harrow
that took one straight back to the later Stone Age. It was made of boards joined
together, to about the size of a kitchen table; in the boards hundreds of holes
were morticed, and into each hole was jammed a piece of flint which had been
chipped into shape exactly as men used to chip them ten thousand years ago. I
remember my feelings almost of horror when I first came upon one of these things
in a derelict hut in no man's land. I had to puzzle over it for a long while
before grasping that it was a harrow. It made me sick to think of the work that
must go into the making of such a thing, and the poverty that was obliged to use
flint in place of steel. I have felt more kindly towards industrialism ever
since. But in the village there were two up-to-date farm tractors, no doubt
seized from some big landowner's estate.

Once or twice I wandered out to the little walled graveyard that stood a mile
or so from the village. The dead from the front were normally sent to Sietamo;
these were the village dead. It was queerly different from an English graveyard.
No reverence for the dead here! Everything overgrown with bushes and coarse
grass, human bones littered everywhere. But the really surprising thing was the
almost complete lack of religious inscriptions on the gravestones, though they
all dated from before the revolution. Only once, I think, I saw the 'Pray for
the Soul of So-and-So' which is usual on Catholic graves. Most of the
inscriptions were purely secular, with ludicrous poems about the virtues of the
deceased. On perhaps one grave in four or five there was a small cross or a
perfunctory reference to Heaven; this had usually been chipped off by some
industrious atheist with a chisel.

It struck me that the people in this part of Spain must be genuinely without
religious feeling--religious feeling, I mean, in the orthodox sense. It is
curious that all the time I was in Spain I never once saw a person cross
himself; yet you would think such a movement would become instinctive,
revolution or no revolution. Obviously the Spanish Church will come back (as the
saying goes, night and the Jesuits always return), but there is no doubt that at
the outbreak of the revolution it collapsed and was smashed up to an extent that
would be unthinkable even for the moribund C. of E. in like circumstances. To
the Spanish people, at any rate in Catalonia and Aragon, the Church was a racket
pure and simple. And possibly Christian belief was replaced to some extent by
Anarchism, whose influence is widely spread and which undoubtedly has a
religious tinge.

It was the day I came back from hospital that we advanced the line to what
was really its proper position, about a thousand yards forward, along the little
stream that lay a couple of hundred yards in front of the Fascist line. This
operation ought to have been carried out months earlier. The point of doing it
now was that the Anarchists were attacking on the Jaca road, and to advance on
this side made them divert troops to face us.

We were sixty or seventy hours without sleep, and my memories go down into a
sort of blue, or rather a series of pictures. Listening-duty in no man's land, a
hundred yards from the Casa Francesa, a fortified farm-house which was part of
the Fascist line. Seven hours lying in a horrible marsh, in reedy-smelling water
into which one's body subsided gradually deeper and deeper: the reedy smell, the
numbing cold, the stars immovable in the black sky, the harsh croaking of the
frogs. Though this was April it was the coldest night that I remember in Spain.
Only a hundred yards behind us the working-parties were hard at it, but there
was utter silence except for the chorus of the frogs. Just once during the night
I heard a sound--the familiar noise of a sand-bag being flattened with a spade.
It is queer how, just now and again, Spaniards can carry out a brilliant feat of
organization. The whole move was beautifully planned. In seven hours six hundred
men constructed twelve hundred metres of trench and parapet, at distances of
from a hundred and fifty to three hundred yards from the Fascist line, and all
so silently that the Fascists heard nothing, and during the night there was only
one casualty. There were more next day, of course. Every man had his job
assigned to him, even to the cook-house orderlies who suddenly arrived when the
work was done with buckets of wine laced with brandy.

And then the dawn coming up and the Fascists suddenly discovering that we
were there. The square white block of the Casa Francesa, though it was two
hundred yards away, seemed to tower over us, and the machine--guns in its
sandbagged upper windows seemed to be pointing straight down into the trench. We
all stood gaping at it, wondering why the Fascists didn't see us. Then a vicious
swirl of bullets, and everyone had flung himself on his knees and was
frantically digging, deepening the trench and scooping out small shelters in the
side. My arm was still in bandages, I could not dig, and I spent most of that
day reading a detective story--The Missing Money-lender its name was. I don't
remember the plot of it, but I remember very clearly the feeling of sitting
there reading it; the dampish clay of the trench bottom underneath me, the
constant shifting of my legs out of the way as men hurried stopping down the
trench, the crack-crack-crack of bullets a foot or two overhead. Thomas Parker
got a bullet through the top of his thigh, which, as he said, was nearer to
being a D.S.O. than he cared about. Casualties were happening all along the
line, but nothing to what there would have been if they had caught us on the
move during the night. A deserter told us afterwards that five Fascist sentries
were shot for negligence. Even now they could have massacred us if they had had
the initiative to bring up a few mortars. It was an awkward job getting the
wounded down the narrow, crowded trench. I saw one poor devil, his breeches dark
with blood, flung out of his stretcher and gasping in agony. One had to carry
wounded men a long distance, a mile or more, for even when a road existed the
ambulances never came very near the front line. If they came too near the
Fascists had a habit of shelling them--justifiably, for in modern war no one
scruples to use an ambulance for carrying ammunition.

And then, next night, waiting at Torre Fabian for an attack that was called
off at the last moment by wireless. In the barn where we waited the floor was a
thin layer of chaff over deep beds of bones, human bones and cows' bones mixed
up, and the place was alive with rats. The filthy brutes came swarming out of
the ground on every side. If there is one thing I hate more than another it is a
rat running over me in the darkness. However, I had the satisfaction of catching
one of them a good punch that sent him flying.

And then waiting fifty or sixty yards from the Fascist parapet for the order
to attack. A long line of men crouching in an irrigation ditch with their
bayonets peeping over the edge and the whites of their eyes shining through the
darkness. Kopp and Benjamin squatting behind us with a man who had a wireless
receiving-box strapped to his shoulders. On the western horizon rosy gun-flashes
followed at intervals of several seconds by enormous explosions. And then a
pip-pip-pip noise from the wireless and the whispered order that we were to get
out of it while the going was good. We did so, but not quickly enough. Twelve
wretched children of the J.C.I. (the Youth League of the P.O.U.M., corresponding
to the J.S.U. of the P.S.U.C.) who had been posted only about forty yards from
the Fascist parapet, were caught by the dawn and unable to escape. All day they
had to lie there, with only tufts of grass for cover, the Fascists shooting at
them every time they moved. By nightfall seven were dead, then the other five
managed to creep away in the darkness.

And then, for many mornings to follow, the sound of the Anarchist attacks on
the other side of Huesca. Always the same sound. Suddenly, at some time in the
small hours, the opening crash of several score bombs bursting simultaneously--
even from miles away a diabolical, rending crash--and then the unbroken roar of
massed rifles and machine-guns, a heavy rolling sound curiously similar to the
roll of drums. By degrees the firing would spread all round the lines that
encircled Huesca, and we would stumble out into the trench to lean sleepily
against the parapet while a ragged meaningless fire swept overhead.

In the daytime the guns thundered fitfully. Torre Fabian, now our cookhouse,
was shelled and partially destroyed. It is curious that when you are watching
artillery-fire from a safe distance you always want the gunner to hit his mark,
even though the mark contains your dinner and some of your comrades. The
Fascists were shooting well that morning; perhaps there were German gunners on
the job. They bracketed neatly on Torre Fabian. One shell beyond it, one shell
short of it, then whizz-BOOM' Burst rafters leaping upwards and a sheet of
uralite skimming down the air like a nicked playing-card. The next shell took
off a corner of a building as neatly as a giant might do it with a knife. But
the cooks produced dinner on time--a memorable feat.

As the days went on the unseen but audible guns began each to assume a
distinct personality. There were the two batteries of Russian 75-mm. guns which
fired from close in our rear and which somehow evoked in my mind the picture of
a fat man hitting a golf-ball. These were the first Russian guns I had seen--or
heard, rather. They had a low trajectory and a very high velocity, so that you
heard the cartridge explosion, the whizz, and the shell-burst almost
simultaneously. Behind Monflorite were two very heavy guns which fired a few
times a day, with a deep, muffled roar that was like the baying of distant
chained-up monsters. Up at Mount Aragon, the medieval fortress which the
Government troops had stormed last year (the first time in its history, it was
said), and which guarded one of the approaches to Huesca, there was a heavy gun
which must have dated well back into the nineteenth century. Its great shells
whistled over so slowly that you felt certain you could run beside them and keep
up with them. A shell from this gun sounded like nothing so much as a man riding
along on a bicycle and whistling. The trench-mortars, small though they were,
made the most evil sound of all. Their shells are really a kind of winged
torpedo, shaped like the darts thrown in public-houses and about the size of a
quart bottle; they go off with a devilish metallic crash, as of some monstrous
globe of brittle steel being shattered on an anvil. Sometimes our aeroplanes
flew over and let loose the aerial torpedoes whose tremendous echoing roar makes
the earth tremble even at two miles' distance. The shell-bursts from the Fascist
anti--aircraft guns dotted the sky like cloudlets in a bad water-colour, but I
never saw them get within a thousand yards of an aeroplane. When an aeroplane
swoops down and uses its machine-gun the sound, from below, is like the
fluttering of wings.

On our part of the line not much was happening. Two hundred yards to the
right of us, where the Fascists were on higher ground, their snipers picked off
a few of our comrades. Two hundred yards to the left, at the bridge over the
stream, a sort of duel was going on between the Fascist mortars and the men who
were building a concrete barricade across the bridge. The evil little shells
whizzed over, zwing-crash! zwing-crash!, making a doubly diabolical noise when
they landed on the asphalt road. A hundred yards away you could stand in perfect
safety and watch the columns of earth and black smoke leaping into the air like
magic trees. The poor devils round the bridge spent much of the daytime cowering
in the little man-holes they had scooped in the side of the trench. But there
were less casualties than might have been expected, and the barricade rose
steadily, a wall of concrete two feet thick, with embrasures for two
machine-guns and a small field gun. The concrete was being reinforced with old
bedsteads, which apparently was the only iron that could be found for the
purpose.




Chapter 7



ONE afternoon Benjamin told us that he wanted fifteen volunteers. The attack
on the Fascist redoubt which had been called off on the previous occasion was to
be carried out tonight. I oiled my ten Mexican cartridges, dirtied my bayonet
(the things give your position away if they flash too much), and packed up a
hunk of bread, three inches of red sausage, and a cigar which my wife had sent
from Barcelona and which I had been hoarding for a long time. Bombs were served
out, three to a man. The Spanish Government had at last succeeded in producing a
decent bomb. It was on the principle of a Mills bomb, but with two pins instead
of one. After you had pulled the pins out there was an interval of seven seconds
before the bomb exploded. Its chief disadvantage was that one pin was very stiff
and the other very loose, so that you had the choice of leaving both pins in
place and being unable to pull the stiff one out in a moment of emergency, or
pulling out the stiff one beforehand and being in a constant stew lest the thing
should explode in your pocket. But it was a handy little bomb to throw.

A little before midnight Benjamin led the fifteen of us down to Torre Fabian.
Ever since evening the rain had been pelting down. The irrigation ditches were
brimming over, and every time you stumbled into one you were in water up to your
waist. In the pitch darkness and sheeting rain in the farm-yard a dim mass of
men was waiting. Kopp addressed us, first in Spanish, then in English, and
explained the plan of attack. The Fascist line here made an L-bend and the
parapet we were to attack lay on rising ground at the corner of the L. About
thirty of us, half English, and half Spanish, under the command of Jorge Roca,
our battalion commander (a battalion in the militia was about four hundred men),
and Benjamin, were to creep up and cut the Fascist wire. Jorge would fling the
first bomb as a signal, then the rest of us were to send in a rain of bombs,
drive the Fascists out of the parapet, and seize it before they could rally.
Simultaneously seventy Shock Troopers were to assault the next Fascist
'position', which lay two hundred yards to the right of the other, joined to it
by a communication-trench. To prevent us from shooting each other in the
darkness white armlets would be worn. At this moment a messenger arrived to say
that there were no white armlets. Out of the darkness a plaintive voice
suggested: 'Couldn't we arrange for the Fascists to wear white armlets
instead?'

There was an hour or two to put in. The barn over the mule stable was so
wrecked by shell-fire that you could not move about in it without a light. Half
the floor had been torn away by a plunging shell and there was a twenty-foot
drop on to the stones beneath. Someone found a pick and levered a burst plank
out of the floor, and in a few minutes we had got a fire alight and our drenched
clothes were steaming. Someone else produced a pack of cards. A rumour--one of
those mysterious rumours that are endemic in war--flew round that hot coffee
with brandy in it was about to be served out. We filed eagerly down the
almost-collapsing staircase and wandered round the dark yard, inquiring where
the coffee was to be found. Alas! there was no coffee. Instead, they called us
together, ranged us into single file, and then Jorge and Benjamin set off
rapidly into the darkness, the rest of us following.

It was still raining and intensely dark, but the wind had dropped. The mud
was unspeakable. The paths through the beet-fields were simply a succession of
lumps, as slippery as a greasy pole, with huge pools everywhere. Long before we
got to the place where we were to leave our own parapet everyone had fallen
several times and our rifles were coated with mud. At the parapet a small knot
of men, our reserves, were waiting, and the doctor and a row of stretchers. We
filed through the gap in the parapet and waded through another irrigation ditch.
Splash-gurgle! Once again in water up to your waist, with the filthy, slimy mud
oozing over your boot-tops. On the grass outside Jorge waited till we were all
through. Then, bent almost double, he began creeping slowly forward. The Fascist
parapet was about a hundred and fifty yards away. Our one chance of getting
there was to move without noise.

I was in front with Jorge and Benjamin. Bent double, but with faces raised,
we crept into the almost utter darkness at a pace that grew slower at every
step. The rain beat lightly in our faces. When I glanced back I could see the
men who were nearest to me, a bunch of humped shapes like huge black mushrooms
gliding slowly forward. But every time I raised my head Benjamin, close beside
me, whispered fiercely in my ear: 'To keep ze head down! To keep ze head down!'
I could have told him that he needn't worry. I knew by experiment that on a dark
night you can never see a man at twenty paces. It was far more important to go
quietly. If they once heard us we were done for. They had only to spray the
darkness with their machine-gun and there was nothing for it but to run or be
massacred.

But on the sodden ground it was almost impossible to move quietly. Do what
you would your feet stuck to the mud, and every step you took was slop-slop,
slop-slop. And the devil of it was that the wind had dropped, and in spite of
the rain it was a very quiet night. Sounds would carry a long way. There was a
dreadful moment when I kicked against a tin and thought every Fascist within
miles must have heard it. But no, not a sound, no answering shot, no movement in
the Fascist lines. We crept onwards, always more slowly. I cannot convey to you
the depth of my desire to get there. Just to get within bombing distance before
they heard us! At such a time you have not even any fear, only a tremendous
hopeless longing to get over the intervening ground. I have felt exactly the
same thing when stalking a wild animal; the same agonized desire to get within
range, the same dreamlike certainty that it is impossible. And how the distance
stretched out! I knew the ground well, it was barely a hundred and fifty yards,
and yet it seemed more like a mile. When you are creeping at that pace you are
aware as an ant might be of the enormous variations in the ground; the splendid
patch of smooth grass here, the evil patch of sticky mud there, the tall
rustling reeds that have got to be avoided, the heap of stones that almost makes
you give up hope because it seems impossible to get over it without noise.

We had been creeping forward for such an age that I began to think we had
gone the wrong way. Then in the darkness thin parallel lines of something
blacker were faintly visible. It was the outer wire (the Fascists had two lines
of wire). Jorge knelt down, fumbled in his pocket. He had our only pair of
wire-cutters. Snip, snip. The trailing stuff was lifted delicately aside. We
waited for the men at the back to close up. They seemed to be making a frightful
noise. It might be fifty yards to the Fascist parapet now. Still onwards, bent
double. A stealthy step, lowering your foot as gently as a cat approaching a
mousehole; then a pause to listen; then another step. Once I raised my head; in
silence Benjamin put his hand behind my neck and pulled it violently down. I
knew that the inner wire was barely twenty yards from the parapet. It seemed to
me inconceivable that thirty men could get there unheard. Our breathing was
enough to give us away. Yet somehow we did get there. The Fascist parapet was
visible now, a dim black mound, looming high above us. Once again Jorge knelt
and fumbled. Snip, snip. There was no way of cutting the stuff silently.

So that was the inner wire. We crawled through it on all fours and rather
more rapidly. If we had time to deploy now all was well. Jorge and Benjamin
crawled across to the right. But the men behind, who were spread out, had to
form into single file to get through the narrow gap in the wire, and just as
this moment there was a flash and a bang from the Fascist parapet. The sentry
had heard us at last. Jorge poised himself on one knee and swung his arm like a
bowler. Crash! His bomb burst somewhere over the parapet. At once, far more
promptly than one would have thought possible, a roar of fire, ten or twenty
rifles, burst out from the Fascist parapet. They had been waiting for us after
all. Momentarily you could see every sand-bag in the lurid light. Men too far
back were flinging their bombs and some of them were falling short of the
parapet. Every loophole seemed to be spouting jets of flame. It is always
hateful to be shot at in the dark--every rifle--flash seems to be pointed
straight at yourself--but it was the bombs that were the worst. You cannot
conceive the horror of these things till you have seen one burst close to you in
darkness; in the daytime there is only the crash of the explosion, in the
darkness there is the blinding red glare as well. I had flung myself down at the
first volley. All this while I was lying on my side in the greasy mud, wrestling
savagely with the pin of a bomb. The damned thing would not come out. Finally I
realized that I was twisting it in the wrong direction. I got the pin out, rose
to my knees, hurled the bomb, and threw myself down again. The bomb burst over
to the right, outside the parapet; fright had spoiled my aim. Just at this
moment another bomb burst right in front of me, so close that I could feel the
heat of the explosion. I flattened myself out and dug my face into the mud so
hard that I hurt my neck and thought that I was wounded. Through the din I heard
an English voice behind me say quietly: 'I'm hit.' The bomb had, in fact,
wounded several people round about me without touching myself. I rose to my
knees and flung my second bomb. I forget where that one went.

The Fascists were firing, our people behind were firing, and I was very
conscious of being in the middle. I felt the blast of a shot and realized that a
man was firing from immediately behind me. I stood up and shouted at him:

'Don't shoot at me, you bloody fool!' At this moment I saw that Benjamin, ten
or fifteen yards to my right, was motioning to me with his arm. I ran across to
him. It meant crossing the line of spouting loop-holes, and as I went I clapped
my left hand over my cheek; an idiotic gesture--as though one's hand could stop
a bullet!--but I had a horror of being hit in the face. Benjamin was kneeling
on one knee with a pleased, devilish sort of expression on his face and firing
carefully at the rifle-flashes with his automatic pistol. Jorge had dropped
wounded at the first volley and was somewhere out of sight. I knelt beside
Benjamin, pulled the pin out of my third bomb and flung it. Ah! No doubt about
it that time. The bomb crashed inside the parapet, at the corner, just by the
machine-gun nest.

The Fascist fire seemed to have slackened very suddenly. Benjamin leapt to
his feet and shouted: 'Forward! Charge!' We dashed up the short steep slope on
which the parapet stood. I say 'dashed'; 'lumbered' would be a better word; the
fact is that you can't move fast when you are sodden and mudded from head to
foot and weighted down with a heavy rifle and bayonet and a hundred and fifty
cartridges. I took it for granted that there would be a Fascist waiting for me
at the top. If he fired at that range he could not miss me, and yet somehow I
never expected him to fire, only to try for me with his bayonet. I seemed to
feel in advance the sensation of our bayonets crossing, and I wondered whether
his arm would be stronger than mine. However, there was no Fascist waiting. With
a vague feeling of relief I found that it was a low parapet and the sand-bags
gave a good foothold. As a rule they are difficult to get over. Everything
inside was smashed to pieces, beams flung all over the place, and great shards
of uralite littered everywhere. Our bombs had wrecked all the huts and dug-outs.
And still there was not a soul visible. I thought they would be lurking
somewhere underground, and shouted in English (I could not think of any Spanish
at the moment): 'Come on out of it! Surrender!' No answer. Then a man, a shadowy
figure in the half-light, skipped over the roof of one of the ruined huts and
dashed away to the left. I started after him, prodding my bayonet ineffectually
into the darkness. As I rounded the comer of the hut I saw a man--I don't know
whether or not it was the same man as I had seen before--fleeing up the
communication-trench that led to the other Fascist position. I must have been
very close to him, for I could see him clearly. He was bareheaded and seemed to
have nothing on except a blanket which he was clutching round his shoulders. If
I had fired I could have blown him to pieces. But for fear of shooting one
another we had been ordered to use only bayonets once we were inside the
parapet, and in any case I never even thought of firing. Instead, my mind leapt
backwards twenty years, to our boxing instructor at school, showing me in vivid
pantomime how he had bayoneted a Turk at the Dardanelles. I gripped my rifle by
the small of the butt and lunged at the man's back. He was just out of my reach.
Another lunge: still out of reach. And for a little distance we proceeded like
this, he rushing up the trench and I after him on the ground above, prodding at
his shoulder-blades and never quite getting there--a comic memory for me to
look back upon, though I suppose it seemed less comic to him.

Of course, he knew the ground better than I and had soon slipped away from
me. When I came back the position was full of shouting men. The noise of firing
had lessened somewhat. The Fascists were still pouring a heavy fire at us from
three sides, but it was coming from a greater distance.

We had driven them back for the time being. I remember saying in an oracular
manner: 'We can hold this place for half an hour, not more.' I don't know why I
picked on half an hour. Looking over the right-hand parapet you could see
innumerable greenish rifle-flashes stabbing the darkness; but they were a long
way back, a hundred or two hundred yards. Our job now was to search the position
and loot anything that was worth looting. Benjamin and some others were already
scrabbling among the ruins of a big hut or dug-out in the middle of the
position. Benjamin staggered excitedly through the ruined roof, tugging at the
rope handle of an ammunition box.

'Comrades! Ammunition! Plenty ammunition here!'

'We don't want ammunition,' said a voice, 'we want rifles.'

This was true. Half our rifles were jammed with mud and unusable. They could
be cleaned, but it is dangerous to take the bolt out of a rifle in the darkness;
you put it down somewhere and then you lose it. I had a tiny electric torch
which my wife had managed to buy in Barcelona, otherwise we had no light of any
description between us. A few men with good rifles began a desultory fire at the
flashes in the distance. No one dared fire too rapidly; even the best of the
rifles were liable to jam if they got too hot. There were about sixteen of us
inside the parapet, including one or two who were wounded. A number of wounded,
English and Spanish, were lying outside. Patrick O'Hara, a Belfast Irishman who
had had some training in first-aid, went to and fro with packets of bandages,
binding up the wounded men and, of course, being shot at every time he returned
to the parapet, in spite of his indignant shouts of 'Poum!'

We began searching the position. There were several dead men lying about, but
I did not stop to examine them. The thing I was after was the machine-gun. All
the while when we were lying outside I had been wondering vaguely why the gun
did not fire. I flashed my torch inside the machine-gun nest. A bitter
disappointment! The gun was not there. Its tripod was there, and various boxes
of ammunition and spare parts, but the gun was gone. They must have unscrewed it
and carried it off at the first alarm. No doubt they were acting under orders,
but it was a stupid and cowardly thing to do, for if they had kept the gun in
place they could have slaughtered the whole lot of us. We were furious. We had
set our hearts on capturing a machine-gun.

We poked here and there but did not find anything of much value. There were
quantities of Fascist bombs lying about--a rather inferior type of bomb, which
you touched off by pulling a string--and I put a couple of them in my pocket as
souvenirs. It was impossible not to be struck by the bare misery of the Fascist
dug-outs. The litter of spare clothes, books, food, petty personal belongings
that you saw in our own dug-outs was completely absent; these poor unpaid
conscripts seemed to own nothing except blankets and a few soggy hunks of bread.
Up at the far end there was a small dug-out which was partly above ground and
had a tiny window. We flashed the torch through the window and instantly raised
a cheer. A cylindrical object in a leather case, four feet high and six inches
in diameter, was leaning against the wall. Obviously the machine-gun barrel. We
dashed round and got in at the doorway, to find that the thing in the leather
case was not a machine-gun but something which, in our weapon-starved army, was
even more precious. It was an enormous telescope, probably of at least sixty or
seventy magnifications, with a folding tripod. Such telescopes simply did not
exist on our side of the line and they were desperately needed. We brought it
out in triumph and leaned it against the parapet, to be carried off after.

At this moment someone shouted that the Fascists were closing in. Certainly
the din of firing had grown very much louder. But it was obvious that the
Fascists would not counter-attack from the right, which meant crossing no man's
land and assaulting their own parapet. If they had any sense at all they would
come at us from inside the line. I went round to the other side of the dug-outs.
The position was roughly horseshoe-shaped, with the dug-outs in the middle, so
that we had another parapet covering us on the left. A heavy fire was coming
from that direction, but it did not matter greatly. The danger-spot was straight
in front, where there was no protection at all. A stream of bullets was passing
just overhead. They must be coming from the other Fascist position farther up
the line; evidently the Shock Troopers had not captured it after all. But this
time the noise was deafening. It was the unbroken, drum-like roar of massed
rifles which I was used to hearing from a little distance; this was the first
time I had been in the middle of it. And by now, of course, the firing had
spread along the line for miles around. Douglas Thompson, with a wounded arm
dangling useless at his side, was leaning against the parapet and firing
one-handed at the flashes. Someone whose rifle had jammed was loading for
him.

There were four or five of us round this side. It was obvious what we must
do. We must drag the sand-bags from the front parapet and make a barricade
across the unprotected side. And we had got to be quick. The fire was high at
present, but they might lower it at any moment; by the flashes all round I could
see that we had a hundred or two hundred men against us. We began wrenching the
sand-bags loose, carrying them twenty yards forward and dumping them into a
rough heap. It was a vile job. They were big sand-bags, weighing a hundredweight
each and it took every ounce of your strength to prise them loose; and then the
rotten sacking split and the damp earth cascaded all over you, down your neck
and up your sleeves. I remember feeling a deep horror at everything: the chaos,
the darkness, the frightful din, the slithering to and fro in the mud, the
struggles with the bursting sand-bags--all the time encumbered with my rifle,
which I dared not put down for fear of losing it. I even shouted to someone as
we staggered along with a bag between us: 'This is war! Isn't it bloody?'
Suddenly a succession of tall figures came leaping over the front parapet. As
they came nearer we saw that they wore the uniform of the Shock Troopers, and we
cheered, thinking they were reinforcements. However, there were only four of
them, three Germans and a Spaniard.

We heard afterwards what had happened to the Shock Troopers. They did not
know the ground and in the darkness had been led to the wrong place, where they
were caught on the Fascist wire and numbers of them were shot down. These were
four who had got lost, luckily for themselves. The Germans did not speak a word
of English, French, or Spanish. With difficulty and much gesticulation we
explained what we were doing and got them to help us in building the
barricade.

The Fascists had brought up a machine-gun now. You could see it spitting like
a squib a hundred or two hundred yards away; the bullets came over us with a
steady, frosty crackle. Before long we had flung enough sand-bags into place to
make a low breastwork behind which the few men who were on this side of the
position could lie down and fire. I was kneeling behind them. A mortar-shell
whizzed over and crashed somewhere in no man's land. That was another danger,
but it would take them some minutes to find our range. Now that we had finished
wrestling with those beastly sand-bags it was not bad fun in a way; the noise,
the darkness, the flashes approaching, our own men blazing back at the flashes.
One even had time to think a little. I remember wondering whether I was
frightened, and deciding that I was not. Outside, where I was probably in less
danger, I had been half sick with fright. Suddenly there was another shout that
the Fascists were closing in. There was no doubt about it this time, the
rifle-flashes were much nearer. I saw a flash hardly twenty yards away.
Obviously they were working their way up the communication-trench. At twenty
yards they were within easy bombing range; there were eight or nine of us
bunched together and a single well-placed bomb would blow us all to fragments.
Bob Smillie, the blood running down his face from a small wound, sprang to his
knee and flung a bomb. We cowered, waiting for the crash. The fuse fizzled red
as it sailed through the air, but the bomb failed to explode. (At least a
quarter of these bombs were duds'). I had no bombs left except the Fascist ones
and I was not certain how these worked. I shouted to the others to know if
anyone had a bomb to spare. Douglas Moyle felt in his pocket and passed one
across. I flung it and threw myself on my face. By one of those strokes of luck
that happen about once in a year I had managed to drop the bomb almost exactly
where the rifle had flashed. There was the roar of the explosion and then,
instantly, a diabolical outcry of screams and groans. We had got one of them,
anyway; I don't know whether he was killed, but certainly he was badly hurt.
Poor wretch, poor wretch! I felt a vague sorrow as I heard him screaming. But at
the same instant, in the dim light of the rifle-flashes, I saw or thought I saw
a figure standing near the place where the rifle had flashed. I threw up my
rifle and let fly. Another scream, but I think it was still the effect of the
bomb. Several more bombs were thrown. The next rifle-flashes we saw were a long
way off, a hundred yards or more. So we had driven them back, temporarily at
least.

Everyone began cursing and saying why the hell didn't they send us some
supports. With a sub-machine-gun or twenty men with clean rifles we could hold
this place against a battalion. At this moment Paddy Donovan, who was
second-in-command to Benjamin and had been sent back for orders, climbed over
the front parapet.

'Hi! Come on out of it! All men to retire at once!'

'What?'

'Retire! Get out of it!'

'Why?'

'Orders. Back to our own lines double-quick.'

People were already climbing over the front parapet. Several of them were
struggling with a heavy ammunition box. My mind flew to the telescope which I
had left leaning against the parapet on the other side of the position. But at
this moment I saw that the four Shock Troopers, acting I suppose on some
mysterious orders they had received beforehand, had begun running up the
communication-trench. It led to the other Fascist position and--if they got
there--to certain death. They were disappearing into the darkness. I ran after
them, trying to think of the Spanish for 'retire'; finally I shouted, 'Atras!
Atras!' which perhaps conveyed the right meaning. The Spaniard understood it and
brought the others back. Paddy was waiting at the parapet.

'Come on, hurry up.'

'But the telescope!'

'B--the telescope! Benjamin's waiting outside.'

We climbed out. Paddy held the wire aside for me. As soon as we got away from
the shelter of the Fascist parapet we were under a devilish fire that seemed to
be coming at us from every direction. Part of it, I do not doubt, came from our
own side, for everyone was firing all along the line. Whichever way we turned a
fresh stream of bullets swept past; we were driven this way and that in the
darkness like a flock of sheep. It did not make it any easier that we were
dragging a captured box of ammunition--one of those boxes that hold 1750 rounds
and weigh about a hundredweight--besides a box of bombs and several Fascist
rifles. In a few minutes, although the distance from parapet to parapet was not
two hundred yards and most of us knew the ground, we were completely lost. We
found ourselves slithering about in a muddy field, knowing nothing except that
bullets were coming from both sides. There was no moon to go by, but the sky was
growing a little lighter. Our lines lay east of Huesca; I wanted to stay where we
were till the first crack of dawn showed us which was east and which was west;
but the others were against it. We slithered onwards, changing our direction
several times and taking it in turns to haul at the ammunition-box. At last we
saw the low flat line of a parapet looming in front of us. It might be ours or
it might be the Fascists'; nobody had the dimmest idea which way we were going.
Benjamin crawled on his belly through some tall whitish weed till he was about
twenty yards from the parapet and tried a challenge. A shout of 'Poum!' answered
him. We jumped to our feet, found our way along the parapet, slopped once more
through the irrigation ditch--splash-gurgle!--and were in safety.

Kopp was waiting inside the parapet with a few Spaniards. The doctor and the
stretchers were gone. It appeared that all the wounded had been got in except
Jorge and one of our own men, Hiddlestone by name, who were missing. Kopp was
pacing up and down, very pale. Even the fat folds at the back of his neck were
pale; he was paying no attention to the bullets that streamed over the low
parapet and cracked close to his head. Most of us were squatting behind the
parapet for cover. Kopp was muttering. 'Jorge! Cogno! Jorge!' And then in
English. 'If Jorge is gone it is terreeble, terreeble!' Jorge was his personal
friend and one of his best officers. Suddenly he turned to us and asked for five
volunteers, two English and three Spanish, to go and look for the missing men.
Moyle and I volunteered with three Spaniards.

As we got outside the Spaniards murmured that it was getting dangerously
light. This was true enough; the sky was dimly blue. There was a tremendous
noise of excited voices coming from the Fascist redoubt. Evidently they had
re-occupied the place in much greater force than before. We were sixty or
seventy yards from the parapet when they must have seen or heard us, for they
sent over a heavy burst of fire which made us drop on our faces. One of them
flung a bomb over the parapet--a sure sign of panic. We were lying in the
grass, waiting for an opportunity to move on, when we heard or thought we heard
--I have no doubt it was pure imagination, but it seemed real enough at the time
--that the Fascist voices were much closer. They had left the parapet and were
coming after us. 'Run!' I yelled to Moyle, and jumped to my feet. And heavens,
how I ran! I had thought earlier in the night that you can't run when you are
sodden from head to foot and weighted down with a rifle and cartridges; I
learned now you can always run when you think you have fifty or a hundred armed
men after you. But if I could run fast, others could run faster. In my flight
something that might have been a shower of meteors sped past me. It was the
three Spaniards, who had been in front. They were back to our own parapet before
they stopped and I could catch up with them. The truth was that our nerves were
all to pieces. I knew, however, that in a half light one man is invisible where
five are clearly visible, so I went back alone. I managed to get to the outer
wire and searched the ground as well as I could, which was not very well, for I
had to lie on my belly. There was no sign of Jorge or Hiddlestone, so I crept
back. We learned afterwards that both Jorge and Hiddlestone had been taken to
the dressing-station earlier. Jorge was lightly wounded through the shoulder.
Hiddlestone had received a dreadful wound--a bullet which travelled right up
his left arm, breaking the bone in several places; as he lay helpless on the
ground a bomb had burst near him and torn various other parts of his body. He
recovered, I am glad to say. Later he told me that he had worked his way some
distance lying on his back, then had clutched hold of a wounded Spaniard and
they had helped one another in.

It was getting light now. Along the line for miles around a ragged
meaningless fire was thundering, like the rain that goes on raining after a
storm. I remember the desolate look of everything, the morasses of mud, the
weeping poplar trees, the yellow water in the trench-bottoms; and men's
exhausted faces, unshaven, streaked with mud, and blackened to the eyes with
smoke. When I got back to my dug--out the three men I shared it with were
already fast sleep. They had flung themselves down with all their equipment on
and their muddy rifles clutched against them. Everything was sodden, inside the
dug--out as well as outside. By long searching I managed to collect enough chips
of dry wood to make a tiny fire. Then I smoked the cigar which I had been
hoarding and which, surprisingly enough, had not got broken during the
night.

Afterwards we learned that the action had been a success, as such things go.
It was merely a raid to make the Fascists divert troops from the other side of
Huesca, where the Anarchists were attacking again. I had judged that the
Fascists had thrown a hundred or two hundred men into the counter-attack, but a
deserter told us later on that it was six hundred. I dare say he was lying--
deserters, for obvious reasons, often try to curry favour. It was a great pity
about the telescope. The thought of losing that beautiful bit of loot worries me
even now.




Chapter 8



THE days grew hotter and even the nights grew tolerably warm. On a bullet--
chipped tree in front of our parapet thick clusters of cherries were forming.
Bathing in the river ceased to be an agony and became almost a pleasure. Wild
roses with pink blooms the size of saucers straggled over the shell-holes round
Torre Fabian. Behind the line you met peasants wearing wild roses over their
ears. In the evenings they used to go out with green nets, hunting quails. You
spread the net over the tops of the grasses and then lay down and made a noise
like a female quail. Any male quail that was within hearing then came running
towards you, and when he was underneath the net you threw a stone to scare him,
whereupon he sprang into the air and was entangled in the net. Apparently only
male quails were caught, which struck me as unfair.

There was a section of Andalusians next to us in the line now. I do not know
quite how they got to this front. The current explanation was that they had run
away from Malaga so fast that they had forgotten to stop at Valencia; but this,
of course, came from the Catalans, who professed to look down on the Andalusians
as a race of semi-savages. 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. They thought
they were Anarchists, but were not quite certain; perhaps they were Communists.
They were gnarled, rustic-looking men, shepherds or labourers from the olive
groves, perhaps, with faces deeply stained by the ferocious suns of farther
south. They were very useful to us, for they had an extraordinary dexterity at
rolling the dried-up Spanish tobacco into cigarettes. The issue of cigarettes
had ceased, but in Monflorite it was occasionally possible to buy packets of the
cheapest kind of tobacco, which in appearance and texture was very like chopped
chaff. Its flavour was not bad, but it was so dry that even when you had
succeeded in making a cigarette the tobacco promptly fell out and left an empty
cylinder. The Andalusians, however, could roll admirable cigarettes and had a
special technique for tucking the ends in.

Two Englishmen were laid low by sunstroke. My salient memories of that time
are the heat of the midday sun, and working half-naked with sand--bags punishing
one's shoulders which were already flayed by the sun; and the lousiness of our
clothes and boots, which were literally dropping to pieces; and the struggles
with the mule which brought our rations and which did not mind rifle-fire but
took to flight when shrapnel burst in the air; and the mosquitoes (just
beginning to be active) and the rats, which were a public nuisance and would
even devour leather belts and cartridge-pouches. Nothing was happening except an
occasional casualty from a sniper's bullet and the sporadic artillery-fire and
air-raids on Huesca. Now that the trees were in full leaf we had constructed
snipers' platforms, like machans, in the poplar trees that fringed the line. On
the other side of Huesca the attacks were petering out. The Anarchists had had
heavy losses and had not succeeded in completely cutting the Jaca road. They had
managed to establish themselves close enough on either side to bring the road
itself under machine-gun fire and make it impassable for traffic; but the gap
was a kilometre wide and the Fascists had constructed a sunken road, a sort of
enormous trench, along which a certain number of lorries could come and go.
Deserters reported that in Huesca there were plenty of munitions and very little
food. But the town was evidently not going to fall. Probably it would have been
impossible to take it with the fifteen thousand ill-armed men who were
available. Later, in June, the Government brought troops from the Madrid front
and concentrated thirty thousand men on Huesca, with an enormous quantity of
aeroplanes, but still the town did not fall.

When we went on leave I had been a hundred and fifteen days in the line, and
at the time this period seemed to me to have been one of the most futile of my
whole life. I had joined the militia in order to fight against Fascism, and as
yet I had scarcely fought at all, had merely existed as a sort of passive
object, doing nothing in return for my rations except to suffer from cold and
lack of sleep. Perhaps that is the fate of most soldiers in most wars. But now
that I can see this period in perspective I do not altogether regret it. I wish,
indeed, that I could have served the Spanish Government a little more
effectively; but from a personal point of view--from the point of view of my
own development--those first three or four months that I spent in the line were
less futile than I then thought. They formed a kind of interregnum in my life,
quite different from anything that had gone before and perhaps from anything
that is to come, and they taught me things that I could not have learned in any
other way.

The essential point is that all this time I had been isolated--for at the
front one was almost completely isolated from the outside world: even of what
was happening in Barcelona one had only a dim conception--among people who
could roughly but not too inaccurately be described as revolutionaries. This was
the result of the militia--system, which on the Aragon front was not radically
altered till about June 1937. The workers' militias, based on the trade unions
and each composed of people of approximately the same political opinions, had
the effect of canalizing into one place all the most revolutionary sentiment in
the country. I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any
size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism
were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of
thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all
living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was
perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense
in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of
Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of
Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life--snobbishness,
money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.--had simply ceased to exist. The
ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost
unthinkable in the money--tainted air of England; there was no one there except
the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master. Of
course such a state of affairs could not last. It was simply a temporary and
local phase in an enormous game that is being played over the whole surface of
the earth. But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who
experienced it. However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards
that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been
in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the
word 'comrade' stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug.
One had breathed the air of equality. I am well aware that it is now the fashion
to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the
world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy 'proving'
that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the
grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism
quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and
makes them willing to risk their skins for it, 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. And it was here that those few months in
the militia were valuable to me. For the Spanish militias, while they lasted,
were a sort of microcosm of a classless society. In that community where no one
was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and
no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages
of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it
deeply attracted me. The effect was to make my desire to see Socialism
established much more actual than it had been before. Partly, perhaps, this was
due to the good luck of being among Spaniards, who, with their innate decency
and their ever-present Anarchist tinge, would make even the opening stages of
Socialism tolerable if they had the chance.

Of course at the time I was hardly conscious of the changes that were
occurring in my own mind. Like everyone about me I was chiefly conscious of
boredom, heat, cold, dirt, lice, privation, and occasional danger. It is quite
different now. This period which then seemed so futile and eventless is now of
great importance to me. It is so different from the rest of my life that already
it has taken on the magic quality which, as a rule, belongs only to memories
that are years old. It was beastly while it was happening, but it is a good
patch for my mind to browse upon. I wish I could convey to you the atmosphere of
that time. I hope I have done so, a little, in the earlier chapters of this
book. It is all bound up in my mind with the winter cold, the ragged uniforms of
militiamen, the oval Spanish faces, the morse-like tapping of machine-guns, the
smells of urine and rotting bread, the tinny taste of bean-stews wolfed
hurriedly out of unclean pannikins.

The whole period stays by me with curious vividness. In my memory I live over
incidents that might seem too petty to be worth recalling. I am in the dug-out
at Monte Pocero again, on the ledge of limestone that serves as a bed, and young
Ramon is snoring with his nose flattened between my shoulder-blades. I am
stumbling up the mucky trench, through the mist that swirls round me like cold
steam. I am half-way up a crack in the mountain-side, struggling to keep my
balance and to tug a root of wild rosemary out of the ground. High overhead some
meaningless bullets are singing.

I am lying hidden among small fir-trees on the low ground west of Monte
Oscuro, with Kopp and Bob Edwards and three Spaniards. Up the naked grey hill to
the right of us a string of Fascists are climbing like ants. Close in front a
bugle-call rings out from the Fascist lines. Kopp catches my eye and, with a
schoolboy gesture, thumbs his nose at the sound.

I am in the mucky yard at La Granja, among the mob of men who are struggling
with their tin pannikins round the cauldron of stew. The fat and harassed cook
is warding them off with the ladle. At a table nearby a bearded man with a huge
automatic pistol strapped to his belt is hewing loaves of bread into five
pieces. Behind me a Cockney voice (Bill Chambers, with whom I quarrelled
bitterly and who was afterwards killed outside Huesca) is singing:

    There are rats, rats,
    Rats as big as cats,
    In the. . .

A shell comes screaming over. Children of fifteen fling themselves on their
faces. The cook dodges behind the cauldron. Everyone rises with a sheepish
expression as the shell plunges and booms a hundred yards away.

I am walking up and down the line of sentries, under the dark boughs of the
poplars. In the flooded ditch outside the rats are paddling about, making as
much noise as otters. As the yellow dawn comes up behind us, the Andalusian
sentry, muffled in his cloak, begins singing. Across no man's land, a hundred or
two hundred yards away, you can hear the Fascist sentry also singing.

On 25 April, after the usual mananas, another section relieved us and we
handed over our rifles, packed our kits, and marched back to Monflorite. I was
not sorry to leave the line. The lice were multiplying in my trousers far faster
than I could massacre them, and for a month past I had had no socks and my boots
had very little sole left, so that I was walking more or less barefoot. I wanted
a hot bath, clean clothes, and a night between sheets more passionately than it
is possible to want anything when one has been living a normal civilized life.
We slept a few hours in a barn in Monflorite, jumped a lorry in the small hours,
caught the five o'clock train at Barbastro, and--having the luck to connect
with a fast train at Lerida--were in Barcelona by three o'clock in the
afternoon of the 26th. And after that the trouble began.




Chapter 9



FROM Mandalay, in Upper Burma, you can travel by train to Maymyo, the
principal hill-station of the province, on the edge of the Shan plateau. It is
rather a queer experience. You start off in the typical atmosphere of an eastern
city--the scorching sunlight, the dusty palms, the smells of fish and spices and
garlic, the squashy tropical fruits, the swarming dark-faced human beings--and
because you are so used to it you carry this atmosphere intact, so to speak, in
your railway carriage. Mentally you are still in Mandalay when the train stops
at Maymyo, four thousand feet above sea--level. But in stepping out of the
carriage you step into a different hemisphere. Suddenly you are breathing cool
sweet air that might be that of England, and all round you are green grass,
bracken, fir-trees, and hill--women with pink cheeks selling baskets of
strawberries.

Getting back to Barcelona, after three and a half months at the front,
reminded me of this. There was the same abrupt and startling change of
atmosphere. In the train, all the way to Barcelona, the atmosphere of the front
persisted; the dirt, the noise, the discomfort, the ragged clothes the feeling
of privation, comradeship, and equality. The train, already full of militiamen
when it left Barbastro, was invaded by more and more peasants at every station
on the line; peasants with bundles of vegetables, with terrified fowls which
they carried head--downwards, with sacks which looped and writhed all over the
floor and were discovered to be full of live rabbits--finally with a quite
considerable flock of sheep which were driven into the compartments and wedged
into every empty space. The militiamen shouted revolutionary songs which drowned
the rattle of the train and kissed their hands or waved red and black
handkerchiefs to every pretty girl along the line. Bottles of wine and of anis,
the filthy Aragonese liqueur, travelled from hand to hand. With the Spanish
goat-skin water-bottles you can squirt a jet of wine right across a railway
carriage into your friend's mouth, which saves a lot of trouble. Next to me a
black-eyed boy of fifteen was recounting sensational and, I do not doubt,
completely untrue stories of his own exploits at the front to two old
leather-faced peasants who listened open-mouthed. Presently the peasants undid
their bundles and gave us some sticky dark-red wine. Everyone was profoundly
happy, more happy than I can convey. But when the train had rolled through
Sabadell and into Barcelona, we stepped into an atmosphere that was scarcely
less alien and hostile to us and our kind than if this had been Paris or
London.

Everyone who has made two visits, at intervals of months, to Barcelona during
the war has remarked upon the extraordinary changes that took place in it. And
curiously enough, whether they went there first in August and again in January,
or, like myself, first in December and again in April, the thing they said was
always the same: that the revolutionary atmosphere had vanished. No doubt to
anyone who had been there in August, when the blood was scarcely dry in the
streets and militia were quartered in the smart hotels, Barcelona in December
would have seemed bourgeois; to me, fresh from England, it was liker to a
workers' city than anything I had conceived possible. Now the tide had rolled
back. Once again it was an ordinary city, a little pinched and chipped by war,
but with no outward sign of working-class predominance.

The change in the aspect of the crowds was startling. The militia uniform and
the blue overalls had almost disappeared; everyone seemed to be wearing the
smart summer suits in which Spanish tailors specialize. Fat prosperous men,
elegant women, and sleek cars were everywhere. (It appeared that there were
still no private cars; nevertheless, anyone who 'was anyone' seemed able to
command a car.) The officers of the new Popular Army, a type that had scarcely
existed when I left Barcelona, swarmed in surprising numbers. The Popular Army
was officered at the rate of one officer to ten men. A certain number of these
officers had served in the militia and been brought back from the front for
technical instruction, but the majority were young men who had gone to the
School of War in preference to joining the militia. Their relation to their men
was not quite the same as in a bourgeois army, but there was a definite social
difference, expressed by the difference of pay and uniform. The men wore a kind
of coarse brown overalls, the officers wore an elegant khaki uniform with a
tight waist, like a British Army officer's uniform, only a little more so. I do
not suppose that more than one in twenty of them had yet been to the front, but
all of them had automatic pistols strapped to their belts; we, at the front,
could not get pistols for love or money. As we made our way up the street I
noticed that people were staring at our dirty exteriors. Of course, like all men
who have been several months in the line, we were a dreadful sight. I was
conscious of looking like a scarecrow. My leather jacket was in tatters, my
woollen cap had lost its shape and slid perpetually over one eye, my boots
consisted of very little beyond splayed-out uppers. All of us were in more or
less the same state, and in addition we were dirty and unshaven, so it was no
wonder that the people stared. But it dismayed me a little, and brought it home
to me that some queer things had been happening in the last three months.

During the next few days I discovered by innumerable signs that my first
impression had not been wrong. A deep change had come over the town. There were
two facts that were the keynote of all else. One was that the people--the civil
population--had lost much of their interest in the war; the other was that the
normal division of society into rich and poor, upper class and lower class, was
reasserting itself.

The general indifference to the war was surprising and rather disgusting. It
horrified people who came to Barcelona from Madrid or even from Valencia. Partly
it was due to the remoteness of Barcelona from the actual fighting; I noticed
the same thing a month later in Tarragona, where the ordinary life of a smart
seaside town was continuing almost undisturbed. But it was significant that all
over Spain voluntary enlistment had dwindled from about January onwards. In
Catalonia, in February, there had been a wave of enthusiasm over the first big
drive for the Popular Army, but it had not led to any great increase in
recruiting. The war was only six months old or thereabouts when the Spanish
Government had to resort to conscription, which would be natural in a foreign
war, but seems anomalous in a civil war. Undoubtedly it was bound up with the
disappointment of the revolutionary hopes with which the war had started. The
trade union members who formed themselves into militias and chased the Fascists
back to Zaragoza in the first few weeks of war had done so largely because they
believed themselves to be fighting for working-class control; but it was
becoming more and more obvious that working-class control was a lost cause, and
the common people, especially the town proletariat, who have to fill the ranks
in any war, civil or foreign, could not be blamed for a certain apathy. Nobody
wanted to lose the war, but the majority were chiefly anxious for it to be over.
You noticed this wherever you went. Everywhere you met with the same perfunctory
remark:' This war--terrible, isn't it? When is it going to end?' Politically
conscious people were far more aware of the internecine struggle between
Anarchist and Communist than of the fight against Franco. To the mass of the
people the food shortage was the most important thing. 'The front' had come to
be thought of as a mythical far-off place to which young men disappeared and
either did not return or returned after three or four months with vast sums of
money in their pockets. (A militiaman usually received his back pay when he went
on leave.) Wounded men, even when they were hopping about on crutches, did not
receive any special consideration. To be in the militia was no longer
fashionable. The shops, always the barometers of public taste, showed this
clearly. When I first reached Barcelona the shops, poor and shabby though they
were, had specialized in militiamen's equipment. Forage-caps, zipper jackets,
Sam Browne belts, hunting-knives, water-bottles, revolver-holsters were
displayed in every window. Now the shops were markedly smarter, but the war had
been thrust into the background. As I discovered later, when buying my kit
before going back to the front, certain things that one badly needed at the
front were very difficult to procure.

Meanwhile there was going on a systematic propaganda against the party
militias and in favour of the Popular Army. The position here was rather
curious. Since February the entire armed forces had theoretically been
incorporated in the Popular Army, and the militias were, on paper, reconstructed
along Popular Army lines, with differential pay-rates, gazetted rank, etc., etc.
The divisions were made up of 'mixed brigades', which were supposed to consist
partly of Popular Army troops and partly of militia. But the only changes that
had actually taken place were changes of name. The P.O.U.M. troops, for
instance, previously called the Lenin Division, were now known as the 29th
Division. Until June very few Popular Army troops reached the Aragon front, and
in consequence the militias were able to retain their separate structure and
their special character. But on every wall the Government agents had stencilled:
'We need a Popular Army', and over the radio and in the Communist Press there
was a ceaseless and sometimes very malignant jibing against the militias, who
were described as ill-trained, undisciplined, etc., etc.; the Popular Army was
always described as 'heroic'. 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.
For the time being, however, the militias were holding the line while the
Popular Army was training in the rear, and this fact had to be advertised as
little as possible. Drafts of militia returning to the front were no longer
marched through the streets with drums beating and flags flying. They were
smuggled away by train or lorry at five o'clock in the morning. A few drafts of
the Popular Army were now beginning to leave for the front, and these, as
before, were marched ceremoniously through the streets; but even they, owing to
the general waning of interest in the war, met with comparatively little
enthusiasm. The fact that the militia troops were also, on paper. Popular Army
troops, was skilfully used in the Press propaganda. Any credit that happened to
be going was automatically handed to the Popular Army, while all blame was
reserved for the militias. It sometimes happened that the same troops were
praised in one capacity and blamed in the other.

But besides all this there was the startling change in the social atmosphere
--a thing difficult to conceive unless you have actually experienced it. When I
first reached Barcelona I had thought it a town where class distinctions and
great differences of wealth hardly existed. Certainly that was what it looked
like. 'Smart' clothes were an abnormality, nobody cringed or took tips, waiters
and flower-women and bootblacks looked you in the eye and called you 'comrade'.
I had not grasped that this was mainly a mixture of hope and camouflage. The
working class believed in a revolution that had been begun but never
consolidated, and the bourgeoisie were scared and temporarily disguising
themselves as workers. In the first months of revolution there must have been
many thousands of people who deliberately put on overalls and shouted
revolutionary slogans as a way of saving their skins. Now things were returning
to normal. The smart restaurants and hotels were full of rich people wolfing
expensive meals, while for the working-class population food-prices had jumped
enormously without any corresponding rise in wages. Apart from the expensiveness
of everything, there were recurrent shortages of this and that, which, of
course, always hit the poor rather than the rich. The restaurants and hotels
seemed to have little difficulty in getting whatever they wanted, but in the
working-class quarters the queues for bread, olive oil, and other necessaries
were hundreds of yards long. Previously in Barcelona I had been struck by the
absence of beggars; now there were quantities of them. Outside the delicatessen
shop at the top of the Ramblas gangs of barefooted children were always waiting
to swarm round anyone who came out and clamour for scraps of food. The
'revolutionary' forms of speech were dropping out of use. Strangers seldom
addressed you as tu and camarada nowadays; it was usually senor and usted.
Buenos dias was beginning to replace salud. The waiters were back in their
boiled shirts and the shop-walkers were cringing in the familiar manner. My wife
and I went into a hosiery shop on the Ramblas to buy some stockings. The shopman
bowed and rubbed his hands as they do not do even in England nowadays, though
they used to do it twenty or thirty years ago. In a furtive indirect way the
practice of tipping was coming back. The workers' patrols had been ordered to
dissolve and the pre-war police forces were back on the streets. One result of
this was that the cabaret show and high-class brothels, many of which had been
closed by the workers' patrols, had promptly reopened. [Note 8, below] A small but
significant instance of the way in which everything was now orientated in favour
of the wealthier classes could be seen in the tobacco shortage. For the mass of
the people the shortage of tobacco was so desperate that cigarettes filled with
sliced liquorice-root were being sold in the streets. I tried some of these
once. (A lot of people tried them once.) Franco held the Canaries, where all the
Spanish tobacco is grown; consequently the only stocks of tobacco left on the
Government side were those that had been in existence before the war. These were
running so low that the tobacconists' shops only opened once a week; after
waiting for a couple of hours in a queue you might, if you were lucky, get a
three-quarter-ounce packet of tobacco. Theoretically the Government would not
allow tobacco to be purchased from abroad, because this meant reducing the
gold-reserves, which had got to be kept for arms and other necessities. Actually
there was a steady supply of smuggled foreign cigarettes of the more expensive
kinds. Lucky Strikes and so forth, which gave a grand opportunity for
profiteering. You could buy the smuggled cigarettes openly in the smart hotels
and hardly less openly in the streets, provided that you could pay ten pesetas
(a militiaman's daily wage) for a packet. The smuggling was for the benefit of
wealthy people, and was therefore connived at. If you had enough money there was
nothing that you could not get in any quantity, with the possible exception of
bread, which was rationed fairly strictly. This open contrast of wealth and
poverty would have been impossible a few months earlier, when the working class
still were or seemed to be in control. But it would not be fair to attribute it
solely to the shift of political power. Partly it was a result of the safety of
life in Barcelona, where there was little to remind one of the war except an
occasional air-raid. Everyone who had been in Madrid said that it was completely
different there. In Madrid the common danger forced people of almost all kinds
into some sense of comradeship. A fat man eating quails while children are
begging for bread is a disgusting sight, but you are less likely to see it when
you are within sound of the guns.

[Note 8. The workers' patrols are said to have closed 75 per cent of the
brothels.]

A day or two after the street-fighting I remember passing through one of the
fashionable streets and coming upon a confectioner's shop with a window full of
pastries and bonbons of the most elegant kinds, at staggering prices. It was the
kind of shop you see in Bond Street or the Rue de la Paix. And I remember
feeling a vague horror and amazement that money could still be wasted upon such
things in a hungry war-stricken country. But God forbid that I should pretend to
any personal superiority. After several months of discomfort I had a ravenous
desire for decent food and wine, cocktails, American cigarettes, and so forth,
and I admit to having wallowed in every luxury that I had money to buy. During
that first week, before the street-fighting began, I had several preoccupations
which interacted upon one another in a curious way. In the first place, as I
have said, I was busy making myself as comfortable as I could. Secondly, thanks
to over-eating and over-drinking, I was slightly out of health all that week. I
would feel a little unwell, go to bed for half a day, get up and eat another
excessive meal, and then feel ill again. At the same time I was making secret
negotiations to buy a revolver. I badly wanted a revolver--in trench-fighting
much more useful than a rifle--and they were very difficult to get hold of. The
Government issued them to policemen and Popular Army officers, but refused to
issue them to the militia; you had to buy them, illegally, from the secret
stores of the Anarchists. After a lot of fuss and nuisance an Anarchist friend
managed to procure me a tiny 26-mm. automatic pistol, a wretched weapon, useless
at more than five yards but better than nothing. And besides all this I was
making preliminary arrangements to leave the P.O.U.M. militia and enter some
other unit that would ensure my being sent to the Madrid front.

I had told everyone for a long time past that I was going to leave the
P.O.U.M. As far as my purely personal preferences went I would have liked to
join the Anarchists. If one became a member of the C.N.T. it was possible to
enter the F.A.I. militia, but I was told that the F.A.I. were likelier to send
me to Teruel than to Madrid. If I wanted to go to Madrid I must join the
International Column, which meant getting a recommendation from a member of the
Communist Party. I sought out a Communist friend, attached to the Spanish
Medical Aid, and explained my case to him. He seemed very anxious to recruit me
and asked me, if possible, to persuade some of the other I.L.P. Englishmen to
come with me. If I had been in better health I should probably have agreed there
and then. It is hard to say now what difference this would have made. Quite
possibly I should have been sent to Albacete before the Barcelona fighting
started; in which case, not having seen the fighting at close quarters, I might
have accepted the official version of it as truthful. On the other hand, if I
had been in Barcelona during the fighting, under Communist orders but still with
a sense of personal loyalty to my comrades in the P.O.U.M., my position would
have been impossible. But I had another week's leave due to me and I was very
anxious to get my health back before returning to the line. Also--the kind of
detail that is always deciding one's destiny--I had to wait while the
boot-makers made me a new pair of marching boots. (The entire Spanish army had
failed to produce a pair of boots big enough to fit me.) I told my Communist
friend that I would make definite arrangements later. Meanwhile I wanted a rest.
I even had a notion that we--my wife and I--might go to the seaside for two or
three days. What an idea! The political atmosphere ought to have warned me that
that was not the kind of thing one could do nowadays.

For under the surface-aspect of the town, under the luxury and growing
poverty, under the seeming gaiety of the streets, with their flower--stalls,
their many-coloured flags, their propaganda-posters, and thronging crowds, there
was an unmistakable and horrible feeling of political rivalry and hatred. People
of all shades of opinion were saying forebodingly: 'There's going to be trouble
before long.' The danger was quite simple and intelligible. It was the
antagonism between those who wished the revolution to go forward and those who
wished to check or prevent it--ultimately, between Anarchists and Communists.
Politically there was now no power in Catalonia except the P.S.U.C. and their
Liberal allies. But over against this there was the uncertain strength of the
C.N.T., less well-armed and less sure of what they wanted than their
adversaries, but powerful because of their numbers and their predominance in
various key industries. Given this alignment of forces there was bound to be
trouble. From the point of view of the P.S.U.C.-controlled Generalite, the first
necessity, to make their position secure, was to get the weapons out of the
C.N.T. workers' hands. As I have pointed out earlier, the move to break up the
party militias was at bottom a manoeuvre towards this end. At the same time the
pre-war armed police forces. Civil Guards, and so forth, had been brought back
into use and were being heavily reinforced and armed. This could mean only one
thing. The Civil Guards, in particular, were a gendarmerie of the ordinary
continental type, who for nearly a century past had acted as the bodyguards of
the possessing class. Meanwhile a decree had been issued that all arms held by
private persons were to be surrendered. Naturally this order had not been
obeyed; it was clear that the Anarchists' weapons could only be taken from them
by force. Throughout this time there were rumours, always vague and
contradictory owing to newspaper censorship, of minor clashes that were
occurring all over Catalonia. In various places the armed police forces had made
attacks on Anarchist strongholds. At Puigcerda, on the French frontier, a band
of Carabineros were sent to seize the Customs Office, previously controlled by
Anarchists and Antonio Martin, a well-known Anarchist, was killed. Similar
incidents had occurred at Figueras and, I think, at Tarragona. In Barcelona
there' had been a series of more or less unofficial brawls in the working-class
suburbs. C.N.T. and U.G.T. members had been murdering one another for some time
past; on several occasions the murders were followed by huge, provocative
funerals which were quite deliberately intended to stir up political hatred. A
short time earlier a C.N.T. member had been murdered, and the C.N.T. had turned
out in hundreds of thousands to follow the cortege. At the end of April, just
after I got to Barcelona, Roldan, a prominent member of the U.G.T., was
murdered, presumably by someone in the C.N.T. The Government ordered all shops
to close and staged ah enormous funeral procession, largely of Popular Army
troops, which took two hours to pass a given point. From the hotel window I
watched it without enthusiasm. It was obvious that the so-called funeral was
merely a display of strength; a little more of this kind of thing and there
might be bloodshed. The same night my wife and I were woken by a fusillade of
shots from the Plaza de Cataluna, a hundred or two hundred yards away. We
learned next day that it was a C.N.T. man being bumped off, presumably by
someone in the U.G.T. It was of course distinctly possible that all these
murders were committed by agents provocateurs. One can gauge the attitude of the
foreign capitalist Press towards the Communist-Anarchist feud by the fact that
Roldan's murder was given wide publicity, while the answering murder was
carefully unmentioned.

The 1st of May was approaching, and there was talk of a monster demonstration
in which both the C.N.T. and the U.G.T. were to take part. The C.N.T. leaders,
more moderate than many of their followers, had long been working for a
reconciliation with the U.G.T.; indeed the keynote of their policy was to try
and form the two blocks of unions into one huge coalition. The idea was that the
C.N.T. and U.G.T. should march together and display their solidarity. But at the
last moment the demonstration was called off. It was perfectly clear that it
would only lead to rioting. So nothing happened on 1 May. It was a queer state
of affairs. Barcelona, the so-called revolutionary city, was probably the only
city in non-Fascist Europe that had no celebrations that day. But I admit I was
rather relieved. The I.L.P. contingent was expected to march in the P.O.U.M.
section of the procession, and everyone expected trouble. The last thing I
wished for was to be mixed up in some meaningless street-fight. To be marching
up the street behind red flags inscribed with elevating slogans, and then to be
bumped off from an upper window by some total stranger with a sub-machine-gun--
that is not my idea of a useful way to die.




Chapter 10



ABOUT midday on 3 May a friend crossing the lounge of the hotel said
casually: 'There's been some kind of trouble at the Telephone Exchange, I hear.'
For some reason I paid no attention to it at the time.

That afternoon, between three and four, I was half-way down the Ramblas when
I heard several rifle-shots behind me. I turned round and saw some youths, with
rifles in their hands and the red and black handkerchiefs of the Anarchists
round their throats, edging up a side--street that ran off the Ramblas
northward. They were evidently exchanging shots with someone in a tall octagonal
tower--a church, I think--that commanded the side-street. I thought instantly:
'It's started!' But I thought it without any very great feeling of surprise--
for days past everyone had been expecting 'it' to start at any moment. I
realized that I must get back to the hotel at once and see if my wife was all
right. But the knot of Anarchists round the opening of the side-street were
motioning the people back and shouting to them not to cross the line of fire.
More shots rang out. The bullets from the tower were flying across the street
and a crowd of panic-stricken people was rushing down the Ramblas, away from the
firing; up and down the street you could hear snap--snap--snap as the
shopkeepers slammed the steel shutters over their windows. I saw two Popular
Army officers retreating cautiously from tree to tree with their hands on their
revolvers. In front of me the crowd was surging into the Metro station in the
middle of the Ramblas to take cover. I immediately decided not to follow them.
It might mean being trapped underground for hours.

At this moment an American doctor who had been with us at the front ran up to
me and grabbed me by the arm. He was greatly excited.

'Come on, we must get down to the Hotel Falcon.' (The Hotel Falcon was a sort
of boarding-house maintained by the P.O.U.M. and used chiefly by militiamen on
leave.) 'The P.O.U.M. chaps will be meeting there. The trouble's starting. We
must hang together.'

'But what the devil is it all about?' I said.

The doctor was hauling me along by the arm. He was too excited to give a very
clear statement. It appeared that he had been in the Plaza de Cataluna when
several lorry-loads of armed Civil Guards had driven up to the Telephone
Exchange, which was operated mainly by C.N.T. workers, and made a sudden assault
upon it. Then some Anarchists had arrived and there had been a general affray. I
gathered that the 'trouble' earlier in the day had been a demand by the
Government to hand over the Telephone Exchange, which, of course, was
refused.

As we moved down the street a lorry raced past us from the opposite
direction. It was full of Anarchists with rifles in their hands. In front a
ragged youth was lying on a pile of mattresses behind a light machine-gun. When
we got to the Hotel Falcon, which was at the bottom of the Ramblas, a crowd of
people was seething in the entrance-hall; there was a great confusion, nobody
seemed to know what we were expected to do, and nobody was armed except the
handful of Shock Troopers who usually acted as guards for the building. I went
across to the Comite Local of the P.O.U.M., which was almost opposite. Upstairs,
in the room where militiamen normally went to draw their pay, another crowd was
seething. A tall, pale, rather handsome man of about thirty, in civilian
clothes, was trying to restore order and handing out belts and cartridge-boxes
from a pile in the corner. There seemed to be no rifles as yet. The doctor had
disappeared--I believe there had already been casualties and a call for doctors
--but another Englishman had arrived. Presently, from an inner office, the tall
man and some others began bringing out armfuls of rifles and handing them round.
The other Englishman and myself, as foreigners, were slightly under suspicion
and at first nobody would give us a rifle. Then a militiaman whom I had known at
the front arrived and recognized me, after which we were given rifles and a. few
clips of cartridges, somewhat grudgingly.

There was a sound of firing in the distance and the streets were completely
empty of people. Everyone said that it was impossible to go up the Ramblas. The
Civil Guards had seized buildings in commanding positions and were letting fly
at everyone who passed. I would have risked it and gone back to the hotel, but
there was a vague idea floating round that the Comite Local was likely to be
attacked at any moment and we had better stand by. All over the building, on the
stairs, and on the pavement outside, small knots of people were standing and
talking excitedly. No one seemed to have a very clear idea of what was
happening. All I could gather was that the Civil Guards had attacked the
Telephone Exchange and seized various strategic spots that commanded other
buildings belonging to the workers. There was a general impression that the
Civil Guards were 'after' the C.N.T. and the working class generally. It was
noticeable that, at this stage, no one seemed to put the blame on the
Government. The poorer classes in Barcelona looked upon the Civil Guards as
something rather resembling the Black and Tans, and it seemed to be taken for
granted that they had started this attack on their own initiative. Once I heard
how things stood I felt easier in my mind. The issue was clear enough. On one
side the C.N.T., on the other side the police. I 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.

A long time passed and nothing seemed to be happening at our end of the town.
It did not occur to me that I could ring up the hotel and find out whether my
wife was all right; I took it for granted that the Telephone Exchange would have
stopped working--though, as a matter of fact, it was only out of action for a
couple of hours. There seemed to be about three hundred people in the two
buildings. Predominantly they were people of the poorest class, from the
back-streets down by the quays; there was a number of women among them, some of
them carrying babies, and a crowd of little ragged boys. I fancy that many of
them had no notion what was happening and had simply fled into the P.O.U.M.
buildings for protection. There was also a number of militiamen on leave, and a
sprinkling of foreigners. As far as I could estimate, there were only about
sixty rifles between the lot of us. The office upstairs was ceaselessly besieged
by a crowd of people who were demanding rifles and being told that there were
none left. The younger militia boys, who seemed to regard the whole affair as a
kind of picnic, were prowling round and trying to wheedle or steal rifles from
anyone who had them. It was not long before one of them got my rifle away from
me by a clever dodge and immediately made himself scarce. So I was unarmed
again, except for my tiny automatic pistol, for which I had only one clip of
cartridges.

It grew dark, I was getting hungry, and seemingly there was no food in the
Falcon. My friend and I slipped out to his hotel, which was not far away, to get
some dinner. The streets were utterly dark and silent, not a soul stirring,
steel shutters drawn over all the shop windows, but no barricades built yet.
There was a great fuss before they would let us into the hotel, which was locked
and barred. When we got back I learned that the Telephone Exchange was working
and went to the telephone in the office upstairs to ring up my wife.
Characteristically, there was no telephone directory in the building, and I did
not know the number of the Hotel Continental; after a searching from room to
room for about an hour I came upon a guide-book which gave me the number. I
could not make contact with my wife, but I managed to get hold of John McNair,
the I.L.P. representative in Barcelona. He told me that all was well, nobody had
been shot, and asked me if we were all right at the Comite Local. I said that we
should be all right if we had some cigarettes. I only meant this as a joke;
nevertheless half an hour later McNair appeared with two packets of Lucky
Strike. He had braved the pitch-dark streets, roamed by Anarchist patrols who
had twice stopped him at the pistol's point and examined his papers. I shall not
forget this small act of heroism. We were very glad of the cigarettes.

They had placed armed guards at most of the windows, and in the street below
a little group of Shock Troopers were stopping and questioning the few
passers-by. An Anarchist patrol car drove up, bristling with weapons. Beside the
driver a beautiful dark-haired girl of about eighteen was nursing a
sub-machine-gun across her knees. I spent a long time wandering about the
building, a great rambling place of which it was impossible to learn the
geography. Everywhere was the usual litter, the broken furniture and torn paper
that seem to be the inevitable products of revolution. All over the place people
were sleeping; on a broken sofa in a passage two poor women from the quayside
were peacefully snoring. The place had been a cabaret-theatre before the
P.O.U.M. took it over. There were raised stages in several of the rooms; on one
of them was a desolate grand piano. Finally I discovered what I was looking for
--the armoury. I did not know how this affair was going to turn out, and I badly
wanted a weapon. I had heard it said so often that all the rival parties,
P.S.U.C., P.O.U.M., and C.N.T.-F.A.I. alike, were hoarding arms in Barcelona,
that I could not believe that two of the principal P.O.U.M. buildings contained
only the fifty or sixty rifles that I had seen. The room which acted as an
armoury was unguarded and had a flimsy door; another Englishman and myself had
no difficulty in prizing it open. When we got inside we found that what they had
told us was true--there were no more weapons. All we found there were about two
dozen small-bore rifles of an obsolete pattern and a few shot--guns, with no
cartridges for any of them. I went up to the office and asked if they had any
spare pistol ammunition; they had none. There were a few boxes of bombs,
however, which one of the Anarchist patrol cars had brought us. I put a couple
in one of my cartridge-boxes. They were a crude type of bomb, ignited by rubbing
a sort of match at the top and very liable to go off of their own accord.

People were sprawling asleep all over the floor. In one room a baby was
crying, crying ceaselessly. Though this was May the night was getting cold. On
one of the cabaret-stages the curtains were still up, so I ripped a curtain down
with my knife, rolled myself up in it, and had a few hours' sleep. My sleep was
disturbed, I remember, by the thought of those beastly bombs, which might blow
me into the air if I rolled on them too vigorously. At three in the morning the
tall handsome man who seemed to be in command woke me up, gave me a rifle, and
put me on guard at one of the windows. He told me that Salas, the Chief of
Police responsible for the attack on the Telephone Exchange, had been placed
under arrest. (Actually, as we learned later, he had only been deprived of his
post. Nevertheless the news confirmed the general impression that the Civil
Guards had acted without orders.) As soon as it was dawn the people downstairs
began building two barricades, one outside the Comite Local and the other
outside the Hotel Falcon. The Barcelona streets are paved with square cobbles,
easily built up into a wall, and under the cobbles is a kind of shingle that is
good for filling sand-bags. The building of those barricades was a strange and
wonderful sight; I would have given something to be able to photograph it. With
the kind--of passionate energy that Spaniards display when they have definitely
decided to begin upon any job of work, long lines of men, women, and quite small
children were tearing up the cobblestones, hauling them along in a hand-cart
that had been found somewhere, and staggering to and fro under heavy sacks of
sand. In the doorway of the Comite Local a German-Jewish girl, in a pair of
militiaman's trousers whose knee--buttons just reached her ankles, was watching
with a smile. In a couple of hours the barricades were head-high, with riflemen
posted at the loopholes, and behind one barricade a fire was burning and men
were frying eggs.

They had taken my rifle away again, and there seemed to be nothing that one
could usefully do. Another Englishman and myself decided to go back to the Hotel
Continental. There was a lot of firing in the distance, but seemingly none in
the Ramblas. On the way up we looked in at the food-market. A very few stalls
had opened; they were besieged by a crowd of people from the working-class
quarters south of the Ramblas. Just as we got there, there was a heavy crash of
rifle--fire outside, some panes of glass in the roof were shivered, and the
crowd went flying for the back exits. A few stalls remained open, however; we
managed to get a cup of coffee each and buy a wedge of goat's-milk cheese which
I tucked in beside my bombs. A few days later I was very glad of that
cheese.

At the street-corner where I had seen the Anarchists begin. firing the day
before a barricade was now standing. The man behind it (I was on the other side
of the street) shouted to me to be careful. The Civil Guards in the church tower
were firing indiscriminately at everyone who passed. I paused and then crossed
the opening at a run; sure enough, a bullet cracked past me, uncomfortably
close. When I neared the P.O.U.M. Executive Building, still on the other side of
the road, there were fresh shouts of warning from some Shock Troopers standing
in the doorway--shouts which, at the moment, I did not understand. There were
trees and a newspaper kiosk between myself and the building (streets of this
type in Spain have a broad walk running down the middle), and I could not see
what they were pointing at. I went up to the Continental, made sure that all was
well, washed my face, and then went back to the P.O.U.M. Executive Building (it
was about a hundred yards down the street) to ask for orders. By this time the
roar of rifle and machine-gun fire from various directions was almost comparable
to the din of a battle. I had just found Kopp and was asking him what we were
supposed to do when there was a series of appalling crashes down below. The din
was so loud that I made sure someone must be firing at us with a field-gun.
Actually it was only hand-grenades, which make double their usual noise when
they burst among stone buildings.

Kopp glanced out of the window, cocked his stick behind his back, said: 'Let
us investigate,' and strolled down the stairs in his usual unconcerned manner, I
following. Just inside the doorway a group of Shock Troopers were bowling bombs
down the pavement as though playing skittles. The bombs were bursting twenty
yards away with a frightful, ear-splitting crash which was mixed up with the
banging of rifles. Half across the street, from behind the newspaper kiosk, a
head--it was the head of an American militiaman whom I knew well--was sticking
up, for all the world like a coconut at a fair. It was only afterwards that I
grasped what was really happening. Next door to the P.O.U.M. building there was
a cafe with a hotel above it, called the Cafe Moka. The day before twenty or
thirty armed Civil Guards had entered the cafe and then, when the fighting
started, had suddenly seized the building and barricaded themselves in.
Presumably they had been ordered to seize the cafe as a preliminary to attacking
the P.O.U.M. offices later. Early in the morning they had attempted to come out,
shots had been exchanged, and one Shock Trooper was badly wounded and a Civil
Guard killed. The Civil Guards had fled back into the cafe, but when the
American came down the street they had opened fire on him, though he was not
armed. The American had flung himself behind the kiosk for cover, and the Shock
Troopers were flinging bombs at the Civil Guards to drive them indoors
again.

Kopp took in the scene at a glance, pushed his way forward and hauled back a
red-haired German Shock Trooper who was just drawing the pin out of a bomb with
his teeth. He shouted to everyone to stand back from the doorway, and told us in
several languages that we had got to avoid bloodshed. Then he stepped out on to
the pavement and, in sight of the Civil Guards, ostentatiously took off his
pistol and laid it on the ground. Two Spanish militia officers did the same, and
the three of them walked slowly up to the doorway where the Civil Guards were
huddling. It was a thing I would not have done for twenty pounds. They were
walking, unarmed, up to men who were frightened out of their wits and had loaded
guns in their hands. A Civil Guard, in shirt-sleeves and livid with fright, came
out of the door to parley with Kopp. He kept pointing in an agitated manner at
two unexploded bombs that were lying on the pavement. Kopp came back and told us
we had better touch the bombs off. Lying there, they were a danger to anyone who
passed. A Shock Trooper fired his rifle at one of the bombs and burst it, then
fired at the other and missed. I asked him to give me his rifle, knelt down and
let fly at the second bomb. I also missed it, I am sorry to say.

This was the only shot I fired during the disturbances. The pavement was
covered with broken glass from the sign over the Cafe Moka, and two cars that
were parked outside, one of them Kopp's official car, had been riddled with
bullets and their windscreens smashed by bursting bombs.

Kopp took me upstairs again and explained the situation. We had got to defend
the P.O.U.M. buildings if they were attacked, but the P.O.U.M. leaders had sent
instructions that we were to stand on the defensive and not open fire if we
could possibly avoid it. Immediately opposite there was a cinematograph, called
the Poliorama, with a museum above it, and at the top, high above the general
level of the roofs, a small observatory with twin domes. The domes commanded the
street, and a few men posted up there with rifles could prevent any attack on
the P.O.U.M. buildings. The caretakers at the cinema were C.N.T. members and
would let us come and go. As for the Civil Guards in the Cafe Moka, there would
be no trouble with them; they did not want to fight and would be only too glad
to live and let live. Kopp repeated that our orders were not to fire unless we
were fired on ourselves or our buildings attacked. I gathered, though he did not
say so, that the P.O.U.M. leaders were furious at being dragged into this
affair, but felt that they had got to stand by the C.N.T.

They had already placed guards in the observatory. The next three days and
nights I spent continuously on the roof of the Poliorama, except for brief
intervals when I slipped across to the hotel for meals. I was in no danger, I
suffered from nothing worse than hunger and boredom, yet it was one of the most
unbearable periods of my whole life. I think few experiences could be more
sickening, more disillusioning, or, finally, more nerve-racking than those evil
days of street warfare.

I used to sit on the roof marvelling at the folly of it all. From the little
windows in the observatory you could see for miles around--vista after vista of
tall slender buildings, glass domes, and fantastic curly roofs with brilliant
green and copper tiles; over to eastward the glittering pale blue sea--the
first glimpse of the sea that I had had since coming to Spain. And the whole
huge town of a million people was locked in a sort of violent inertia, a
nightmare of noise without movement. The sunlit streets were quite empty.
Nothing was happening except the streaming of bullets from barricades and
sand-bagged windows. Not a vehicle was stirring in the streets; here and there
along the Ramblas the trams stood motionless where their drivers had jumped out
of them when the fighting started. And all the while the devilish noise, echoing
from thousands of stone buildings, went on and on and on, like a tropical
rainstorm. Crack-crack, rattle--rattle, roar--sometimes it died away to a few
shots, sometimes it quickened to a deafening fusillade, but it never stopped
while daylight lasted, and punctually next dawn it started again.

What the devil was happening, who was fighting whom, and who was winning, was
at first very difficult to discover. The people of Barcelona are so used to
street-fighting and so familiar with the local geography that they knew by a
kind of instinct which political party will hold which streets and which
buildings. A foreigner is at a hopeless disadvantage. Looking out from the
observatory, I could grasp that the Ramblas, which is one of the principal
streets of the town, formed a dividing line. To the right of the Ramblas the
working-class quarters were solidly Anarchist; to the left a confused fight was
going on among the tortuous by-streets, but on that side the P.S.U.C. and the
Civil Guards were more or less in control. Up at our end of the Ramblas, round
the Plaza de Cataluna, the position was so complicated that it would have been
quite unintelligible if every building had not flown a party flag. The principal
landmark here was the Hotel Colon, the headquarters of the P.S.U.C., dominating
the Plaza de Cataluna. In a window near the last 0 but one in the huge 'Hotel
Colon' that sprawled across its face they had a machine-gun that could sweep the
square with deadly effect. A hundred yards to the right of us, down the Ramblas,
the J.S.U., the youth league of the P.S.U.C. (corresponding to the Young
Communist League in England), were holding a big department store whose
sandbagged side-windows fronted our observatory. They had hauled down their red
flag and hoisted the Catalan national flag. On the Telephone Exchange, the
starting-point of all the trouble, the Catalan national flag and the Anarchist
flag were flying side by side. Some kind of temporary compromise had been
arrived at there, the exchange was working uninterruptedly and there was no
firing from the building.

In our position it was strangely peaceful. The Civil Guards in the Cafe Moka
had drawn down the steel curtains and piled up the cafe furniture to make a
barricade. Later half a dozen of them came on to the roof, opposite to
ourselves, and built another barricade of mattresses, over which they hung a
Catalan national flag. But it was obvious that they had no wish to start a
fight. Kopp had made a definite agreement with them: if they did not fire at us
we would not fire at them. He had grown quite friendly with the Civil Guards by
this time, and had been to visit them several times in the Cafe Moka. Naturally
they had looted everything drinkable the cafe possessed, and they made Kopp a
present of fifteen bottles of beer. In return Kopp had actually given them one
of our rifles to make up for one they had somehow lost on the previous day.
Nevertheless, it was a queer feeling sitting on that roof. Sometimes I was
merely bored with the whole affair, paid no attention to the hellish noise, and
spent hours reading a succession of Penguin Library books which, luckily, I had
bought a few days earlier; sometimes I was very conscious of the armed men
watching me fifty yards away. It was a little like being in the trenches again;
several times I caught myself, from force of habit, speaking of the Civil Guards
as 'the Fascists'. There were generally about six of us up there. We placed a
man on guard in each of the observatory towers, and the rest of us sat on the
lead roof below, where there was no cover except a stone palisade. I was well
aware that at any moment the Civil Guards might receive telephone orders to open
fire. They had agreed to give us warning before doing so, but there was no
certainty that they would keep to their agreement. Only once, however, did
trouble look like starting. One of the Civil Guards opposite knelt down and
began firing across the barricade. I was on guard in the observatory at the
time. I trained my rifle on him and shouted across:

'Hi! Don't you shoot at us!'

'What?'

'Don't you fire at us or we'll fire back!'

'No, no! I wasn't firing at you. Look--down there!'

He motioned with his rifle towards the side-street that ran past the bottom
of our building. Sure enough, a youth in blue overalls, with a rifle in his
hand, was dodging round the corner. Evidently he had just taken a shot at the
Civil Guards on the roof.

'I was firing at him. He fired first.' (I believe this was true.) 'We don't
want to shoot you. We're only workers, the same as you are.'

He made the anti-Fascist salute, which I returned. I shouted across:

'Have you got any more beer left?'

'No, it's all gone.'

The same day, for no apparent reason, a man in the J.S.U. building farther
down the street suddenly raised his rifle and let fly at me when I was leaning
out of the window. Perhaps I made a tempting mark. I did not fire back. Though
he was only a hundred yards away the bullet went so wide that it did not even
hit the roof of the observatory. As usual, Spanish standards of marksmanship had
saved me. I was fired at several times from this building.

The devilish racket of firing went on and on. But so far as I could see, and
from all I heard, the fighting was defensive on both sides. People simply
remained in their buildings or behind their barricades and blazed away at the
people opposite. About half a mile away from us there was a street where some of
the main offices of the C.N.T. and the U.G.T. were almost exactly facing one
another; from that direction the volume of noise was terrific. I passed down
that street the day after the fighting was over and the panes of the
shop-windows were like sieves. (Most of the shopkeepers in Barcelona had their
windows criss-crossed with strips of paper, so that when a bullet hit a pane it
did not shiver to pieces.) Sometimes the rattle of rifle and machine-gun fire
was punctuated by the crash of hand-grenades. And at long intervals, perhaps a
dozen times in all, there were tremendously heavy explosions which at the time I
could not account for; they sounded like aerial bombs, but that was impossible,
for there were no aeroplanes about. I was told afterwards--quite possibly it
was true--that agents provocateurs were touching off masses of explosive in
order to increase the general noise and panic. There was, however, no
artillery-fire. I was listening for this, for if the guns began to fire it would
mean that the affair was becoming serious (artillery is the determining factor
in street warfare). Afterwards there were wild tales in the newspapers about
batteries of guns firing in the streets, but no one was able to point to a
building that had been hit by a shell. In any case the sound of gunfire is
unmistakable if one is used to it.

Almost from the start food was running short. With difficulty and under cover
of darkness (for the Civil Guards were constantly sniping into the Ramblas) food
was brought from the Hotel Falcon for the fifteen or twenty militiamen who were
in the P.O.U.M. Executive Building, but there was barely enough to go round, and
as many of us as possible went to the Hotel Continental for our meals. The
Continental had been 'collectivized' by the Generalite and not, like most of the
hotels, by the C.N.T. or U.G.T., and it was regarded as neutral ground. No
sooner had the fighting started than the hotel filled to the brim with a most
extraordinary collection of people. There were foreign journalists, political
suspects of every shade, an American airman in the service of the Government,
various Communist agents, including a fat, sinister-looking Russian, said to be
an agent of the Ogpu, who was nicknamed Charlie Chan and wore attached to his
waist-band a revolver and a neat little bomb, some families of well--to-do
Spaniards who looked like Fascist sympathizers, two or three wounded men from
the International Column, a gang of lorry drivers from. some huge French lorries
which had been carrying a load of oranges back to France and had been held up by
the fighting, and a number of Popular Army officers. The Popular Army, as a
body, remained neutral throughout the fighting, though a few soldiers slipped
away from the barracks and took part as individuals; on the Tuesday morning I
had seen a couple of them at the P.O.U.M. barricades. At the beginning, before
the food-shortage became acute and the newspapers began stirring up hatred,
there was a tendency to regard the whole affair as a joke. This was the kind of
thing that happened every year in Barcelona, people were saying. George Tioli,
an Italian journalist, a great friend of ours, came in with his trousers
drenched with blood. He had gone out to see what was happening and had been
binding up a wounded man on the pavement when someone playfully tossed a
hand-grenade at him, fortunately not wounding him seriously. I remember his
remarking that the Barcelona paving-stones ought to be numbered; it would save
such a lot of trouble in building and demolishing barricades. And I remember a
couple of men from the International Column sitting in my room at the hotel when
I came in tired, hungry, and dirty after a night on guard. Their attitude was
completely neutral. If they had been good party-men they would, I suppose, have
urged me to change sides, or even have pinioned me and taken away the bombs of
which my pockets were full; instead they merely commiserated with me for having
to spend my leave in doing guard-duty on a roof. The general attitude was: 'This
is only a dust-up between the Anarchists and the police--it doesn't mean
anything.' In spite of the extent of the fighting and the number of casualties I
believe this was nearer the truth than the official version which represented
the affair as a planned rising.

It was about Wednesday (5 May) that a change seemed to come over things. The
shuttered streets looked ghastly. A very few pedestrians, forced abroad for one
reason or another, crept to and fro, flourishing white handkerchiefs, and at a
spot in the middle of the Ramblas that was safe from bullets some men were
crying newspapers to the empty street. On Tuesday Solidaridad Obrera, the
Anarchist paper, had described the attack on the Telephone Exchange as a
'monstrous provocation' (or words to that effect), but on Wednesday it changed
its tune and began imploring everyone to go back to work. The Anarchist leaders
were broadcasting the same message. The office of La Batalla, the P.O.U.M.
paper, which was not defended, had been raided and seized by the Civil Guards at
about the same time as the Telephone Exchange, but the paper was being printed,
and a few copies distributed, from another address. I urged everyone to remain
at the barricades. People were divided in their minds and wondering uneasily how
the devil this was going to end. I doubt whether anyone left the barricades as
yet, but everyone was sick of the meaningless fighting, which could obviously
lead to no real decision, because no one wanted this to develop into a
full-sized civil war which might mean losing the war against Franco. I heard
this fear expressed on all sides. So far as one could gather from what people
were saying at the time the C.N.T. rank and file wanted, and had wanted from the
beginning, only two things: the handing back of the Telephone Exchange and the
disarming of the hated Civil Guards. If the Generalite had promised to do these
two things, and also promised to put an end to the food profiteering, there is
little doubt that the barricades would have been down in two hours. But it was
obvious that the Generalite was not going to give in. Ugly rumours were flying
round. It was said that the Valencia Government was sending six thousand men to
occupy Barcelona, and that five thousand Anarchist and P.O.U.M. troops had left
the Aragon front to oppose them. Only the first of these rumours was true.
Watching from the observatory tower we saw the low grey shapes of warships
closing in upon the harbour. Douglas Moyle, who had been a sailor, said that
they looked like British destroyers. As a matter of fact they were British
destroyers, though we did not learn this till afterwards.

That evening we heard that on the Plaza de Espana four hundred Civil Guards
had surrendered and handed their arms to the Anarchists; also the news was
vaguely filtering through that in the suburbs (mainly working-class quarters)
the C.N.T. were in control. It looked as though we were winning. But the same
evening Kopp sent for me and, with a grave face, told me that according to
information he had just received the Government was about to outlaw the P.O.U.M.
and declare a state of war upon it. The news gave me a shock. It was the first
glimpse I had had of the interpretation that was likely to be put upon this
affair later on. I dimly foresaw that when the fighting ended the entire blame
would be laid upon the P.O.U.M., which was the weakest party and therefore the
most suitable scapegoat. And meanwhile our local neutrality was at an end. If
the Government declared war upon us we had no choice but to defend ourselves,
and here at the Executive building we could be certain that the Civil Guards
next door would get orders to attack us. Our only chance was to attack them
first. Kopp was waiting for orders on the telephone; if we heard definitely that
the P.O.U.M. was outlawed we must make preparations at once to seize the Cafe
Moka.

I remember the long, nightmarish evening that we spent in fortifying the
building. We locked the steel curtains across the front entrance and behind them
built a barricade of slabs of stone left behind by the workmen who had been
making some alterations. We went over our stock of weapons. Counting the six
rifles that were on the roof of the Poliorama opposite, we had twenty-one
rifles, one of them defective, about fifty rounds of ammunition for each rifle,
and a few dozen bombs; otherwise nothing except a few pistols and revolvers.
About a dozen men, mostly Germans, had volunteered for the attack on the Cafe
Moka, if it came off. We should attack from the roof, of course, some time in
the small hours, and take them by surprise; they were more numerous, but our
morale was better, and no doubt we could storm the place, though people were
bound to be killed in doing so. We had no food in the building except a few
slabs of chocolate, and the rumour had gone round that 'they' were going to cut
off the water supply. (Nobody knew who 'they' were. It might be the Government
that controlled the waterworks, or it might be the C.N.T.--nobody knew.) We
spent a long time filling up every basin in the lavatories, every bucket we
could lay hands on, and, finally, the fifteen beer bottles, now empty, which the
Civil Guards had given to Kopp.

I was in a ghastly frame of mind and dog-tired after about sixty hours
without much sleep. It was now late into the night. People were sleeping all
over the floor behind the barricade downstairs. Upstairs there was a small room,
with a sofa in it, which we intended to use as a dressing-station, though,
needless to say, we discovered that there was neither iodine nor bandages in the
building. My wife had come down from the hotel in case a nurse should be needed.
I lay down on the sofa, feeling that I would like half an hour's rest before the
attack on the Moka, in which I should presumably be killed. I remember the
intolerable discomfort caused by my pistol, which was strapped to my belt and
sticking into the small of my back. And the next thing I remember is waking up
with a jerk to find my wife standing beside me. It was broad daylight, nothing
had happened, the Government had not declared war on the P.O.U.M., the water had
not been cut off, and except for the sporadic firing in the streets everything
was normal. My wife said that she had not had the heart to wake me and had slept
in an arm-chair in one of the front rooms.

That afternoon there was a kind of armistice. The firing died away and with
surprising suddenness the streets filled with people. A few shops began to pull
up their shutters, and the market was packed with a huge crowd clamouring for
food, though the stalls were almost empty. It was noticeable, however, that the
trams did not start running. The Civil Guards were still behind their barricades
in the Moka; on neither side were the fortified buildings evacuated. Everyone
was rushing round and trying to buy food. And on every side you heard the same
anxious questions: 'Do you think it's stopped? Do you think it's going to start
again?' 'It'--the fighting--was now thought of as some kind of natural
calamity, like a hurricane or an earthquake, which was happening to us all alike
and which we had no power of stopping. And sure enough, almost immediately--I
suppose there must really have been several hours' truce, but they seemed more
like minutes than hours--a sudden crash of rifle-fire, like a June cloud-burst,
sent everyone scurrying; the steel shutters snapped into place, the streets
emptied like magic, the barricades were manned, and 'it' had started again.

I went back to my post on the roof with a feeling of concentrated disgust and
fury. When you are taking part in events like these you are, I suppose, in a
small way, making history, and you ought by rights to feel like a historical
character. But you never do, because at such times the physical details always
outweigh everything else. Throughout the fighting I never made the correct
'analysis' of the situation that was so glibly made by journalists hundreds of
miles away. What I was chiefly thinking about was not the rights and wrongs of
this miserable internecine scrap, but simply the discomfort and boredom of
sitting day and night on that intolerable roof, and the hunger which was growing
worse and worse--for none of us had had a proper meal since Monday. It was in
my mind all the while that I should have to go back to the front as soon as this
business was over. It was infuriating. I had been a hundred and fifteen days in
the line and had come back to Barcelona ravenous for a bit of rest and comfort;
and instead I had to spend my time sitting on a roof opposite Civil Guards as
bored as myself, who periodically waved to me and assured me that they were
'workers' (meaning that they hoped I would not shoot them), but who would
certainly open fire if they got the order to do so. If this was history it did
not feel like it. It was more like a bad period at the front, when men were
short and we had to do abnormal hours of guard-duty; instead of being heroic one
just had to stay at one's post, bored, dropping with sleep, and completely
uninterested as to what it was all about.

Inside the hotel, among the heterogeneous mob who for the most part had not
dared to put their noses out of doors, a horrible atmosphere of suspicion had
grown up. Various people were infected with spy mania and were creeping round
whispering that everyone else was a spy of the Communists, or the Trotskyists,
or the Anarchists, or what-not. The fat Russian agent was cornering all the
foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an
Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that
I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies--unless one counts
journalists. There was something repulsive in the parody of smart hotel life
that was still going on behind shuttered windows amid the rattle of rifle-fire.
The front dining-room had been abandoned after a bullet came through the window
and chipped a pillar, and the guests were crowded into a darkish room at the
back, where there were never quite enough tables to go round. The waiters were
reduced in numbers--some of them were C.N.T. members and had joined in the
general strike--and had dropped their boiled shirts for the time being, but
meals were still being served with a pretence of ceremony. There was, however,
practically nothing to eat. On that Thursday night the principal dish at dinner
was one sardine each. The hotel had had no bread for days, and even the wine was
running so low that we were drinking older and older wines at higher and higher
prices. This shortage of food went on for several days after the fighting was
over. Three days running, I remember, my wife and I breakfasted off a little
piece of goat's-milk cheese with no bread and nothing to drink. The only thing
that was plentiful was oranges. The French lorry drivers brought quantities of
their oranges into the hotel. They were a tough--looking bunch; they had with
them some flashy Spanish girls and a huge porter in a black blouse. At any other
time the little snob of a hotel manager would have done his best to make them
uncomfortable, in fact would have refused to have them on the premises, but at
present they were popular because, unlike the rest of us, they had a private
store of bread which everyone was trying to cadge from them.

I spent that final night on the roof, and the next day it did really look as
though the fighting was coming to an end. I do not think there was much firing
that day--the Friday. No one seemed to know for certain whether the troops from
Valencia were really coining; they arrived that evening, as a matter of fact.
The Government was broadcasting half-soothing, half-threatening messages, asking
everyone to go home and saying that after a certain hour anyone found carrying
arms would be arrested. Not much attention was paid to the Government's
broadcasts, but everywhere the people were fading away from the barricades. I
have no doubt that it was mainly the food shortage that was responsible. From
every side you heard the same remark:' We have no more food, we must go back to
work.' On the other hand the Civil Guards, who could count on getting their
rations so long as there was any food in the town, were able to stay at their
posts. By the afternoon the streets were almost normal, though the deserted
barricades were still standing; the Ramblas were thronged with people, the shops
nearly all open, and--most reassuring of all--the trams that had stood so long
in frozen blocks jerked into motion and began running. The Civil Guards were
still holding the Cafe Moka and had not taken down their barricades, but some of
them brought chairs out and sat on the pavement with their rifles across their
knees. I winked at one of them as I went past and got a not unfriendly grin; he
recognized me, of course. Over the Telephone Exchange the Anarchist flag had
been hauled down and only the Catalan flag was flying. That meant that the
workers were definitely beaten; I realized--though, owing to my political
ignorance, not so clearly as I ought to have done--that when the Government
felt more sure of itself there would be reprisals. But at the time I was not
interested in that aspect of things. All I felt was a profound relief that the
devilish din of firing was over, and that one could buy some food and have a bit
of rest and peace before going back to the front.

It must have been late that evening that the troops from Valencia first
appeared in the streets. They were the Assault Guards, another formation similar
to the Civil Guards and the Carabineros (i.e. a formation intended primarily for
police work), and the picked troops of the Republic. Quite suddenly they seemed
to spring up out of the ground; you saw them everywhere patrolling the streets
in groups of ten--tall men in grey or blue uniforms, with long rifles slung
over their shoulders, and a sub-machine-gun to each group. Meanwhile there was a
delicate job to be done. The six rifles which we had used for the guard in the
observatory towers were still lying there, and by hook or by crook we had got to
get them back to the P.O.U.M. building. It was only a question of getting them
across the street. They were part of the regular armoury of the building, but to
bring them into the street was to contravene the Government's order, and if we
were caught with them in our hands we should certainly be arrested--worse, the
rifles would be confiscated. With only twenty-one rifles in the building we
could not afford to lose six of them. After a lot of discussion as to the best
method, a red-haired Spanish boy and myself began to smuggle them out. It was
easy enough to dodge the Assault Guard patrols; the danger was the Civil Guards
in the Moka, who were well aware that we had rifles in the observatory and might
give the show away if they saw us carrying them across. Each of us partially
undressed and slung a rifle over the left shoulder, the butt under the armpit,
the barrel down the trouser-leg. It was unfortunate that they were long Mausers.
Even a man as tall as I am cannot wear a long Mauser down his trouser-leg
without discomfort. It was an intolerable job getting down the corkscrew
staircase of the observatory with a completely rigid left leg. Once in the
street, we found that the only way to move was with extreme slowness, so slowly
that you did not have to bend your knees. Outside the picture-house I saw a
group of people staring at me with great interest as I crept along at
tortoise-speed. I have often wondered what they thought was the matter with me.
Wounded in the war, perhaps. However, all the rifles were smuggled across
without incident.

Next day the Assault Guards were everywhere, walking the streets like
conquerors. There was no doubt that the Government was simply making a display
of force in order to overawe a population which it already knew would not
resist; if there had been any real fear of further outbreaks the Assault Guards
would have been kept in barracks and not scattered through the streets in small
bands. They were splendid troops, much the best I had seen in Spain, and, though
I suppose they were in a sense 'the enemy', I could not help liking the look of
them. But it was with a sort of amazement that I watched them strolling to and
fro. I was used to the ragged, scarcely-armed militia on the Aragon front, and I
had not known that the Republic possessed troops like these. It was not only
that they were picked men physically, it was their weapons that most astonished
me. All of them were armed with brand-new rifles of the type known as 'the
Russian rifle' (these rifles were sent to Spain by the U.S.S.R., but were, I
believe, manufactured in America). I examined one of them. It was a far from
perfect rifle, but vastly better than the dreadful old blunderbusses we had at
the front. The Assault Guards had one submachine-gun between ten men and an
automatic pistol each; we at the front had approximately one machine-gun between
fifty men, and as for pistols and revolvers, you could only procure them
illegally. As a matter of fact, though I had not noticed it till now, it was the
same everywhere. The Civil Guards and Carabineros, who were not intended for the
front at all, were better armed and far better clad than ourselves. I suspect it
is the same in all wars--always the same contrast between the sleek police in
the rear and the ragged soldiers in the line. On the whole the Assault Guards
got on very well with the population after the first day or two. On the first
day there was a certain amount of trouble because some of the Assault Guards--
acting on instructions, I suppose--began behaving in a provocative manner.
Bands of them boarded trams, searched the passengers, and, if they had C.N.T.
membership cards in their pockets, tore them up and stamped on them. This led to
scuffles with armed Anarchists, and one or two people were killed. Very soon,
however, the 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.

The Barcelona fighting had given the Valencia Government the long--wanted
excuse to assume fuller control of Catalonia. The workers' militias were to be
broken' up and redistributed among the Popular Army. The Spanish Republican flag
was flying all over Barcelona--the first time I had seen it, I think, except
over a Fascist trench. In the working-class quarters the barricades were being
pulled down, rather fragmentarily, for it is a lot easier to build a barricade
than to put the stones back. Outside the P.S.U.C. buildings the barricades were
allowed to remain standing, and indeed many were standing as late as June. The
Civil Guards were still occupying strategic points. Huge seizures of arms were
being made from C.N.T. strongholds, though I have no doubt a good many escaped
seizure. La Batalla was still appearing, but it was censored until the front
page was almost completely blank. The P.S.U.C. papers were un-censored and were
publishing inflammatory articles demanding the suppression of the P.O.U.M. The
P.O.U.M. was declared to be a disguised Fascist organization, and a cartoon
representing the P.O.U.M. as a figure slipping off a mask marked with the
hammer and sickle and revealing a hideous, maniacal face marked with the
swastika, was being circulated all over the town by P.S.U.C. agents. Evidently
the official version of the Barcelona fighting was already fixed upon: it was to
be represented as a 'fifth column' Fascist rising engineered solely by the
P.O.U.M.

In the hotel the horrible atmosphere of suspicion and hostility had grown
worse now that the fighting was over. In the face of the accusations that were
being flung about it was impossible to remain neutral. The posts were working
again, the foreign Communist papers were beginning to arrive, and their accounts
of the fighting were not only violently partisan but, of course, wildly
inaccurate as to facts. I think some of the Communists on the spot, who had seen
what was actually happening, were dismayed by the interpretation that was being
put upon events, but naturally they had to stick to their own side. Our
Communist friend approached me once again and asked me whether I would not
transfer into the International Column.

I was rather surprised. 'Your papers are saying I'm a Fascist,' I said.
'Surely I should be politically suspect, coming from the P.O.U.M.'

'Oh, that doesn't matter. After all, you were only acting under orders.'

I had to tell him that after this affair I could not join any
Communist-controlled unit. Sooner or later it might mean being used against the
Spanish working class. One could not tell when this kind of thing would break
out again, and if I had to use my rifle at all in such an affair I would use it
on the side of the working class and not against them. He was very decent about
it. But from now on the whole atmosphere was changed. You could not, as before,
'agree to differ' and have drinks with a man who was supposedly your political
opponent. There were some ugly wrangles in the hotel lounge. Meanwhile the jails
were already full and overflowing. After the fighting was over the Anarchists
had, of course, released their prisoners, but the Civil Guards had not released
theirs, and most of them were thrown into prison and kept there without trial,
in many cases for months on end. As usual, completely innocent people were being
arrested owing to police bungling. I mentioned earlier that Douglas Thompson was
wounded about the beginning of April. Afterwards we had lost touch with him, as
usually happened when a man was wounded, for wounded men were frequently moved
from one hospital to another. Actually he was at Tarragona hospital and was sent
back to Barcelona about the time when the fighting started. On the Tuesday
morning I met him in the street, considerably bewildered by the firing that was
going on all round. He asked the question everyone was asking:

'What the devil is this all about?'

I explained as well as I could. Thompson said promptly:

'I'm going to keep out of this. My arm's still bad. I shall go back to my
hotel and stay there.'

He went back to his hotel, but unfortunately (how important it is in
street-fighting to understand the local geography!) it was a hotel in a part of
the town controlled by the Civil Guards. The place was raided and Thompson was
arrested, flung into jail, and kept for eight days in a cell so full of people
that nobody had room to lie down. There were many similar cases. Numerous
foreigners with doubtful political records were on the run, with the police on
their track and in constant fear of denunciation. It was worst for the Italians
and Germans, who had no passports and were generally wanted by the secret police
in their own countries. If they were arrested they were liable to be deported to
France, which might mean being sent back to Italy or Germany, where God knew
what horrors were awaiting them. One or two foreign women hurriedly regularized
their position by 'marrying' Spaniards. A German girl who had no papers at all
dodged the police by posing for several days as a man's mistress. I remember the
look of shame and misery on the poor girl's face when I accidentally bumped into
her coming out of the man's bedroom. Of course she was not his mistress, but no
doubt she thought I thought she was. You had all the while a hateful feeling
that someone hitherto your friend might be denouncing you to the secret police.
The long nightmare of the fighting, the noise, the lack of food and sleep, the
mingled strain and boredom of sitting on the roof and wondering whether in
another minute I should be shot myself or be obliged to shoot somebody else had
put my nerves on edge. I had got to the point when every time a door banged I
grabbed for my pistol. On the Saturday morning there was an uproar of shots
outside and everyone cried out: 'It's starting again!' I ran into the street to
find that it was only some Assault Guards shooting a mad dog. 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.

I have tried to give some idea of what it felt like to be in the middle of
the Barcelona fighting; yet I do not suppose I have succeeded in conveying much
of the strangeness of that time. One of the things that stick in my mind when I
look back is the casual contacts one made at the time, the sudden glimpses of
non-combatants to whom the whole thing was simply a meaningless uproar. I
remember the fashionably-dressed woman I saw strolling down the Ramblas, with a
shopping-basket over her arm and leading a white poodle, while the rifles
cracked and roared a street or two away. It is conceivable that she was deaf.
And the man I saw rushing across the completely empty Plaza de Cataluna,
brandishing a white handkerchief in each hand. And the large party of people all
dressed in black who kept trying for about an hour to cross the Plaza de
Cataluna and always failing. Every time they emerged from the side-street at the
corner the P.S.U.C. machine-gunners in the Hotel Colon opened fire and drove
them back--I don't know why, for they were obviously unarmed. I have since
thought that they may have been a funeral party. And the little man who acted as
caretaker at the museum over the Poliorama and who seemed to regard the whole
affair as a social occasion. He was so pleased to have the English visiting him
--the English were so simpatico, he said. He hoped we would all come and see him
again when the trouble was over; as a matter of fact I did go and see him. And
the other little man, sheltering in a doorway, who jerked his head in a pleased
manner towards the hell of firing on the Plaza de Cataluna and said (as though
remarking that it was a fine morning): 'So we've got the nineteenth of July back
again!' And the people in the shoe-shop who were making my marching-boots. I
went there before the fighting, after it was over, and, for a very few minutes,
during the brief armistice on 5 May. It was an expensive shop, and the
shop-people were U.G.T. and may have been P.S.U.C. members--at any rate they
were politically on the other side and they knew that I was serving with the
P.O.U.M. Yet their attitude was completely indifferent. 'Such a pity, this kind
of thing, isn't it? And so bad for business. What a pity it doesn't stop! As
though there wasn't enough of that kind of thing at the front!' etc., etc. There
must have been quantities of people, perhaps a majority of the inhabitants of
Barcelona, who regarded the whole affair without a nicker of interest, or with
no more interest than they would have felt in an air-raid.

In this chapter I have described only my personal experiences. In the next
chapter I must discuss as best I can the larger issues--what actually happened
and with what results, what were the rights and wrongs of the affair, and who if
anyone was responsible. So much political capital has been made out of the
Barcelona fighting that it is important to try and get a balanced view of it. An
immense amount, enough to fill many books, has already been written on the
subject, and I do not suppose I should exaggerate if I said that nine-tenths of
it is untruthful. Nearly all the newspaper accounts published at the time were
manufactured by journalists at a distance, and were not only inaccurate in their
facts but intentionally misleading. As usual, only one side of the question has
been allowed to get to the wider public. Like everyone who was in Barcelona at
the time. I saw only what was happening in my immediate neighbourhood, but I saw
and heard quite enough to be able to contradict many of the lies that have been
circulated. As before, if you are not interested in political controversy and
the mob of parties and sub-parties with their confusing names (rather like the
names of the generals in a Chinese war), please skip. It is a horrible thing to
have to enter into the details of inter-party polemics; it is like diving into a
cesspool. But it is necessary to try and establish the truth, so far as it is
possible. This squalid brawl in a distant city is more important than might
appear at first sight.




Chapter 11



IT will never be possible to get a completely accurate and unbiased account
of the Barcelona fighting, because the necessary records do not exist. Future
historians will have nothing to go upon except a mass of accusations and party
propaganda. I myself have little data beyond what I saw with my own eyes and
what I have learned from other eyewitnesses whom I believe to be reliable. I
can, however, contradict some of the more flagrant lies and help to get the
affair into some kind of perspective.

First of all, what actually happened?

For some time past there had been tension throughout Catalonia. In earlier
chapters of this book I have given some account of the struggle between
Communists and Anarchists. By May 1937 things had reached a point at which some
kind of violent outbreak could be regarded as inevitable. The immediate cause of
friction was the Government's order to surrender all private weapons, coinciding
with the decision to build up a heavily-armed 'non-political' police-force from
which trade union members were to be excluded. The meaning of this was obvious
to everyone; and it was also obvious that the next move would be the taking over
of some of the key industries controlled by the C.N.T. In addition there was a
certain amount of resentment among the working classes because of the growing
contrast of wealth and poverty and a general vague feeling that the revolution
had been sabotaged. Many people were agreeably surprised when there was no
rioting on i May. On 3 May the Government decided to take over the Telephone
Exchange, which had been operated since the beginning of the war mainly by
C.N.T. workers; it was alleged that it was badly run and that official calls
were being tapped. Salas, the Chief of Police (who may or may not have been
exceeding his orders), sent three lorry-loads of armed Civil Guards to seize the
building, while the streets outside were cleared by armed police in civilian
clothes. At about the same time bands of Civil Guards seized various other
buildings in strategic spots. Whatever the real intention may have been, there
was a widespread belief that this was the signal for a general attack on the
C.N.T. by the Civil Guards and the P.S.U.C. (Communists and Socialists). The
word flew round the town that the workers' buildings were being attacked, armed
Anarchists appeared on the streets, work ceased, and fighting broke out
immediately. That night and the next morning barricades were built all over the
town, and there was no break in the fighting until the morning of 6 May. The
fighting was, however, mainly defensive on both sides. Buildings were besieged,
but, so far as I know, none were stormed, and there was no use of artillery.
Roughly speaking, the C.N.T.-F.A.I.-P.O.U.M. forces held the working-class
suburbs, and the armed police-forces and the P.S.U.C. held the central and
official portion of the town. On 6 May there was an armistice, but fighting soon
broke out again, probably because of premature attempts by Civil Guards to
disarm C.N.T. workers. Next morning, however, the people began to leave the
barricades of their own accord. Up till, roughly, the night of 5 May the C.N.T.
had had the better of it, and large numbers of Civil Guards had surrendered. But
there was no generally accepted leadership and no fixed plan--indeed, so far as
one could judge, no plan at all except a vague determination to resist the Civil
Guards. The official leaders of the C.N.T. had joined with those of the U.G.T.
in imploring everyone to go back to work; above all, food was running short. In
such circumstances nobody was sure enough of the issue to go on fighting. By the
afternoon of 7 May conditions were almost normal. That evening six thousand
Assault Guards, sent by sea from Valencia, arrived and took control of the town.
The Government issued an order for the surrender of all arms except those held
by the regular forces, and during the next few days large numbers of arms were
seized. The casualties during the fighting were officially given out as four
hundred killed and about a thousand wounded. Four hundred killed is possibly an
exaggeration, but as there is no way of verifying this we must accept it as
accurate.

Secondly, as to the after-effects of the fighting. Obviously it is impossible
to say with any certainty what these were. There is no evidence that the
outbreak had any direct effect upon the course of the war, though obviously it
must have had if it continued even a few days longer. It was made the excuse for
bringing Catalonia under the direct control of Valencia, for hastening the
break-up of the militias, and for the suppression of the P.O.U.M., and no doubt
it also had its share in bringing down the Caballero Government. But we may take
it as certain that these things would have happened in any case. The real
question is whether the C.N.T. workers who came into the street gained or lost
by showing fight on this occasion. It is pure guesswork, but my own opinion is
that they gained more than they lost. The seizure of the Barcelona Telephone
Exchange was simply one incident in a long process. Since the previous year
direct power had been gradually manoeuvred out of the hands of the syndicates,
and the general movement was away from working-class control and towards
centralized control, leading on to State capitalism or, possibly, towards the
reintroduction of private capitalism. The fact that at this point there was
resistance probably slowed the process down. A year after the outbreak of war
the Catalan workers had lost much of their power, but their position was still
comparatively favourable. It might have been much less so if they had made it
clear that they would lie down under no matter what provocation. There are
occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at
all.

Thirdly, what purpose, if any, lay behind the outbreak? Was it any kind of
coup d'etat or revolutionary attempt? Did it definitely aim at overthrowing the
Government? Was it preconcerted at all?

My own opinion is that the fighting was only preconcerted in the sense that
everyone expected it. There were no signs of any very definite plan on either
side. On the Anarchist side the action was almost certainly spontaneous, for it
was an affair mainly of the rank and file. The people came into the streets and
their political leaders followed reluctantly, or did not follow at all. The only
people who even talked in a revolutionary strain were the Friends of Durruti, a
small extremist group within the F.A.I., and the P.O.U.M. But once again they
were following and not leading. The Friends of Durruti distributed some kind of
revolutionary leaflet, but this did not appear until 5 May and cannot be said to
have started the fighting, which had started of its own accord two days earlier.
The official leaders of the C.N.T. disowned the whole affair from the start.
There were a number of reasons for this. To begin with, the fact that the C.N.T.
was still represented in the Government and the Generalite ensured that its
leaders would be more conservative than their followers. Secondly, the main
object of the C.N.T. leaders was to form an alliance with the U.G.T., and the
fighting was bound to widen the split between C.N.T. and U.G.T., at any rate for
the time being. Thirdly--though this was not generally known at the time--the
Anarchist leaders feared that if things went beyond a certain point and the
workers took possession of the town, as they were perhaps in a position to do on
5 May, there would be foreign intervention. A British cruiser and two British
destroyers had closed in upon the harbour, and no doubt there were other
warships not far away. The English newspapers gave it out that these ships were
proceeding to Barcelona 'to protect British interests', but in fact they made no
move to do so; that is, they did not land any men or take off any refugees.
There can be no certainty about this, but it was at least inherently likely that
the British Government, which had not raised a finger to save the Spanish
Government from Franco, would intervene quickly enough to save it from its own
working class.

The P.O.U.M. leaders did not disown the affair, in fact they encouraged their
followers to remain at the barricades and even gave their approval (in La
Batalla, 6 May) to the extremist leaflet issued by the Friends of Durruti.
(There is great uncertainty about this leaflet, of which no one now seems able
to produce a copy.) In some of the foreign papers it was described as an
'inflammatory poster' which was 'plastered' all over the town. There was
certainly no such poster. From comparison of various reports I should say that
the leaflet called for (i) The formation of a revolutionary council (junta),
(ii) The shooting of those responsible for the attack on the Telephone Exchange,
(iii) The disarming of the Civil Guards. There is also some uncertainty as to
how far La Batalla expressed agreement with the leaflet. I myself did not see
the leaflet or La Batalla of that date. The only handbill I saw during the
fighting was one issued by the tiny group of Trotskyists ('Bolshevik-Leninists')
on 4 May. This merely said: 'Everyone to the barricades--general strike of all
industries except war industries.' (In other words, it merely demanded what was
happening already.) But in reality the attitude of the P.O.U.M. leaders was
hesitating. They had never been in favour of insurrection until the war against
Franco was won; on the other hand the workers had come into the streets, and the
P.O.U.M. leaders took the rather pedantic Marxist line that when the workers are
on the streets it is the duty of the revolutionary parties to be with them.
Hence, in spite of uttering revolutionary slogans about the 'reawakening of the
spirit of 19 July', and so forth, they did their best to limit the workers'
action to the defensive. They never, for instance, ordered an attack on any
building; they merely ordered their followers to remain on guard and, as I
mentioned in the last chapter, not to fire when it could be avoided. La Batalla
also issued instructions that no troops were to leave the front. [Note 9, below]
As far as one can estimate it, I should say that the responsibility of the
P.O.U.M. amounts to having urged everyone to remain at the barricades, and probably
to having persuaded a certain number to remain there longer than they would
otherwise have done. Those who were in personal touch with the P.O.U.M. leaders
at the time (I myself was not) have told me that they were in reality dismayed
by the whole business, but felt that they had got to associate themselves with
it. Afterwards, of course, political capital was made out of it in the usual
manner. Gorkin, one of the P.O.U.M. leaders, even spoke later of 'the glorious
days of May'. From the propaganda point of view this may have been the right
line; certainly the P.O.U.M. rose somewhat in numbers during the brief period
before its suppression. Tactically it was probably a mistake to give countenance
to the leaflet of the Friends of Durruti, which was a very small organization
and normally hostile to the P.O.U.M. Considering the general excitement and the
things that were being said on both sides, the leaflet did not in effect mean
much more than 'Stay at the barricades', but by seeming to approve of it while
Solidaridad Obrera, the Anarchist paper, repudiated it, the P.O.U.M. leaders
made it easy for the Communist press to say afterwards that the fighting was a
kind of insurrection engineered solely by the P.O.U.M. However, we may be
certain that the Communist press would have said this in any case. It was
nothing compared with the accusations that were made both before and afterwards
on less evidence. The C.N.T. leaders did not gain much by their more cautious
attitude; they were praised for their loyalty but were levered out of both the
Government and the Generalite as soon as the opportunity arose.

[Note 9. A recent number of Inprecor states the exact opposite--that
La Batalla orders the P.O.U.M. troops to leave the front! The point can
easily be settled by referring to La Batalla of the date named.]

So far as one could judge from what people were saying at the time, there was
no real revolutionary intention anywhere. The people behind the barricades were
ordinary C.N.T. workers, probably with a sprinkling of U.G.T. workers among
them, and what they were attempting was not to overthrow the Government but to
resist what they regarded, rightly or wrongly, as an attack by the police. Their
action was essentially defensive, and I doubt whether it should be described, as
it was in nearly all the foreign newspapers, as a 'rising'. A rising implies
aggressive action and a definite plan. More exactly it was a riot--a very
bloody riot, because both sides had fire-arms in their hands and were willing to
use them.

But what about the intentions on the other side? If it was not an Anarchist
coup d'etat, was it perhaps a Communist coup d'etat--a planned effort to smash
the power of the C.N.T. at one blow?

I do not believe it was, though certain things might lead one to suspect it.
It is significant that something very similar (seizure of the Telephone Exchange
by armed police acting under orders from Barcelona) happened in Tarragona two
days later. And in Barcelona the raid on the Telephone Exchange was not an
isolated act. In various parts of the town bands of Civil Guards and P.S.U.C.
adherents seized buildings in strategic spots, if not actually before the
fighting started, at any rate with surprising promptitude. But what one has got
to remember is that these things were happening in Spain and not in England.
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. Presumably those responsible for the seizure of the Telephone
Exchange expected trouble--though not on the scale that actually happened--and
had made ready to meet it. But it does not follow that they were planning a
general attack on the C.N.T. There are two reasons why I do not believe that
either side had made preparations for large-scale fighting:

(i) Neither side had brought troops to Barcelona beforehand. The fighting was
only between those who were in Barcelona already, mainly civilians and
police.

(ii) The food ran short almost immediately. Anyone who has served in Spain
knows that the one operation of war that Spaniards really perform really well is
that of feeding their troops. It is most unlikely that if either side had
contemplated a week or two of street--fighting and a general strike they would
not have stored food beforehand.

Finally, as to the rights and wrongs of the affair.

A tremendous dust was kicked up in the foreign anti-Fascist press, but, as
usual, only one side of the case has had anything like a hearing. As a result
the Barcelona fighting has been represented as an insurrection by disloyal
Anarchists and Trotskyists who were 'stabbing the Spanish Government in the
back', and so forth. The issue was not quite so simple as that. Undoubtedly when
you are at war with a deadly enemy it is better not to begin fighting among
yourselves; but it is worth remembering that it takes two to make a quarrel and
that people do not begin building barricades unless they have received something
that they regard as a provocation.

The trouble sprang naturally out of the Government's order to the Anarchists
to surrender their arms. In the English press this was translated into English
terms and took this form: that arms were desperately needed on the Aragon front
and could not be sent there because the unpatriotic Anarchists were holding them
back. To put it like this is to ignore the conditions actually existing in
Spain. Everyone knew that both the Anarchists and the P.S.U.C. were hoarding
arms, and when the fighting broke out in Barcelona this was made clearer still;
both sides produced arms in abundance. The Anarchists were well aware that even
if they surrendered their arms, the P.S.U.C., politically the main power in
Catalonia, would still retain theirs; and this in fact was what happened after
the fighting was over. Meanwhile actually visible on the streets, there were
quantities of arms which would have been very welcome at the front, but which
were being retained for the 'non-political' police forces in the rear. And
underneath this there was the irreconcilable difference between Communists and
Anarchists, which was bound to lead to some kind of struggle sooner or later.
Since the beginning of the war the Spanish Communist Party had grown enormously
in numbers and captured most of the political power, and there had come into
Spain thousands of foreign Communists, many of whom were openly expressing their
intention of 'liquidating' Anarchism as soon as the war against Franco was won.
In the circumstances one could hardly expect the Anarchists to hand over the
weapons which they had got possession of in the summer of 1936.

The seizure of the Telephone Exchange was simply the match that fired an
already existing bomb. It is perhaps just conceivable that those responsible
imagined that it would not lead to trouble. Company, the Catalan President, is
said to have declared laughingly a few days earlier that the Anarchists would
put up with anything. [Note 10, below] But certainly it was not a wise action.
For months past there had been a long series of armed clashes between
Communists and Anarchists in various parts of Spain. Catalonia and
especially Barcelona was in a state of tension that had already led
to street affrays, assassinations, and so forth. Suddenly the news ran round
the city that armed men were attacking the buildings that the workers had
captured in the July fighting and to which they attached great sentimental
importance. One must remember that the Civil Guards were not loved by the
working-class population. For generations past la guardia. had been simply an
appendage of the landlord and the boss, and the Civil Guards were doubly hated
because they were suspected, quite justly, of being of very doubtful loyalty
against the Fascists. [Note 11, below] It is probable that the emotion
that brought people into the streets in the first few hours was much the
same emotion as had led them to resist the rebel generals at the
beginning of the war. Of course it is arguable that the C.N.T. workers ought
to have handed over the Telephone Exchange without protest. One's opinion here
will be governed by one's attitude on the question of centralized government and
working-class control. More relevantly it may be said: 'Yes, very likely the
C.N.T. had a case. But, after all, there was a war on, and they had no business
to start a fight behind the lines.' Here I agree entirely. Any internal disorder
was likely to aid Franco. But what actually precipitated the fighting? The
Government may or may not have had the right to seize the Telephone Exchange;
the point is that in the actual circumstances it was bound to lead to a fight.
It was a provocative action, a gesture which said in effect, and presumably was
meant to say: 'Your power is at an end--we are taking over.' It was not common
sense to expect anything but resistance. If one keeps a sense of proportion one
must realize that the fault was not--could not be, in a matter of this kind--
entirely on one side. The reason why a one-sided version has been accepted is
simply that the Spanish revolutionary parties have no footing in the foreign
press. In the English press, in particular, you would have to search for a long
time before finding any favourable reference, at any period of the war, to the
Spanish Anarchists. They have been systematically denigrated, and, as I know by
my own experience, it is almost impossible to get anyone to print anything in
their defence.

[Note 10. New Statesman (14 May).]

[Note 11. At the outbreak of war the Civil Guards had
everywhere sided with the stronger party. On several occasions later in the war,
e.g. at Santander, the local Civil Guards went over to the Fascists in a
body.]

I have tried to write objectively about the Barcelona fighting, though,
obviously, no one can be completely objective on a question of this kind. One is
practically obliged to take sides, and it must be clear enough which side I am
on. Again, I must inevitably have made mistakes of fact, not only here but in
other parts of this narrative. It is very difficult to write accurately about
the Spanish war, because of the lack of non-propagandist documents. I warn
everyone against my bias, and I warn everyone against my mistakes. Still, I have
done my best to be honest. But it will be seen that the account I have given is
completely different from that which appeared in the foreign and especially the
Communist press. It is necessary to examine the Communist version, because it
was published all over the world, has been supplemented at short intervals ever
since, and is probably the most widely accepted one.

In the Communist and pro-Communist press the entire blame for the Barcelona
fighting was laid upon the P.O.U.M. The affair was represented not as a
spontaneous outbreak, but as a deliberate, planned insurrection against the
Government, engineered solely by the P.O.U.M. with the aid of a few misguided
'uncontrollables'. More than this, it was definitely a Fascist plot, carried out
under Fascist orders with the idea of starting civil war in the rear and thus
paralysing the Government. The P.O.U.M. was 'Franco's Fifth Column'--a
'Trotskyist' organization working in league with the Fascists. According to the
Daily Worker (11 May):

   The German and Italian agents, who poured into Barcelona ostensibly to
   'prepare' the notorious 'Congress of the Fourth International', had one big
   task. It was this:

   They were--in cooperation with the local Trotskyists--to prepare a
   situation of disorder and bloodshed, in which it would be possible for the
   Germans and Italians to declare that they were 'unable to exercise naval
   control of the Catalan coasts effectively because of the disorder prevailing
   in Barcelona' and were, therefore, 'unable to do otherwise than land forces in
   Barcelona'.

    In other words, what was being prepared was a situation in which the German
    and Italian Governments could land troops or marines quite openly on the
    Catalan coasts, declaring that they were doing so 'in order to preserve
    order'. . . .

    The instrument for all this lay ready to hand for the Germans and Italians
    in the shape of the Trotskyist organization known as the P.O.U.M.

    The P.O.U.M., acting in cooperation with well-known criminal elements, and
    with certain other deluded persons in the Anarchist organizations planned,
    organized, and led the attack in the rearguard, accurately timed to coincide
    with the attack on the front at Bilbao, etc., etc.

Later in the article the Barcelona fighting becomes 'the P.O.U.M. attack',
and in another article in the same issue it is stated that there is 'no doubt
that it is at the door of the P.O.U.M. that the responsibility for the bloodshed
in Catalonia must be laid'. Inprecor (29 May) states that those who erected the
barricades in Barcelona were 'only members of the P.O.U.M. organized from that
party for this purpose'.

I could quote a great deal more, but this is clear enough. The P.O.U.M. was
wholly responsible and the P.O.U.M. was acting under Fascist orders. In a moment
I will give some more extracts from the accounts that appeared in the Communist
press; it will be seen that they are so self-contradictory as to be completely
worthless. But before doing so it is worth pointing to several a priori reasons
why this version of the May fighting as a Fascist rising engineered by the
P.O.U.M. is next door to incredible.

(i) The P.O.U.M. had not the numbers or influence to provoke disorders of
this magnitude. Still less had it the power to call a general strike. It was a
political organization with no very definite footing in the trade unions, and it
would have been hardly more capable of producing a strike throughout Barcelona
than (say) the English Communist Party would be of producing a general strike
throughout Glasgow. As I said earlier, the attitude of the P.O.U.M. leaders may
have helped to prolong the fighting to some extent; but they could not have
originated it even if they had wanted to.

(ii) The alleged Fascist plot rests on bare assertion and all the evidence
points in the other direction. We are told that the plan was for the German and
Italian Governments to land troops in Catalonia; but no German or Italian
troopships approached the coast. As to the 'Congress of the Fourth
International' and the' German and Italian agents', they are pure myth. So far
as I know there had not even been any talk of a Congress of the Fourth
International. There were vague plans for a Congress of the P.O.U.M. and its
brother-parties (English I.L.P., German S.A.P., etc., etc.); this had been
tentatively fixed for some time in July--two months later--and not a single
delegate had yet arrived. The 'German and Italian agents' have no existence
outside the pages of the Daily Worker. Anyone who crossed the frontier at that
time knows that it was not so easy to 'pour' into Spain, or out of it, for that
matter.

(iii) Nothing happened either at Lerida, the chief stronghold of the
P.O.U.M., or at the front. It is obvious that if the P.O.U.M. leaders had wanted
to aid the Fascists they would have ordered their militia to walk out of the
line and let the Fascists through. But nothing of the kind was done or
suggested. Nor were any extra men brought out of the line beforehand, though it
would have been easy enough to smuggle, say, a thousand or two thousand men back
to Barcelona on various pretexts. And there was no attempt even at indirect
sabotage of the front. The transport of food, munitions, and so forth continued
as usual; I verified this by inquiry afterwards. Above all, a planned rising of
the kind suggested would have needed months of preparation, subversive
propaganda among the militia, and so forth. But there was no sign or rumour of
any such thing. The fact that the militia at the front played no part in the
'rising' should be conclusive. If the P.O.U.M. were really planning a coup
d'etat it is inconceivable that they would not have used the ten thousand or so
armed men who were the only striking force they had.

It will be clear enough from this that the Communist thesis of a P.O.U.M.
'rising' under Fascist orders rests on less than no evidence. I will add a few
more extracts from the Communist press. The Communist accounts of the opening
incident, the raid on the Telephone Exchange, are illuminating; they agree in
nothing except in putting the blame on the other side. It is noticeable that in
the English Communist papers the blame is put first upon the Anarchists and only
later upon the P.O.U.M. There is a fairly obvious reason for this. Not everyone
in England has heard of'Trotskyism', whereas every English-speaking person
shudders at the name of 'Anarchist'. Let it once be known that 'Anarchists' are
implicated, and the right atmosphere of prejudice is established; after that the
blame can safely be transferred to the 'Trotskyists'. The Daily Worker begins
thus (6 May):

    A minority gang of Anarchists on Monday and Tuesday seized and attempted to
    hold the telephone and telegram buildings, and started firing into the
    street.

There is nothing like starting off with a reversal of roles. The Civil Guards
attack a building held by the C.N.T.; so the C.N.T. are represented as attacking
their own building attacking themselves, in fact. On the other hand, the Daily
Worker of 11 May states:

    The Left Catalan Minister of Public Security, Aiguade, and the United
    Socialist General Commissar of Public Order, Rodrigue Salas, sent the armed
    republican police into the Telefonica building to disarm the employees there,
    most of them members of C.N.T. unions.

This does not seem to agree very well with the first statement; nevertheless
the Daily Worker contains no admission that the first statement was wrong. The
Daily Worker of 11 May states that the leaflets of the Friends of Durruti, which
were disowned by the C.N.T., appeared on 4 May and 5 May, during the fighting.
Inprecor (22 May) states that they appeared on 3 May, before the fighting, and
adds that 'in view of these facts' (the appearance of various leaflets):

    The police, led by the Prefect of Police in person, occupied the central
    telephone exchange in the afternoon of 3 May. The police were shot at while
    discharging their duty. This was the signal for the provocateurs to begin
    shooting affrays all over the city.

And here is Inprecor for 29 May:

    At three o'clock in the afternoon the Commissar for Public Security,
    Comrade Salas, went to the Telephone Exchange, which on the previous night had
    been occupied by 50 members of the P.O.U.M. and various uncontrollable
    elements.

This seems rather curious. The occupation of the Telephone Exchange by 50
P.O.U.M. members is what one might call a picturesque circumstance, and one
would have expected somebody to notice it at the time. Yet it appears that it
was discovered only three or four weeks later. In another issue of Inprecor the
50 P.O.U.M. members become 50 P.O.U.M. militiamen. It would be difficult to pack
together more contradictions than are contained in these few short passages. At
one moment the C.N.T. are attacking the Telephone Exchange, the next they are
being attacked there; a leaflet appears before the seizure of the Telephone
Exchange and is the cause of it, or, alternatively, appears afterwards and is
the result of it; the people in the Telephone Exchange are alternatively C.N.T.
members and P.O.U.M. members--and so on. And in a still later issue of the
Daily Worker (3 June) Mr J. R. Campbell informs us that the Government only
seized the Telephone Exchange because the barricades were already erected!

For reasons of space I have taken only the reports of one incident, but the
same discrepancies run all through the accounts in the Communist press. In
addition there are various statements which are obviously pure fabrication. Here
for instance is something quoted by the Daily Worker (7 May) and said to have
been issued by the Spanish Embassy in Paris:

    A significant feature of the uprising has been that the old monarchist flag
    was flown from the balcony of various houses in Barcelona, doubtless in the
    belief that those who took part in the rising had become masters of the
    situation.

The Daily Worker very probably reprinted this statement in good faith, but
those responsible for it at the Spanish Embassy must have been quite
deliberately lying. Any Spaniard would understand the internal situation better
than that. A monarchist flag in Barcelona! It was the one thing that could have
united the warring factions in a moment. Even the Communists on the spot were
obliged to smile when they read about it. It is the same with the reports in the
various Communist papers upon the arms supposed to have been used by the
P.O.U.M. during the 'rising'. They would be credible only if one knew nothing
whatever of the facts. In the Daily Worker of 17 May Mr Frank Pitcairn
states:

    There were actually all sorts of arms used by them in the outrage. There
    were the arms which they have been stealing for months past, and hidden, and
    there were arms such as tanks, which they stole from the barracks just at the
    beginning of the rising. It is clear that scores of machine-guns and several
    thousand rifles are still in their possession.

Inprecor (29 May) also states:

    On 3 May the P.O.U.M. had at its disposal some dozens of machine-guns and
    several thousand rines. ... On the Plaza de Espana the Trotskyists brought
    into action batteries of '75' guns which were destined for the front in Aragon
    and which the militia had carefully concealed on their premises.

Mr Pitcairn does not tell us how and when it became dear that the P.O.U.M.
possessed scores of machine-guns and several thousand rifles. I have given an
estimate of the arms which were at three of the principal P.O.U.M. buildings--
about eighty rifles, a few bombs, and no machine-guns; i.e. about sufficient for
the armed guards which, at that time, all the political parties placed on their
buildings. It seems strange that afterwards, when the P.O.U.M. was suppressed
and all its buildings seized, these thousands of weapons never came to light;
especially the tanks and field-guns, which are not the kind of thing that can be
hidden up the chimney. But what is revealing in the two statements above is the
complete ignorance they display of the local circumstances. According to Mr
Pitcairn the P.O.U.M. stole tanks 'from the barracks'. He does not tell us which
barracks. The P.O.U.M. militiamen who were in Barcelona (now comparatively few,
as direct recruitment to the party militias had ceased) shared the Lenin
Barracks with a considerably larger number of Popular Army troops. Mr Pitcaim is
asking us to believe, therefore, that the P.O.U.M. stole tanks with the
connivance of the Popular Army. It is the same with the 'premises' on which the
75-mm. guns were concealed. There is no mention of where these 'premises' were.
Those batteries of guns, firing on the Plaza de Espana, appeared in many
newspaper reports, but I think we can say with certainty that they never
existed. As I mentioned earlier, I heard no artillery-fire during the fighting,
though the Plaza de Espana was only a mile or so away. A few days later I
examined the Plaza de Espana and could find no buildings that showed marks of
shell-fire. And an eye-witness who was in that neighbourhood throughout the
fighting declares that no guns ever appeared there. (Incidentally, the tale of
the stolen guns may have originated with Antonov-Ovseenko, the Russian
Consul-General. He, at any rate, communicated it to a well-known English
journalist, who afterwards repeated it in good faith in a weekly paper.
Antonov-Ovseenko has since been 'purged'. How this would affect his credibility
I do not know.) The truth is, of course, that these tales about tanks,
field-guns, and so forth have only been invented because otherwise it is
difficult to reconcile the scale of the Barcelona fighting with the P.O.U.M.'S
small numbers. It was necessary to claim that the P.O.U.M. was wholly
responsible for the fighting; it was also necessary to claim that it was an
insignificant party with no following and 'numbered only a few thousand
members', according to Inprecor. The only hope of making both statements
credible was to pretend that the P.O.U.M. had all the weapons of a modern
mechanized army.

It is impossible to read through the reports in the Communist Press without
realizing that they are consciously aimed at a public ignorant of the facts and
have no other purpose than to work up prejudice. Hence, for instance, such
statements as Mr Pitcairn's in the Daily Worker of 11 May that the 'rising' was
suppressed by the Popular Army. The idea here is to give outsiders the
impression that all Catalonia was solid against the 'Trotskyists'. But the
Popular Army remained neutral throughout the fighting; everyone in Barcelona
knew this, and it is difficult to believe that Mr Pitcairn did not know it too.
Or again, the juggling in the Communist Press with the figures for killed and
wounded, with the object of exaggerating the scale of the disorders. Diaz,
General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party, widely quoted in the Communist
Press, gave the numbers as 900 dead and 2500 wounded. The Catalan Minister of
Propaganda, who was hardly likely to underestimate, gave the numbers as 400
killed and 1000 wounded. The Communist Party doubles the bid and adds a few more
hundreds for luck.

The foreign capitalist newspapers, in general, laid the blame for the
fighting upon the Anarchists, but there were a few that followed the Communist
line. One of these was the English News Chronicle, whose correspondent, Mr John
Langdon-Davies, was in Barcelona at the tune I quote portions of his article
here:

    A TROTSKYIST REVOLT

    . . . This has not been an Anarchist uprising. It is a frustrated putsch of
    the 'Trotskyist' P.O.U.M., working through their controlled organizations,
    'Friends of Durruti' and Libertarian Youth. . . . The tragedy began on Monday
    afternoon when the Government sent armed police into the Telephone Building,
    to disarm the workers there, mostly C.N.T. men. Grave irregularities in the
    service had been a scandal for some time. A large crowd gathered in the Plaza
    de Cataluna outside, while the C.N.T. men resisted, retreating floor by floor
    to the top of the building. . . . The incident was very obscure, but word went
    round that the Government was out against the Anarchists. The streets filled
    with armed men. . . . By nightfall every workers' centre and Government
    building was barricaded, and at ten o'clock the first volleys were fired and
    the first ambulances began ringing their way through the streets. By dawn all
    Barcelona was under fire. ... As the day wore on and the dead mounted to over
    a hundred, one could make a guess at what was happening. The Anarchist C.N.T.
    and Socialist U.G.T. were not technically 'out in the street'. So long as they
    remained behind the barricades they were merely watchfully waiting, an
    attitude which included the right to shoot at anything armed in the open
    street. . . (the) general bursts were invariably aggravated by pacos--hidden
    solitary men, usually Fascists, shooting from roof--tops at nothing in
    particular, but doing all they could to add to the general panic.. . . By
    Wednesday evening, however, it began to be clear who was behind the revolt.
    All the walls had been plastered with an inflammatory poster calling for an
    immediate revolution and for the shooting of Republican and Socialist leaders.
    It was signed by the 'Friends of Durruti'. On Thursday morning the Anarchists
    daily denied all knowledge or sympathy with it, but La Batalla, the P.O.U.M.
    paper, reprinted the document with the highest praise. Barcelona, the first
    city of Spain, was plunged into bloodshed by agents provocateurs using this
    subversive organization.

This does not agree very completely with the Communist versions I have quoted
above, but it will be seen that even as it stands it is self--contradictory.
First the affair is described as 'a Trotskyist revolt', then it is shown to have
resulted from a raid on the Telephone building and the general belief that the
Government was 'out against' the Anarchists. The city is barricaded and both
C.N.T. and U.G.T. are behind the barricades; two days afterwards the
inflammatory poster (actually a leaflet) appears, and this is declared by
implication to have started the whole business--effect preceding cause. But
there is a piece of very serious misrepresentation here. Mr Langdon-Davies
describes the Friends of Durruti and Libertarian Youth as 'controlled
organizations' of the P.O.U.M. Both were Anarchist organizations and had no
connexion with the P.O.U.M. The Libertarian Youth was the youth league of the
Anarchists, corresponding to the J.S.U. of the P.S.U.C., etc. The Friends of
Durruti was a small organization within the F.A.I., and was in general bitterly
hostile to the P.O.U.M. So far as I can discover, there was no one who was a
member of both. It would be about equally true to say that the Socialist League
is a 'controlled organization' of the English Liberal Party. Was Mr
Langdon-Davies unaware of this? If he was, he should have written with more
caution about this very complex subject.

I am not attacking Mr Langdon-Davies's good faith; but admittedly he left
Barcelona as soon as the fighting was over, i.e. at the moment when he could
have begun serious inquiries, and throughout his report there are clear signs
that he has accepted the official version of a 'Trotskyist revolt' without
sufficient verification. This is obvious even in the extract I have quoted. 'By
nightfall' the barricades are built, and 'at ten o'clock' the first volleys are
fired. These are not the words of an eye-witness. From this you would gather
that it is usual to wait for your enemy to build a barricade before beginning to
shoot at him. The impression given is that some hours elapsed between the
building of the barricades and the firing of the first volleys; whereas--
naturally--it was the other way about. I and many others saw the first volleys
fired early in the afternoon. 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. He is simply repeating what he has been told and, as
it fits in with the official version, is not questioning it. As a matter of
fact, he indicates one probable source of much of his information by an
incautious reference to the Minister of Propaganda at the beginning of his
article. Foreign journalists in Spain were hopelessly at the mercy of the
Ministry of Propaganda, though one would think that the very name of this
ministry would be a sufficient warning. The Minister of Propaganda was, of
course, about as likely to give an objective account of the Barcelona trouble as
(say) the late Lord Carson would have been to give an objective account of the
Dublin rising of 1916.

I have given reasons for thinking that the Communist version of the Barcelona
fighting cannot be taken seriously. In addition I must say something about the
general charge that the P.O.U.M. was a secret Fascist organization in the pay of
Franco and Hitler.

This charge was repeated over and over in the Communist Press, especially
from the beginning of 1937 onwards. It was part of the world-wide drive of the
official Communist Party against 'Trotskyism', of which the P.O.U.M. was
supposed to be representative in Spain. 'Trotskyism', according to Frente Rojo
(the Valencia Communist paper) 'is not a political doctrine. Trotskyism is an
official capitalist organization, a Fascist terrorist band occupied in crime and
sabotage against the people.' The P.O.U.M. was a 'Trotskyist' organization in
league with the Fascists and part of 'Franco's Fifth Column'. What was
noticeable from the start was that no evidence was produced in support of this
accusation; the thing was simply asserted with an air of authority. And the
attack was made with the maximum of personal libel and with complete
irresponsibility as to any effects it might have upon the war. Compared with the
job of libelling the P.O.U.M., many Communist writers appear to have considered
the betrayal of military secrets unimportant. In a February number of the Daily
Worker, for instance, a writer (Winifred Bates) is allowed to state that the
P.O.U.M. had only half as many troops on its section of the front as it
pretended. This was not true, but presumably the writer believed it to be true.
She and the Daily Worker were perfectly willing, therefore, to hand to the enemy
one of the most important pieces of information that can be handed through the
columns of a newspaper. 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. Again,
there was the malignant cartoon which was widely circulated, first in Madrid and
later in Barcelona, representing the P.O.U.M. as slipping off a mask marked with
the hammer and sickle and revealing a face marked with the swastika. Had the
Government not been virtually under Communist control it would never have
permitted a thing of this kind to be circulated in wartime. It was a deliberate
blow at the morale not only of the P.O.U.M. militia, but of any others who
happened to be near them; for it is not encouraging to be told that the troops
next to you in the line are traitors. As a matter of fact, I doubt whether the
abuse that was heaped upon them from the rear actually had the effect of
demoralizing the P.O.U.M. militia. But certainly it was calculated to do so, and
those responsible for it must be held to have put political spite before
anti-Fascist unity.

The accusation against the P.O.U.M. amounted to this: that a body of some
scores of thousands of people, almost entirely working class, besides numerous
foreign helpers and sympathizers, mostly refugees from Fascist countries, and
thousands of militia, was simply a vast spying organization in Fascist pay. The
thing was opposed to common sense, and the past history of the P.O.U.M. was
enough to make it incredible. All the P.O.U.M. leaders had revolutionary
histories behind them. Some of them had been mixed up in the 1934 revolt, and
most of them had been imprisoned for Socialist activities under the Lerroux
Government or the monarchy. In 1936 its then leader, Joaquin Maurin, was one of
the deputies who gave warning in the Cortes of Franco's impending revolt. Some
time after the outbreak of war he was taken prisoner by the Fascists while
trying to organize resistance in Franco's rear. When the revolt broke out the
P.O.U.M. played a conspicuous part in resisting it, and in Madrid, in
particular, many of its members were killed in the street-fighting. It was one
of the first bodies to form columns of militia in Catalonia and Madrid. It seems
almost impossible to explain these as the actions of a party in Fascist pay. A
party in Fascist pay would simply have joined in on the other side.

Nor was there any sign of pro-Fascist activities during the war. It was
arguable--though finally I do not agree--that by pressing for a more
revolutionary policy the P.O.U.M. divided the Government forces and thus aided
the Fascists;

I think any Government of reformist type would be justified in regarding a
party like the P.O.U.M. as a nuisance. But this is a very different matter from
direct treachery. There is no way of explaining why, if the P.O.U.M. was really
a Fascist body, its militia remained loyal. Here were eight or ten thousand men
holding important parts of the line during the intolerable conditions of the
winter of 1936-7. Many of them were in the trenches four or five months at a
stretch. It is difficult to see why they did not simply walk out of the line or
go over to the enemy. It was always in their power to do so, and at times the
effect might have been decisive. Yet they continued to fight, and it was shortly
after the P.O.U.M. was suppressed as a political party, when the event was fresh
in everyone's mind, that the militia--not yet redistributed among the Popular
Army--took part in the murderous attack to the east of Huesca when several
thousand men were killed in one or two days. At the very least one would have
expected fraternization with the enemy and a constant trickle of deserters. But,
as I have pointed out earlier, the number of desertions was exceptionally small.
Again, one would have expected pro-Fascist propaganda, 'defeatism', and so
forth. Yet there was no sign of any such thing. Obviously there must have been
Fascist spies and agents provocateurs in the P.O.U.M.; they exist in all
Left-wing parties; but there is no evidence that there were more of them there
than elsewhere.

It is true that some of the attacks in the Communist Press said, rather
grudgingly, that only the P.O.U.M. leaders were in Fascist pay, and not the rank
and file. But this was merely an attempt to detach the rank and file from their
leaders. The nature of the accusation implied that ordinary members, militiamen,
and so forth, were all in the plot together; for it was obvious that if Nin,
Gorkin, and the others were really in Fascist pay, it was more likely to be
known to their followers, who were in contact with them, than to journalists in
London, Paris, and New York. And in any case, when the P.O.U.M. was suppressed
the Communist-controlled secret police acted on the assumption that all were
guilty alike, and arrested everyone connected with the P.O.U.M. whom they could
lay hands on, including even wounded men, hospital nurses, wives of P.O.U.M.
members, and in some cases, even children.

Finally, on 15-16 June, the P.O.U.M. was suppressed and declared an illegal
organization. This was one of the first acts of the Negrin Government which came
into office in May. When the Executive Committee of the P.O.U.M. had been thrown
into jail, the Communist Press produced what purported to be the discovery of an
enormous Fascist plot. For a while the Communist Press of the whole world was
flaming with this kind of thing (Daily Worker, 21 June, summarizing various
Spanish Communist papers):

    SPANISH TROTSKYISTS PLOT WITH FRANCO

    Following the arrest of a large number of leading Trotskyists in Barcelona
    and elsewhere . . . there became known, over the weekend, details of one of
    the most ghastly pieces of espionage ever known in wartime, and the ugliest
    revelation of Trotskyist treachery to date. . . Documents in the possession of
    the police, together with the full confession of no less than 200 persons
    under arrest, prove, etc. etc.

What these revelations 'proved' was that the P.O.U.M. leaders were
transmitting military secrets to General Franco by radio, were in touch with
Berlin, and were acting in collaboration with the secret Fascist organization in
Madrid. In addition there were sensational details about secret messages in
invisible ink, a mysterious document signed with the letter N. (standing for
Nin), and so on and so forth.

But the final upshot was this: six months after the event, as I write, most
of the P.O.U.M. leaders are still in jail, but they have never been brought to
trial, and the charges of communicating with Franco by radio, etc., have never
even been formulated. Had they really been guilty of espionage they would have
been tried and shot in a week, as so many Fascist spies had been previously. But
not a scrap of evidence was ever produced except the unsupported statements in
the Communist Press. 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.

More than this, most of the members of the Spanish Government have disclaimed
all belief in the charges against the P.O.U.M. Recently the cabinet decided by
five to two in favour of releasing anti-Fascist political prisoners; the two
dissentients being the Communist ministers. In August an international
delegation headed by James Maxton M.P., went to Spain to inquire into the
charges against the P.O.U.M. and the disappearance of Andres Nin. Prieto, the
Minister of National Defence, Irujo, the Minister of Justice, Zugazagoitia,
Minister of the Interior, Ortega y Gasset, the Procureur-General, Prat Garcia,
and others all repudiated any belief in the P.O.U.M. leaders being guilty of
espionage. Irujo added that he had been through the dossier of the case, that
none of the so-called pieces of evidence would bear examination, and that the
document supposed to have been signed by Nin was 'valueless'--i.e. a forgery.
Prieto considered the P.O.U.M. leaders to be responsible for the May fighting in
Barcelona, but dismissed the idea of their being Fascist spies. 'What is most
grave', he added,' is that the arrest of the P.O.U.M. leaders was not decided
upon by the Government, and the police carried out these arrests on their own
authority. Those responsible are not the heads of the police, but their
entourage, which has been infiltrated by the Communists according to their usual
custom.' He cited other cases of illegal arrests by the police. Irujo likewise
declared that the police had become 'quasi-independent' and were in reality
under the control of foreign Communist elements. Prieto hinted fairly broadly to
the delegation that the Government could not afford to offend the Communist
Party while the Russians were supplying arms. When another delegation, headed by
John McGovern M.P., went to Spain in December, they got much the same answers as
before, and Zugazagoitia, the Minister of the Interior, repeated Prieto's hint
in even plainer terms. 'We have received aid from Russia and have had to permit
certain actions which we did not like.' As an illustration of the autonomy of
the police, it is interesting to learn that even with a signed order from the
Director of Prisons and the Minister of Justice, McGovern and the others could
not obtain admission to one of the 'secret prisons' maintained by the Communist
Party in Barcelona. [Note 12. For reports on the two delegations see Le
Populaire (7 September), Laleche (18 September), Report on the Maxton delegation
published by Independent News (219 Rue Saint-Denis, Paris), and McGovern's
pamphlet Terror in Spain.]

I think this should be enough to make the matter clear. The accusation of
espionage against the P.O.U.M. rested solely upon articles in the Communist
press and the activities of the Communist-controlled secret police. The P.O.U.M.
leaders, and hundreds or thousands of their followers, are still in prison, and
for six months past the Communist press has continued to clamour for the
execution of the 'traitors' But Negrin and the others have kept their heads and
refused to stage a wholesale massacre of'Trotskyists'. Considering the pressure
that has been put upon them, it is greatly to their credit that they have done
so. Meanwhile, in face of what I have quoted above, it becomes very difficult to
believe that the P.O.U.M. was really a Fascist spying organization, unless one
also believes that Maxton, Mc-Govern, Prieto, Irujo, Zugazagoitia, and the rest
are all in Fascist pay together.

Finally, as to the charge that the P.O.U.M. was 'Trotskyist'. This word is
now flung about with greater and greater freedom, and it is used in a way that
is extremely misleading and is often intended to mislead. It is worth stopping
to define it. The word Trotskyist is used to mean three distinct things:

(i) One who, like Trotsky, advocates 'world revolution' as against 'Socialism
in a single country'. More loosely, a revolutionary extremist.

(ii) A member of the actual organization of which Trotsky is head.

(iii) A disguised Fascist posing as a revolutionary who acts especially by
sabotage in the U.S.S.R., but, in general, by splitting and undermining the
Left-wing forces.

In sense (i) the P.O.U.M. could probably be described as Trotskyist. So can
the English I.L.P., the German S.A.P., the Left Socialists in France, and so on.
But the P.O.U.M. had no connexion with Trotsky or the Trotskyist
('Bolshevik-Lenninist') organization. When the war broke out the foreign
Trotskyists who came to Spain (fifteen or twenty in number) worked at first for
the P.O.U.M., as the party nearest to their own viewpoint, but without becoming
party-members; later Trotsky ordered his followers to attack the P.O.U.M.
policy, and the Trotskyists were purged from the party offices, though a few
remained in the militia. Nin, the P.O.U.M. leader after Maurin's capture by the
Fascists, was at one time Trotsky's secretary, but had left him some years
earlier and formed the P.O.U.M. by the amalgamation of various Opposition
Communists with an earlier party, the Workers' and Peasants' Bloc. Nin's
one-time association with Trotsky has been used in the Communist press to show
that the P.O.U.M. was really Trotskyist.

By the same line of argument it could be shown that the English Communist
Party is really a Fascist organization, because of Mr John Strachey's one-time
association with Sir Oswald Mosley.

In sense (ii), the only exactly defined sense of the word, the P.O.U.M. was
certainly not Trotskyist. It is important to make this distinction, because it
is taken for granted by the majority of Communists that a Trotskyist in sense
(ii) is invariably a Trotskyist in sense (iii)--i.e. that the whole Trotskyist
organization is simply a Fascist spying-machine. 'Trotskyism' only came into
public notice in the time of the Russian sabotage trials, and to call a man a
Trotskyist is practically equivalent to calling him a murderer, agent
provocateur, etc. But at the same time anyone who criticizes Communist policy
from a Left-wing standpoint is liable to be denounced as a Trotskyist. Is it
then asserted that everyone professing revolutionary extremism is in Fascist
pay?

In practice it is or is not, according to local convenience. When Maxton went
to Spain with the delegation I have mentioned above, Verdad, Frente Rojo, and
other Spanish Communist papers instantly denounced him as a 'Trotsky-Fascist',
spy of the Gestapo, and so forth. Yet the English Communists were careful not to
repeat this accusation. In the English Communist press Maxton becomes merely a
'reactionary enemy of the working class', which is conveniently vague. The
reason, of course, is simply that several sharp lessons have given the English
Communist press a wholesome dread of the law of libel. The fact that the
accusation was not repeated in a country where it might have to be proved is
sufficient confession that it is a lie.

It may seem that I have discussed the accusations against the P.O.U.M. at
greater length than was necessary. Compared with the huge miseries of a civil
war, this kind of internecine squabble between parties, with its inevitable
injustices and false accusations, may appear trivial. It is not really so. I
believe that libels and press--campaigns of this kind, and the habits of mind
they indicate, are capable of doing the most deadly damage to the anti-Fascist
cause.

Anyone who has given the subject a glance knows that the Communist tactic of
dealing with political opponents by means of trumped-up accusations is nothing
new. Today the key-word is 'Trotsky-Fascist'; yesterday it was 'Social-Fascist'.
It is only six or seven years since the Russian State trials 'proved' that the
leaders of the Second International, including, for instance, Leon Blum and
prominent members of the British Labour Party, were hatching a huge plot for the
military invasion of the U.S.S.R. Yet today the French Communists are glad
enough to accept Blum as a leader, and the English Communists are raising heaven
and earth to get inside the Labour Party. I doubt whether this kind of thing
pays, even from a sectarian point of view. And meanwhile there is no possible
doubt about the hatred and dissension that the 'Trotsky-Fascist' accusation is
causing. Rank-and--file Communists everywhere are led away on a senseless
witch-hunt after 'Trotskyists', and parties of the type of the P.O.U.M. are
driven back into the terribly sterile position of being mere anti-Communist
parties. There is already the beginning of a dangerous split in the world
working-class movement. A few more libels against life-long Socialists, a few
more frame-ups like the charges against the P.O.U.M., and the split may become
irreconcilable. The only hope is to keep political controversy on a plane where
exhaustive discussion is possible. Between the Communists and those who stand or
claim to stand to the Left of them there is a real difference. The Communists
hold that Fascism can be beaten by alliance with sections of the capitalist
class (the Popular Front); their opponents hold that this manoeuvre simply gives
Fascism new breeding-grounds. The question has got to be settled; to make the
wrong decision may be to land ourselves in for centuries of semi-slavery. But so
long as no argument is produced except a scream of 'Trotsky-Fascist!' the
discussion cannot even begin. It would be impossible for me, for instance, to
debate the rights and wrongs of the Barcelona fighting with a Communist Party
member, because no Communist--that is to say, no' good' Communist--could admit
that I have given a truthful account of the facts. If he followed his party
'line dutifully he would have to declare that I am lying or, at best, that I am
hopelessly misled and that anyone who glanced at the Daily Worker headlines a
thousand miles from the scene of events knows more of what was happening in
Barcelona than I do. In such circumstances there can be no argument; the
necessary minimum of agreement cannot be reached. What purpose is served by
saying that men like Maxton are in Fascist pay? Only the purpose of making
serious discussion impossible. It is as though in the middle of a chess
tournament one competitor should suddenly begin screaming that the other is
guilty of arson or bigamy. The point that is really at issue remains untouched.
Libel settles nothing.




Chapter 12



IT must have been three days after the Barcelona fighting ended that we
returned to the front. After the fighting--more particularly after the
slanging-match in the newspapers--it was difficult to think about this war in
quite the same naively idealistic manner as before. I suppose there is no one
who spent more than a few weeks in Spain without being in some degree
disillusioned. My mind went back to the newspaper correspondent whom I had met
my first day in Barcelona, and who said to me: 'This war is a racket the same as
any other.' The remark had shocked me deeply, and at that time (December) I do
not believe it was true; it was not true even now, in May; but it was becoming
truer. 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.

One could begin now to make some kind of guess at what was likely to happen.
It was easy to see that the Caballero Government would fall and be replaced by a
more Right-wing Government with a stronger Communist influence (this happened a
week or two later), which would set itself to break the power of the trade
unions once and for all. And afterwards, when Franco was beaten--and putting
aside the huge problems raised by the reorganization of Spain--the prospect was
not rosy. 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. It would have to
be a dictatorship, and it was clear that the chance of a working-class
dictatorship had passed. That meant that the general movement would be in the
direction of some kind of Fascism. Fascism called, no doubt, by some politer
name, and--because this was Spain--more human and less efficient than the
German or Italian varieties. The only alternatives were an infinitely worse
dictatorship by Franco, or (always a possibility) that the war would end with
Spain divided up, either by actual frontiers or into economicszones.

Whichever way you took it it was a depressing outlook. But it did not follow
that the Government was not worth fighting for as against the more naked and
developed Fascism of Franco and Hitler. Whatever faults the post-war Government
might have, Franco's regime would certainly be worse. To the workers--the town
proletariat--it might in the end make very little difference who won, but Spain
is primarily an agricultural country and the peasants would almost certainly
benefit by a Government victory. Some at least of the seized lands would remain
in their possession, in which case there would also be a distribution of land in
the territory that had been Franco's, and the virtual serfdom that had existed
in some parts of Spain was not likely to be restored. The Government in control
at the end of the war would at any rate be anti-clerical and anti-feudal. It
would keep the Church in check, at least for the time being, and would modernize
the country--build roads, for instance, and promote education and public
health; a certain amount had been done in this direction even during the war.
Franco, on the other hand, in so far as he was not merely the puppet of Italy
and Germany, was tied to the big feudal landlords and stood for a stuffy
clerico-military reaction. The Popular Front might be a swindle, but Franco was
an anachronism. Only millionaires or romantics could want him to win.

Moreover, there was the question of the international prestige of Fascism,
which for a year or two past had been haunting me like a nightmare. Since 1930
the Fascists had won all the victories; it was time they got a beating, it
hardly mattered from whom. 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.

This was how I saw things at the time. I may say that I now think much more
highly of the Negrin Government than I did when it came into office. It has kept
up the difficult fight with splendid courage, and it has shown more political
tolerance than anyone expected. But I still believe that--unless Spain splits
up, with unpredictable consequences--the tendency of the post-war Government is
bound to be Fascistic. Once again I let this opinion stand, and take the chance
that time will do to me what it does to most prophets.

We had just reached the front when we heard that Bob Smillie, on his way back
to England, had been arrested at the frontier, taken down to Valencia, and
thrown into jail. Smillie had been in Spain since the previous October. He had
worked for several months at the P.O.U.M. office and had then joined the militia
when the other I.L.P. members arrived, on the understanding that he was to do
three months at the front before going back to England to take part in a
propaganda tour. It was some time before we could discover what he had been
arrested for. He was being kept incommunicado, so that not even a lawyer could
see him. In Spain there is--at any rate in practice--no habeas corpus, and you
can be kept in jail for months at a stretch without even being charged, let
alone tried. Finally we learned from a released prisoner that Smillie had been
arrested for 'carrying arms'. The 'arms', as I happened to know, were two
hand-grenades of the primitive type used at the beginning of the war, which he
had been taking home to show off at his lectures, along with shell splinters and
other souvenirs. The charges and fuses had been removed from them--they were
mere cylinders of steel and completely harmless. It was obvious that this was
only a pretext and that he had been arrested because of his known connexion with
the P.O.U.M. The Barcelona fighting had only just ended and the authorities
were, at that moment, extremely anxious not to let anyone out of Spain who was
in a position to contradict the official version. As a result people were liable
to be arrested at the frontier on more or less frivolous pretexts. Very possibly
the intention, at the beginning, was only to detain Smillie for a few days. But
the trouble is that, in Spain, once you are in jail you generally stay there,
with or without trial.

We were still at Huesca, but they had placed us further to the right,
opposite the Fascist redoubt which we had temporarily captured a few weeks
earlier. I was now acting as teniente--corresponding to second-lieutenant in
the British Army, I suppose--in command of about thirty men, English and
Spanish. They had sent my name in for a regular commission; whether I should get
it was uncertain. Previously the militia officers had refused to accept regular
commissions, which meant extra pay and conflicted with the equalitarian ideas of
the militia, but they were now obliged to do so. Benjamin had already been
gazetted captain and Kopp was in process of being gazetted major. The Government
could not, of course, dispense with the militia officers, but it was not
confirming any of them in a higher rank than major, presumably in order to keep
the higher commands for Regular Army officers and the new officers from the
School of War. As a result, in our division, the agth, and no doubt in many
others, you had the queer temporary situation of the divisional commander, the
brigade commanders, and the battalion commanders all being majors.

There was not much happening at the front. The battle round the Jaca road had
died away and did not begin again till mid June. In our position the chief
trouble was the snipers. The Fascist trenches were more than a hundred and fifty
yards away, but they were on higher ground and were on two sides of us, our line
forming a right-angle salient. The corner of the salient was a dangerous spot;
there had always been a toll of sniper casualties there. From time to time the
Fascists let fly at us with a rifle-grenade or some similar weapon. It made a
ghastly crash--unnerving, because you could not hear it coming in time to dodge
--but was not really dangerous; the hole it blew in the ground was no bigger
than a wash-tub. The nights were pleasantly warm, the days blazing hot, the
mosquitoes were becoming a nuisance, and in spite of the clean clothes we had
brought from Barcelona we were almost immediately lousy. Out in the deserted
orchards in no man's land the cherries were whitening on the trees. For two days
there were torrential rains, the dug-outs flooded, and the parapet sank a foot;
after that there were more days of digging out the sticky clay with the wretched
Spanish spades which have no handles and bend like tin spoons.

They had promised us a trench-mortar for the company; I was looking forward
to it gready. At nights we patrolled as usual--more dangerous than it used to
be, because the Fascist trenches were better manned and they had grown more
alert; they had scattered tin cans just outside their wire and used to open up
with the machine-guns when they heard a clank. In the daytime we sniped from no
man's land. By crawling a hundred yards you could get to a ditch, hidden by tall
grasses, which commanded a gap in the Fascist parapet. We had set up a
rifle-rest in the ditch. If you waited long enough you generally saw a
khaki-clad figure slip hurriedly across the gap. I had several shots. I don't
know whether I hit anyone--it is most unlikely; I am a very poor shot with a
rifle. But it was rather fun, the Fascists did not know where the shots were
coming from, and I made sure I would get one of them sooner or later. However,
the dog it was that died--a Fascist sniper got me instead. I had been about ten
days at the front when it happened. The whole experience of being hit by a
bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail.

It was at the corner of the parapet, at five o'clock in the morning. This was
always a dangerous time, because we had the dawn at our backs, and if you stuck
your head above the parapet it was clearly outlined against the sky. I was
talking to the sentries preparatory to changing the guard. Suddenly, in the very
middle of saying something, I felt--it is very hard to describe what I felt,
though I remember it with the utmost vividness.

Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion.
There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I
felt a tremendous shock--no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an
electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being
stricken and shrivelled up to nothing. The sand-bags in front of me receded into
immense distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by
lightning. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang
and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off accidentally and
shot me. All this happened in a space of time much less than a second. The next
moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a
violent bang which, to my relief, did not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a
consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense.

The American sentry I had been talking to had started forward. 'Gosh! Are you
hit?' People gathered round. There was the usual fuss--'Lift him up! Where's he
hit? Get his shirt open!' etc., etc. The American called for a knife to cut my
shirt open. I knew that there was one in my pocket and tried to get it out, but
discovered that my right arm was paralysed. Not being in pain, I felt a vague
satisfaction. This ought to please my wife, I thought; she had always wanted me
to be wounded, which would save me from being killed when the great battle came.
It was only now that it occurred to me to wonder where I was hit, and how badly;
I could feel nothing, but I was conscious that the bullet had struck me
somewhere in the front of the body. When I tried to speak I found that I had no
voice, only a faint squeak, but at the second attempt I managed to ask where I
was hit. In the throat, they said. Harry Webb, our stretcher-bearer, had brought
a bandage and one of the little bottles of alcohol they gave us for
field-dressings. As they lifted me up a lot of blood poured out of my mouth, and
I heard a Spaniard behind me say that the bullet had gone clean through my neck.
I felt the alcohol, which at ordinary times would sting like the devil, splash
on to the wound as a pleasant coolness.

They laid me down again while somebody fetched a stretcher. As soon as I knew
that the bullet had gone clean through my neck I took it for granted that I was
done for. I had never heard of a man or an animal getting a bullet through the
middle of the neck and surviving it. The blood was dribbling out of the comer of
my mouth. 'The artery's gone,' I thought. I wondered how long you last when your
carotid artery is cut; not many minutes, presumably. Everything was very blurry.
There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed.
And that too was interesting--I mean it is interesting to know what your
thoughts would be at such a time. My first thought, conventionally enough, was
for my wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world
which, when all is said and done, suits me so well. I had time to feel this very
vividly. The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it! To be
bumped off, not even in battle, but in this stale comer of the trenches, thanks
to a moment's carelessness! I thought, too, of the man who had shot me--
wondered what he was like, whether he was a Spaniard or a foreigner, whether he
knew he had got me, and so forth. I could not feel any resentment against him. I
reflected that as he was a Fascist I would have killed him if I could, but that
if he had been taken prisoner and brought before me at this moment I would
merely have congratulated him on his good shooting. It may be, though, that if
you were really dying your thoughts would be quite different.

They had just got me on to the stretcher when my paralysed right arm came to
life and began hurting damnably. At the time I imagined that I must have broken
it in falling; but the pain reassured me, for I knew that your sensations do not
become more acute when you are dying. I began to feel more normal and to be
sorry for the four poor devils who were sweating and slithering with the
stretcher on their shoulders. It was a mile and a half to the ambulance, and
vile going, over lumpy, slippery tracks. I knew what a sweat it was, having
helped to carry a wounded man down a day or two earlier. The leaves of the
silver poplars which, in places, fringed our trenches brushed against my face; I
thought what a good thing it was to be alive in a world where silver poplars
grow. But all the while the pain in my arm was diabolical, making me swear and
then try not to swear, because every time I breathed too hard the blood bubbled
out of my mouth.

The doctor re-bandaged the wound, gave me a shot of morphia, and sent me off
to Sietamo. The hospitals at Sietamo were hurriedly constructed wooden huts
where the wounded were, as a rule, only kept for a few hours before being sent
on to Barbastro or Lerida. I was dopey from morphia but still in great pain,
practically unable to move and swallowing blood constantly. It was typical of
Spanish hospital methods that while I was in this state the untrained nurse
tried to force the regulation hospital meal--a huge meal of soup, eggs, greasy
stew, and so forth--down my throat and seemed surprised when I would not take
it. I asked for a cigarette, but this was one of the periods of tobacco famine
and there was not a cigarette in the place. Presently two comrades who had got
permission to leave the line for a few hours appeared at my bedside.

'Hullo! You're alive, are you? Good. We want your watch and your revolver and
your electric torch. And your knife, if you've got one.'

They made off with all my portable possessions. This always happened when a
man was wounded--everything he possessed was promptly divided up; quite
rightly, for watches, revolvers, and so forth were precious at the front and if
they went down the line in a wounded man's kit they were certain to be stolen
somewhere on the way.

By the evening enough sick and wounded had trickled in to make up a few
ambulance-loads, and they sent us on to Barbastro. What a journey! It used to be
said that in this war you got well if you were wounded in the extremities, but
always died of a wound in the abdomen. I now realized why. No one who was liable
to bleed internally could have survived those miles of jolting over metal roads
that had been smashed to pieces by heavy lorries and never repaired since the
war began. Bang, bump, wallop! It took me back to my early childhood and a
dreadful thing called the Wiggle-Woggle at the White City Exhibition. They had
forgotten to tie us into the stretchers. I had enough strength in my left arm to
hang on, but one poor wretch was spilt on to the floor and suffered God knows
what agonies. Another, a walking case who was sitting in the corner of the
ambulance, vomited all over the place. The hospital in Barbastro was very
crowded, the beds so close together that they were almost touching. Next morning
they loaded a number of us on to the hospital train and sent us down to
Lerida.

I was five or six days in Lerida. It was a big hospital, with sick, wounded,
and ordinary civilian patients more or less jumbled up together. Some of the men
in my ward had frightful wounds. In the next bed to me there was a youth with
black hair who was suffering from some disease or other and was being given
medicine that made his urine as green as emerald. His bed-bottle was one of the
sights of the ward. An English-speaking Dutch Communist, having heard that there
was an Englishman in the hospital, befriended me and brought me English
newspapers. He had been ter-ribly wounded in the October fighting, and had
somehow managed to settle down at Lerida hospital and had married one of the
nurses. Thanks to his wound, one of his legs had shrivelled till it was no
thicker than my arm. Two militiamen on leave, whom I had met my first week at
the front, came in to see a wounded friend and recognized me. They were kids of
about eighteen. They stood awkwardly beside my bed, trying to think of something
to say, and then, as a way of demonstrating that they were sorry I was wounded,
suddenly took all the tobacco out of their pockets, gave it to me, and fled
before I could give it back. How typically Spanish! I discovered afterwards that
you could not buy tobacco anywhere in the town and what they had given me was a
week's ration.

After a few days I was able to get up and walk about with my arm in a sling.
For some reason it hurt much more when it hung down. I also had, for the time
being, a good deal of internal pain from the damage I had done myself in
falling, and my voice had disappeared almost completely, but I never had a
moment's pain from the bullet wound itself. It seems this is usually the case.
The tremendous shock of a bullet prevents sensation locally; a splinter of shell
or bomb, which is jagged and usually hits you less hard, would probably hurt
like the devil. There was a pleasant garden in the hospital grounds, and in it
was a pool with gold-fishes and some small dark grey fish--bleak, I think. I
used to sit watching them for hours. The way things were done at Lerida gave me
an insight into the hospital system on the Aragon front--whether it was the
same on other fronts I do not know. In some ways the hospitals were very good.
The doctors were able men and there seemed to be no shortage of drugs and
equipment. But there were two bad faults on account of which, I have no doubt,
hundreds or thousands of men have died who might have been saved.

One was the fact that all the hospitals anywhere near the front line were
used more or less as casualty clearing-stations. The result was that you got no
treatment there unless you were too badly wounded to be moved. In theory most of
the wounded were sent straight to Barcelona or Tarragona, but owing to the lack
of transport they were often a week or ten days in getting there. They were kept
hanging about at Sietamo, Barbastro, Monzon, Lerida, and other places, and
meanwhile they were getting no treatment except an occasional clean bandage,
sometimes not even that. Men with dreadful shell wounds, smashed bones, and so
forth, were swathed in a sort of casing made of bandages and plaster of Paris; a
description of the wound was written in pencil on the outside, and as a rule the
casing was not removed till the man reached Barcelona or Tarragona ten days
later. It was almost impossible to get one's wound examined on the way; the few
doctors could not cope with the work, and they simply walked hurriedly past your
bed, saying: 'Yes, yes, they'll attend to you at Barcelona.' There were always
rumours that the hospital train was leaving for Barcelona manana. The other
fault was the lack of competent nurses. Apparently there was no supply of
trained nurses in Spain, perhaps because before the war this work was done
chiefly by nuns. I have no complaint against the Spanish nurses, they always
treated me with the greatest kindness, but there is no doubt that they were
terribly ignorant. All of them knew how to take a temperature, and some of them
knew how to tie a bandage, but that was about all. The result was that men who
were too ill to fend for themselves were often shamefully neglected. The nurses
would let a man remain constipated for a week on end, and they seldom washed
those who were too weak to wash themselves. I remember one poor devil with a
smashed arm telling me that he had been three weeks without having his face
washed. Even beds were left unmade for days together. The food in all the
hospitals was very good--too good, indeed. Even more in Spain than elsewhere it
seemed to be the tradition to stuff sick people with heavy food. At Lerida the
meals were terrific. Breakfast, at about six in the morning, consisted of soup,
an omelette, stew, bread, white wine, and coffee, and lunch was even larger--
this at a time when most of the civil population was seriously underfed.
Spaniards seem not to recognize such a thing as a light diet. They give the same
food to sick people as to well ones--always the same rich, greasy cookery, with
everything sodden in olive oil.

One morning it was announced that the men in my ward were to be sent down to
Barcelona today. I managed to send a wire to my wife, telling her that I was
coming, and presently they packed us into buses and took us down to the station.
It was only when the train was actually starting that the hospital orderly who
travelled with us casually let fall that we were not going to Barcelona after
all, but to Tarragona. I suppose the engine-driver had changed his mind. 'Just
like Spain!' I thought. But it was very Spanish, too, that they agreed to hold
up the train while I sent another wire, and more Spanish still that the wire
never got there.

They had put us into ordinary third-class carriages with wooden seats, and
many of the men were badly wounded and had only got out of bed for the first
time that morning. Before long, what with the heat and the jolting, half of them
were in a state of collapse and several vomited on the floor. The hospital
orderly threaded his way among the corpse--like forms that sprawled everywhere,
carrying a large goatskin bottle full of water which he squirted into this mouth
or that. It was beastly water; I remember the taste of it still. We got into
Tarragona as the sun was getting low. The line runs along the shore a stone's
throw from the sea. As our train drew into the station a troop-train full of men
from the International Column was drawing out, and a knot of people on the
bridge were waving to them. It was a very long train, packed to bursting-point
with men, with field-guns lashed on the open trucks and more men clustering
round the guns. I remember with peculiar vividness the spectacle of that train
passing in the yellow evening light; window after window full of dark, smiling
faces, the long tilted barrels of the guns, the scarlet scarves fluttering--all
this gliding slowly past us against a turquoise-coloured sea.

'Extranjeros--foreigners,' said someone. 'They're Italians. 'Obviously they
were Italians. No other people could have grouped themselves so picturesquely or
returned the salutes of the crowd with so much grace--a grace that was none the
less because about half the men on the train were drinking out of up-ended wine
bottles. We heard afterwards that these were some of the troops who won the
great victory at Guadalajara in March; they had been on leave and were being
transferred to the Aragon front. Most of them, I am afraid, were killed at
Huesca only a few weeks later. The men who were well enough to stand had moved
across the carriage to cheer the Italians as they went past. A crutch waved out
of the window; bandaged forearms made the Red Salute. 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.

The hospital at Tarragona was a very big one and full of wounded from all
fronts. What wounds one saw there! They had a way of treating certain wounds
which I suppose was in accordance with the latest medical practice, but which
was peculiarly horrible to look at. This was to leave the wound completely open
and unbandaged, but protected from flies by a net of butter-muslin, stretched
over wires. Under the muslin you would see the red jelly of a half-healed wound.
There was one man wounded in the face and throat who had his head inside a sort
of spherical helmet of butter-muslin; his mouth was closed up and he breathed
through a little tube that was fixed between his lips. Poor devil, he looked so
lonely, wandering to and fro, looking at you through his muslin cage and unable
to speak. I was three or four days at Tarragona. My strength was coming back,
and one day, by going slowly, I managed to walk down as far as the beach. It was
queer to see the seaside life going on almost as usual; the smart cafes along
the promenade and the plump local bourgeoisie bathing and sunning themselves in
deck-chairs as though there had not been a war within a thousand miles.
Nevertheless, as it happened, I saw a bather drowned, which one would have
thought impossible in that shallow and tepid sea.

Finally, eight or nine days after leaving the front, I had my wound examined.
In the surgery where newly-arrived cases were examined, doctors with huge pairs
of shears were hacking away the breast-plates of plaster in which men with
smashed ribs, collar-bones, and so forth had been cased at the dressing-stations
behind the line; out of the neck-hole of the huge clumsy breast-plate you would
see protruding an anxious, dirty face, scrubby with a week's beard. The doctor,
a brisk, handsome man of about thirty, sat me down in a chair, grasped my tongue
with a piece of rough gauze, pulled it out as far as it would go, thrust a
dentist's mirror down my throat, and told me to say 'Eh!' After doing this till
my tongue was bleeding and my eyes running with water, he told me that one vocal
cord was paralysed.

'When shall I get my voice back?' I said.

'Your voice? Oh, you'll never get your voice back,' he said cheerfully.

However, he was wrong, as it turned out. For about two months I could not
speak much above a whisper, but after that my voice became normal rather
suddenly, the other vocal cord having 'compensated'. The pain in my arm was due
to the bullet having pierced a bunch of nerves at the back of the neck. It was a
shooting pain like neuralgia, and it went on hurting continuously for about a
month, especially at night, so that I did not get much sleep. The fingers of my
right hand were also semi-paralysed. Even now, five months afterwards, my
forefinger is still numb--a queer effect for a neck wound to have.

The wound was a curiosity in a small way and various doctors examined it with
much clicking of tongues and 'Que suerte! Qye suerte!' One of them told me with
an air of authority that the bullet had missed the artery by 'about a
millimetre'. I don't know how he knew. 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.




Chapter 13



IN Barcelona, during all those last weeks I spent there, there was a peculiar
evil feeling in the air--an atmosphere of suspicion, fear, uncertainty, and
veiled hatred. The May fighting had left ineradicable after-effects behind it.
With the fall of the Caballero Government the Communists had come definitely
into power, the charge of internal order had been handed over to Communist
ministers, and no one doubted that they would smash their political rivals as
soon as they got a quarter of a chance Nothing was happening as yet, I myself
had not even any mental picture of what was going to happen; and yet there was a
perpetual vague sense of danger, a consciousness of some evil thing that was
impending. However little you were actually conspiring, the atmosphere forced
you to feel like a conspirator. You seemed to spend all your time holding
whispered conversations in corners of cafes and wondering whether that person at
the next table was a police spy.

Sinister rumours of all kinds were flying round, thanks to the Press
censorship. One was that the Negrin-Prieto Government was planning to compromise
the war. At the time I was inclined to believe this, for the Fascists were
closing in on Bilbao and the Government was visibly doing nothing to save it.
Basque flags were displayed all over the town, girls rattled collecting-boxes in
the cafes, and there were the usual broadcasts about 'heroic defenders', but the
Basques were getting no real assistance. It was tempting to believe that the
Government was playing a double game. Later events have proved, that I was quite
wrong here, but it seems probable that Bilbao could have been saved if a little
more energy had been shown. An offensive on the Aragon front, even an
unsuccessful one, would have forced Franco to divert part of his army; as it was
the Government did not begin any offensive action till it was far too late--
indeed, till about the time when Bilbao fell. The C.N.T. was distributing in
huge numbers a leaflet saying: 'Be on your guard!' and hinting that 'a certain
Party' (meaning the Communists) was plotting a coup d'etat. There was also a
widespread fear that Catalonia was going to be invaded. Earlier, when we went
back to the front, I had seen the powerful defences that were being constructed
scores of miles behind the front line, and fresh bomb-proof shelters were being
dug all over Barcelona. There were frequent scares of air-raids and sea-raids;
more often than not these were false alarms, but every time the sirens blew the
lights all over the town blacked out for hours on end and timid people dived for
the cellars. Police spies were everywhere. The jails were still crammed with
prisoners left over from the May fighting, and others--always, of course.
Anarchist and P.O.U.M. adherents--were disappearing into jail by ones and twos.
So far as one could discover, no one was ever tried or even charged--not even
charged with anything so definite as 'Trotskyism'; you were simply flung into
jail and kept there, usually incommunicado. Bob Smillie was still in jail in
Valencia. We could discover nothing except that neither the I.L.P.
representative on the spot nor the lawyer who had been engaged, was permitted to
see him. Foreigners from the International Column and other militias were
getting into jail in larger and larger numbers. Usually they were arrested as
deserters. It was typical of the general situation that nobody now knew for
certain whether a militiaman was a volunteer or a regular soldier. A few months
earlier anyone enlisting in the militia had been told that he was a volunteer
and could, if he wished, get his discharge papers at any time when he was due
for leave. Now it appeared that the Government had changed its mind, a
militiaman was a regular soldier and counted as a deserter if he tried to go
home. But even about this no one seemed certain. At some parts of the front the
authorities were still issuing discharges. At the frontier these were sometimes
recognized, sometimes not; if not, you were promptly thrown into jail. Later the
number of foreign 'deserters' in jail swelled into hundreds, but most of them
were repatriated when a fuss was made in their own countries.

Bands of armed Assault Guards roamed everywhere in the streets, the Civil
Guards were still holding cafes and other buildings in strategic spots, and many
of the P.S.U.C. buildings were still sandbagged and barricaded. At various
points in the town there were posts manned by Civil Guards of Carabineros who
stopped passers-by and demanded their papers. Everyone warned me not to show my
P.O.U.M. militiaman's card but merely to show my passport and my hospital
ticket. Even to be known to have served in the P.O.U.M. militia was vaguely
dangerous. P.O.U.M. militiamen who were wounded or on leave were penalized in
petty ways--it was made difficult for them to draw their pay, for instance. La
Batalla was still appearing, but it was censored almost out of existence, and
Solidaridad and the other Anarchist papers were also heavily censored. There was
a new rule that censored portions of a newspaper must not be left blank but
filled up with other matter; as a result it was often impossible to tell when
something had been cut out.

The food shortage, which had fluctuated throughout the War, was in one of its
bad stages. Bread was scarce and the cheaper sorts were being adulterated with
rice; the bread the soldiers were getting in the barracks was dreadful stuff
like putty. Milk and sugar were very scarce and tobacco almost non-existent,
except for the expensive smuggled cigarettes. There was an acute shortage of
olive oil, which Spaniards use for half a dozen different purposes. The queues
of women waiting to buy olive oil were controlled by mounted Civil Guards who
sometimes amused themselves by backing their horses into the queue and trying to
make them tread on the women's toes. A minor annoyance of the time was the lack
of small change. The silver had been withdrawn and as yet no new coinage had
been issued, so that there was nothing between the ten-centime piece and the
note for two and a half pesetas, and all notes below ten pesetas were very
scarce. [Note 13, below] For the poorest people this meant an aggravation of
the food shortage. A woman with only a ten-peseta note in her possession might
wait for hours in a queue outside the grocery and then be unable to buy anything
after all because the grocer had no change and she could not afford to spend
the whole note.

[Note 13. The purchasing value of the peseta was about fourpence.]

It is not easy to convey the nightmare atmosphere of that time--the peculiar
uneasiness produced by rumours that were always changing, by censored
newspapers, and the constant presence of armed men. It is not easy to convey it
because, at the moment, the thing essential to such an atmosphere does not exist
in England. In England political intolerance is not yet taken for granted. There
is political persecution in a petty way; if I were a coal-miner I would not care
to be known to the boss as a Communist; but the 'good party man', the
gangster-gramophone of continental politics, is still a rarity, and the notion
of 'liquidating' or 'eliminating' everyone who happens to disagree with you does
not yet seem natural. It seemed only too natural in Barcelona. The 'Stalinists'
were in the saddle, and therefore it was a matter of course that every
'Trotskyist' was in danger. The thing everyone feared was a thing which, after
all, did not happen--a fresh outbreak of street-fighting, which, as before,
would be blamed on the P.O.U.M. and the Anarchists. There were times when I
caught my ears listening for the first shots. It was as though some huge evil
intelligence were brooding over the town. Everyone noticed it and remarked upon
it. And it was queer how everyone expressed it in almost the same words: 'The
atmosphere of this place--it's horrible. Like being in a lunatic asylum.' But
perhaps I ought not to say everyone. Some of the English visitors who flitted
briefly through Spain, from hotel to hotel, seem not to have noticed that there
was anything wrong with the general atmosphere. The Duchess of Atholl writes, I
notice (Sunday Express, 17 October 1937):

    I was in Valencia, Madrid, and Barcelona . . . perfect order prevailed in
    all three towns without any display of force. All the hotels in which I stayed
    were not only 'normal' and 'decent', but extremely comfortable, in spite of
    the shortage of butter and coffee.

It is a peculiarity of English travellers that they do not really believe in
the existence of anything outside the smart hotels. I hope they found some
butter for the Duchess of Atholl.

I was at the Sanatorium Maurin, one of the sanatoria run by the P.O.U.M. It
was in the suburbs near Tibidabo, the queer-shaped mountain that rises abruptly
behind Barcelona and is traditionally supposed to have been the hill from which
Satan showed Jesus the countries of the earth (hence its name). The house had
previously belonged to some wealthy bourgeois and had been seized at the time of
the revolution. Most of the men there had either been invalided out of the line
or had some wound that had permanently disabled them--amputated limbs, and so
forth. There were several other Englishmen there: Williams, with a damaged leg,
and Stafford Cottman, a boy of eighteen, who had been sent back from the
trenches with suspected tuberculosis, and Arthur Clinton, whose smashed left arm
was still strapped on to one of those huge wire contraptions, nicknamed
aeroplanes, which the Spanish hospitals were using. My wife was still staying at
the Hotel Continental, and I generally came into Barcelona in the daytime. In
the morning I used to attend the General Hospital for electrical treatment of my
arm. It was a queer business--a series of prickly electric shocks that made the
various sets of muscles jerk up and down--but it seemed to do some good; the
use of my fingers came back and the pain grew somewhat less. Both of us had
decided that the best thing we could do was to go back to England as soon as
possible. I was extremely weak, my voice was gone, seemingly for good, and the
doctors told me that at best it would be several months before I was fit to
fight. I had got to start earning some money sooner or later, and there did not
seem much sense in staying in Spain and eating food that was needed for other
people. But my motives were mainly selfish. I had an overwhelming desire to get
away from it all; away from the horrible atmosphere of political suspicion and
hatred, from streets thronged by armed men, from air-raids, trenches,
machine-guns, screaming trams, milkless tea, oil cookery, and shortage of
cigarettes--from almost everything that I had learnt to associate with
Spain.

The doctors at the General Hospital had certified me medically unfit, but to
get my discharge I had to see a medical board at one of the hospitals near the
front and then go to Sietamo to get my papers stamped at the P.O.U.M. militia
headquarters. Kopp had just come back from the front, full of jubilation. He had
just been in action and said that Huesca was going to be taken at last. The
Government had brought troops from the Madrid front and were concentrating
thirty thousand men, with aeroplanes in huge numbers. The Italians I had seen
going up the line from Tarragona had attacked on the Jaca road but had had heavy
casualties and lost two tanks. However, the town was bound to fall, Kopp said.
(Alas! It didn't. The attack was a frightful mess--up and led to nothing except
an orgy of lying in the newspapers.) Meanwhile Kopp had to go down to Valencia
for an interview at the Ministry of War. He had a letter from General Pozas, now
commanding the Army of the East--the usual letter, describing Kopp as a 'person
of all confidence' and recommending him for a special appointment in the
engineering section (Kopp had been an engineer in civil life). He left for
Valencia the same day as I left for Sietamo--15 June.

It was five days before I got back to Barcelona. A lorry-load of us reached
Sietamo about midnight, and as soon as we got to the P.O.U.M. headquarters they
lined us up and began handling out rifles and cartridges, before even taking our
names. It seemed that the attack was beginning and they were likely to call for
reserves at any moment. I had my hospital ticket in my pocket, but I could not
very well refuse to go with the others. I kipped down on the ground, with a
cartridge-box for a pillow, in a mood of deep dismay. Being wounded had spoiled
my nerve for the time being--I believe this usually happens--and the prospect
of being under fire frightened me horribly. However, there was a bit of manana,
as usual, we were not called out after all, and next morning I produced my
hospital ticket and went in search of my discharge. It meant a series of
confused, tiresome journeys. As usual they bandied one to and fro from hospital
to hospital--Sietamo, Barbastro, Monzon, then back to Sietamo to get my
discharge stamped, then down the line again via Barbastro and Lerida--and the
convergence of troops on Huesca had monopolized all the transport and
disorganized everything. I remember sleeping in queer places--once in a
hospital bed, but once in a ditch, once on a very narrow bench which I fell off
in the middle of the night, and once in a sort of municipal lodging-house in
Barbastro. As soon as you got away from the railroad there was no way of
travelling except by jumping chance lorries. You had to wait by the roadside for
hours, sometimes three or four hours at a stretch, with knots of disconsolate
peasants who carried bundles full of ducks and rabbits, waving to lorry after
lorry. When finally you struck a lorry that was not chock full of men, loaves of
bread, or ammunition-boxes the bumping over the vile roads wallowed you to pulp.
No horse has ever thrown me so high as those lorries used to throw me. The only
way of travelling was to crowd all together and cling to one another. To my
humiliation I found that I was still too weak to climb on to a lorry without
being helped.

I slept a night at Monzon Hospital, where I went to see my medical board. In
the next bed to me there was an Assault Guard, wounded over the left eye. He was
friendly and gave me cigarettes. I said: 'In Barcelona we should have been
shooting one another,' and we laughed over this. It was queer how the general
spirit seemed to change when you got anywhere near the front line. All or nearly
all of the vicious hatred of the political parties evaporated. During all the
time I was at the front I never once remember any P.S.U.C. adherent showing me
hostility because I was P.O.U.M. That kind of thing belonged in Barcelona or in
places even remoter from the war. There were a lot of Assault Guards in Sietamo.
They had been sent on from Barcelona to take part in the attack on Huesca. The
Assault Guards were a corps not intended primarily for the front, and many of
them had not been under fire before. Down in Barcelona they were lords of the
street, but up here they were quintos (rookies) and palled up with militia
children of fifteen who had been in the line for months.

At Monzon Hospital the doctor did the usual tongue-pulling and mirror--
thrusting business, assured me in the same cheerful manner as the others that I
should never have a voice again, and signed my certificate. While I waited to be
examined there was going on inside the surgery some dreadful operation without
anaesthetics--why without anaesthetics I do not know. It went on and on, scream
after scream, and when I went in there were chairs flung about and on the floor
were pools of blood and urine.

The details of that final journey stand out in my mind with strange clarity.
I was in a different mood, a more observing mood, than I had been in for months
past. I had got my discharge, stamped with the seal of the 29th Division, and
the doctor's certificate in which I was 'declared useless'. I was free to go
back to England; consequently I felt able, almost for the first time, to look at
Spain. I had a day to put in to Barbastro, for there was only one train a day.
Previously I had seen Barbastro in brief glimpses, and it had seemed to me
simply a part of the war--a grey, muddy, cold place, full of roaring lorries
and shabby troops. It seemed queerly different now. Wandering through it I
became aware of pleasant tortuous streets, old stone bridges, wine shops with
great oozy barrels as tall as a man, and intriguing semi-subterranean shops
where men were making cartwheels, daggers, wooden spoons, and goatskin
water-bottles. I watched a man making a skin bottle and discovered with great
interest, what I had never known before, that they are made with the fur inside
and the fur is not removed, so that you are really drinking distilled goat's
hair. I had drunk out of them for months without knowing this. And at the back
of the town there was a shallow jade-green river, and rising out of it a
perpendicular cliff of rock, with houses built into the rock, so that from your
bedroom window you could spit straight into the water a hundred feet below.
Innumerable doves lived in the holes in the cliff. And in Lerida there were old
crumbling buildings upon whose cornices thousands upon thousands of swallows had
built their nests, so that at a little distance the crusted pattern of nests was
like some florid moulding of the rococo period. It was queer how for nearly six
months past I had had no eyes for such things. With my discharge papers in my
pocket I felt like a human being again, and also a little like a tourist. For
almost the first time I felt that I was really in Spain, in a country that I had
longed all my life to visit. In the quiet back streets of Lerida and Barbastro I
seemed to catch a momentary glimpse, a sort of far-off rumour of the Spain that
dwells in everyone's imagination. White sierras, goatherds, dungeons of the
Inquisition, Moorish palaces, black winding trains of mules, grey olive trees
and groves of lemons, girls in black mantillas, the wines of Malaga and
Alicante, cathedrals, cardinals, bull-fights, gypsies, serenades--in short,
Spain. Of all Europe it was the country that had had most hold upon my
imagination. It seemed a pity that when at last I had managed to come here I had
seen only this north-eastern corner, in the middle of a confused war and for the
most part in winter.

It was late when I got back to Barcelona, and there were no taxis. It was no
use trying to get to the Sanatorium Maurin, which was right outside the town, so
I made for the Hotel Continental, stopping for dinner on the way. I remember the
conversation I had with a very fatherly waiter about the oak jugs, bound with
copper, in which they served the wine. I said I would like to buy a set of them
to take back to England. The waiter was sympathetic. 'Yes, beautiful, were they
not? But impossible to buy nowadays. Nobody was manufacturing them any longer--
nobody was manufacturing anything. This war--such a pity!' We agreed that the
war was a pity. Once again I felt like a tourist. The waiter asked me gently,
had I liked Spain; would I come back to Spain? Oh, yes, I should come back to
Spain. The peaceful quality of this conversation sticks in my memory, because of
what happened immediately afterwards.

When I got to the hotel my wife was sitting in the lounge. She got up and
came towards me in what struck me as a very unconcerned manner; then she put an
arm round my neck and, with a sweet smile for the benefit of the other people in
the lounge, hissed in my ear:

'Get out!'

'What?'

'Get out of here at once!'

'What?'

'Don't keep standing here! You must get outside quickly!'

'What? Why? What do you mean?'

She had me by the arm and was already leading me towards the stairs. Half-way
down we met a Frenchman--I am not going to give his name, for though he had no
connexion with the P.O.U.M. he was a good friend to us all during the trouble.
He looked at me with a concerned face.

'Listen! You mustn't come in here. Get out quickly and hide yourself before
they ring up the police.'

And behold! at the bottom of the stairs one of the hotel staff, who was a
P.O.U.M. member (unknown to the management, I fancy), slipped furtively out of
the lift and told me in broken English to get out. Even now I did not grasp what
had happened.

'What the devil is all this about?' I said, as soon as we were on the
pavement.

'Haven't you heard?'

'No. Heard what? I've heard nothing.'

'The P.O.U.M.'S been suppressed. They've seized all the buildings.
Practically everyone's in prison. And they say they're shooting people
already.'

So that was it. We had to have somewhere to talk. All the big cafes on the
Ramblas were thronged with police, but we found a quiet cafe in a side street.
My wife explained to me what had happened while I was away.

On 15 June the police had suddenly arrested Andres Nin in his office, and the
same evening had raided the Hotel Falcon and arrested all the people in it,
mostly militiamen on leave. The place was converted immediately into a prison,
and in a very little while it was filled to the brim with prisoners of all
kinds. Next day the P.O.U.M. was declared an illegal organization and all its
offices, book-stalls, sanatoria, Red Aid centres, and so forth were seized.
Meanwhile the police were arresting everyone they could lay hands on who was
known to have any connexion with the P.O.U.M. Within a day or two all or almost
all of the forty members of the Executive Committee were in prison. Possibly one
or two had escaped into hiding, but the police were adopting the trick
(extensively used on both sides in this war) of seizing a man's wife as a
hostage if he disappeared. There was no way of discovering how many people had
been arrested. My wife had heard that it was about four hundred in Barcelona
alone. I have since thought that even at that time the numbers must have been
greater. And the most fantastic people had been arrested. In some cases the
police had even gone to the length of dragging wounded militiamen out of the
hospitals.

It was all profoundly dismaying. What the devil was it all about? I could
understand their suppressing the P.O.U.M., but what were they arresting people
for? For nothing, so far as one could discover. Apparently the suppression of
the P.O.U.M. had a retrospective effect; the P.O.U.M. was now illegal, and
therefore one was breaking the law by having previously belonged to it. As
usual, none of the arrested people had been charged. Meanwhile, however, the
Valencia Communist papers were naming with the story of a huge 'Fascist plot',
radio communication with the enemy, documents signed in invisible ink, etc.,
etc. I have dealt with this story earlier. The significant thing was that it was
appearing only in the Valencia papers; I think I am right in saying that there
was not a single word about it, or about the suppression of the P.O.U.M., in any
Barcelona papers, Communist, Anarchist, or Republican. We first learned the
precise nature of the charges against the P.O.U.M. leaders not from any Spanish
paper but from the English papers that reached Barcelona a day or two later.
What we could not know at this time was that the Government was not responsible
for the charge of treachery and espionage, and that members of the Government
were later to repudiate it. We only vaguely knew that the P.O.U.M. leaders, and
presumably all the rest of us, were accused of being in Fascist pay. And already
the rumours were flying round that people were being secretly shot in jail.
There was a lot of exaggeration about this, but it certainly happened in some
cases, and there is not much doubt that it happened in the case of Nin. After
his arrest Nin was transferred to Valencia and thence to Madrid, and as early as
21 June the rumour reached Barcelona that he had been shot. Later the rumour
took a more definite shape: Nin had been shot in prison by the secret police and
his body dumped into the street. This story came from several sources, including
Federico Montsenys, an ex-member of the Government. From that day to this Nin
has never been heard of alive again. When, later, the Government were questioned
by delegates from various countries, they shilly-shallied and would say only
that Nin had disappeared and they knew nothing of his whereabouts. Some of the
newspapers produced a tale that he had escaped to Fascist territory. No evidence
was given in support of it, and Irujo, the Minister of Justice, later declared
that the Espagne news-agency had falsified his official communique. [Note 14, below]
In any case it is most unlikely that a political prisoner of Nin's importance
would be allowed to escape. Unless at some future time he is produced alive,
I think we must take it that he was murdered in prison.

[Note 14. See the reports of the Maxton delegation which
I referred to in Chapter II.]

The tale of arrests went on and on, extending over months, until the number
of political prisoners, not counting Fascists, swelled into thousands. One
noticeable thing was the autonomy of the lower ranks of the police. Many of the
arrests were admittedly illegal, and various people whose release had been
ordered by the Chief of Police were re--arrested at the jail gate and carried
off to 'secret prisons'. A typical case is that of Kurt Landau and his wife.
They were arrested about 17 June, and Landau immediately 'disappeared'. Five
months later his wife was still in jail, untried and without news of her
husband. She declared a hunger-strike, after which the Minister of Justice, sent
word to assure her that her husband was dead. Shortly afterwards she was
released, to be almost immediately re-arrested and flung into prison again. And
it was noticeable that the police, at any rate at first, seemed completely
indifferent as to any effect their actions might have upon the war. They were
quite ready to arrest military officers in important posts without getting
permission beforehand. About the end of June Jose Rovira, the general commanding
the 29th Division, was arrested somewhere near the front line by a party of
police who had been sent from Barcelona. His men sent a delegation to protest at
the Ministry of War. It was found that neither the Ministry of War, nor Ortega,
the chief of Police, had even been informed of Rovira's arrest. In the whole
business the detail that most sticks in my throat, though perhaps it is not of
great importance, is that all news of what was happening was kept from the
troops at the front. As you will have seen, neither I nor anyone else at the
front had heard anything about the suppression of the P.O.U.M. All the P.O.U.M.
militia headquarters, Red Aid centres, and so forth were functioning as usual,
and as late as 20 June and as far down the line as Lerida, only about 100 miles
from Barcelona, no one had heard what was happening. All word of it was kept out
of the Barcelona papers (the Valencia papers, which were running the spy
stories, did not reach the Aragon front), and no doubt one reason for arresting
all the P.O.U.M. militiamen on leave in Barcelona was to prevent them from
getting back to the front with the news. The draft with which I had gone up the
line on 15 June must have been about the last to go. I am still puzzled to know
how the thing was kept secret, for the supply lorries and so forth were still
passing to and fro; but there is no doubt that it was kept secret, and, as I
have since learned from a number of others, the men in the front line heard
nothing till several days later. The motive for all this is clear enough. The
attack on Huesca was beginning, the P.O.U.M. militia was still a separate unit,
and it was probably feared that if the men knew what was happening they would
refuse to fight. Actually nothing of the kind happened when the news arrived. In
the intervening days there must have been numbers of men who were killed without
ever learning that the newspapers in the rear were calling them Fascists. This
kind of thing is a little difficult to forgive. I know it was the usual policy
to keep bad news from the troops, and perhaps as a rule that is justified. But
it is a different matter to send men into battle and not even tell them that
behind their backs their party is being suppressed, their leaders accused of
treachery, and their friends and relatives thrown into prison.

My wife began telling me what had happened to our various friends. Some of
the English and other foreigners had got across the frontier. Williams and
Stafford Cottman had not been arrested when the Sanatorium Maurin was raided,
and were in hiding somewhere. So was John Mc-Nair, who had been in France and
had re-entered Spain after the P.O.U.M. was declared illegal--a rash thing to
do, but he had not cared to stay in safety while his comrades were in danger.
For the rest it was simply a chronicle of 'They've got so and so' and 'They've
got so and so'. They seemed to have 'got' nearly everyone. It took me aback to
hear that they had also 'got' George Kopp.

'What! Kopp? I thought he was in Valencia.'

It appeared that Kopp had come back to Barcelona; he had a letter from the
Ministry of War to the colonel commanding the engineering operations on the
eastern front. He knew that the P.O.U.M. had been suppressed, of course, but
probably it did not occur to him that the police could be such fools as to
arrest him when he was on his way to the front on an urgent military mission. He
had come round to the Hotel Continental to fetch his kit-bags; my wife had been
out at the time, and the hotel people had managed to detain him with some lying
story while they rang up the police. I admit I was angry when I heard of Kopp's
arrest. He was my personal friend, I had served under him for months, I had been
under fire with him, and I knew his history. He was a man who had sacrificed
everything--family, nationality, livelihood--simply to come to Spain and fight
against Fascism. By leaving Belgium without permission and joining a foreign
army while he was on the Belgian Army reserve, and, earlier, by helping to
manufacture munitions illegally for the Spanish Government, he had piled up
years of imprisonment for himself if he should ever return to his own country.
He had been in the line since October 1936, had worked his way up from
militiaman to major, had been in action I do not know how many times, and had
been wounded once. During the May trouble, as I had seen for myself, he had
prevented fighting locally and probably saved ten or twenty lives. And all they
could do in return was to fling him into jail. It is waste of time to be angry,
but the stupid malignity of this kind of thing does try one's patience.

Meanwhile they had not 'got' my wife. Although she had remained at the
Continental the police had made no move to arrest her. It was fairly obvious
that she was being used as a decoy duck. A couple of nights earlier, however, in
the small hours of the morning, six of the plain--clothes police had invaded our
room at the hotel and searched it. They had seized every scrap of paper we
possessed, except, fortunately, our passports and cheque-book. They had taken my
diaries, all our books, all the press-cuttings that had been piling up for
months past (I have often wondered what use those press-cuttings were to them),
all my war souvenirs, and all our letters. (Incidentally, they took away a
number of letters I had received from readers. Some of them had not been
answered, and of course I have not the addresses. If anyone who wrote to me
about my last book, and did not get an answer, happens to read these lines, will
he please accept this as an apology?) I learned afterwards that the police had
also seized various belongings that I had left at the Sanatorium Maunn. They
even carried off a bundle of my dirty linen. Perhaps they thought it had
messages written on it in invisible ink.

It was obvious that it would be safer for my wife to stay at the hotel, at
any rate for the time being. If she tried to disappear they would be after her
immediately. As for myself, I should have to go straight into hiding. The
prospect revolted me. In spite of the innumerable arrests it was almost
impossible for me to believe that I was in any danger. The whole thing seemed
too meaningless. It was the same refusal to take this idiotic onslaught
seriously that had led Kopp into jail. I kept saying, but why should anyone want
to arrest me? What had I done? I was not even a party member of the P.O.U.M.
Certainly I had carried arms during the May fighting, but so had (at a guess)
forty or fifty thousand people. Besides, I was badly in need of a proper night's
sleep. I wanted to risk it and go back to the hotel. My wife would not hear of
it. Patiently she explained the state of affairs. It did not matter what I had
done or not done. This was not a round-up of criminals; it was merely a reign of
terror. I was not guilty of any definite act, but I was guilty of 'Trotskyism'.
The fact that I had served in the P.O.U.M. militia was quite enough to get me
into prison. 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. The only thing to do was to lie low and conceal the fact that I had anything
to do with the P.O.U.M. We went through the papers in my pockets. My wife made
me tear up my militiaman's card, which had P.O.U.M. on it in big letters, also a
photo of a group of militiamen with a P.O.U.M. flag in the background; that was
the kind of thing that got you arrested nowadays. I had to keep my discharge
papers, however. Even these were a danger, for they bore the seal of the 29th
Division, and the police would probably know that the 29th Division was the
P.O.U.M.; but without them I could be arrested as a deserter.

The thing we had got to think of now was getting out of Spain. There was no
sense in staying here with the certainty of imprisonment sooner or later. As a
matter of fact both of us would greatly have liked to stay, just to see what
happened. But I foresaw that Spanish prisons would be lousy places (actually
they were a lot worse than I imagined), once in prison you never knew when you
would get out, and I was in wretched health, apart from the pain in my arm. We
arranged to meet next day at the British Consulate, where Cottman and McNair
were also coming. It would probably take a couple of days to get our passports
in order. Before leaving Spain you had to have your passport stamped in three
separate places--by the Chief of Police, by the French Consul, and by the
Catalan immigration authorities. The Chief of Police was the danger, of course.
But perhaps the British Consul could fix things up without letting it be known
that we had anything to do with the P.O.U.M. Obviously there must be a list of
foreign 'Trotskyist' suspects, and very likely our names were on it, but with
luck we might get to the frontier before the list. There was sure to be a lot of
muddle and manana. 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.

So we parted. My wife went back to the hotel and I wandered off into the
darkness to find somewhere to sleep. I remember feeling sulky and bored. I had
so wanted a night in bed! There was nowhere I could go, no house where I could
take refuge. The P.O.U.M. had practically no underground organization. No doubt
the leaders had always realized that the party was likely to be suppressed, but
they had never expected a wholesale witch-hunt of this description. They had
expected it so little, indeed, that they were actually continuing the
alterations to the P.O.U.M. buildings (among other things they were constructing
a cinema in the Executive Building, which had previously been a bank) up to the
very day when the P.O.U.M. was suppressed. Consequently the rendezvous and
hiding-places which every revolutionary party ought to possess as a matter of
course did not exist. Goodness knows how many people--people whose homes had
been raided by the police--were sleeping in the streets that night. I had had
five days of tiresome journeys, sleeping in impossible places, my arm was
hurting damnably, and now these fools were chasing me to and fro and I had got
to sleep on the ground again. That was about as far as my thoughts went. I did
not make any of the correct political reflections. I never do when things are
happening. It seems to be always the case when I get mixed up in war or politics
--I am conscious of nothing save physical discomfort and a deep desire for this
damned nonsense to be over. Afterwards I can see the significance of events, but
while they are happening I merely want to be out of them--an ignoble trait,
perhaps.

I walked a long way and fetched up somewhere near the General Hospital. I
wanted a place where I could lie down without some nosing policeman finding me
and demanding my papers. I tried an air-raid shelter, but it was newly dug and
dripping with damp. Then I came upon the ruins of a church that had been gutted
and burnt in the revolution. It was a mere shell, four roofless walls
surrounding piles of rubble. In the half-darkness I poked about and found a kind
of hollow where I could lie down. Lumps of broken masonry are not good to lie
on, but fortunately it was a warm night and I managed to get several hours'
sleep.




Chapter 14



THE worst of being wanted by the police in a town like Barcelona is that
everything opens so late. When you sleep out of doors you always wake about
dawn, and none of the Barcelona cafes opens much before nine. It was hours
before I could get a cup of coffee or a shave. It seemed queer, in the barber's
shop, to see the Anarchist notice still on the wall, explaining that tips were
prohibited. 'The Revolution has struck off our chains,' the notice said. I felt
like telling the barbers that their chains would soon be back again if they
didn't look out.

I wandered back to the centre of the town. Over the P.O.U.M. buildings the
red flags had been torn down, Republican flags were floating in their place, and
knots of armed Civil Guards were lounging in the doorways. At the Red Aid centre
on the corner of the Plaza de Gataluna the police had amused themselves by
smashing most of the windows. The P.O.U.M. book-stalls had been emptied of books
and the notice-board farther down the Ramblas had been plastered with an
anti-P.O.U.M. cartoon--the one representing the mask and the Fascist face
beneath. Down at the bottom of the Ramblas, near the quay, I came upon a queer
sight; a row of militiamen, still ragged and muddy from the front, sprawling
exhaustedly on the chairs placed there for the bootblacks. I knew who they were
--indeed, I recognized one of them. They were P.O.U.M. militiamen who had come
down the line on the previous day to find that the P.O.U.M. had been suppressed,
and had had to spend the night in the streets because their homes had been
raided. Any P.O.U.M. militiaman who returned to Barcelona at this time had the
choice of going straight into hiding or into jail--not a pleasant reception
after three or four months in the line.

It was a queer situation that we were in. At night one was a hunted fugitive,
but in the daytime one could live an almost normal life. Every house known to
harbour P.O.U.M. supporters was--or at any rate was likely to be--under
observation, and it was impossible to go to a hotel or boarding-house, because
it had been decreed that on the arrival of a stranger the hotel-keeper must
inform the police immediately. Practically this meant spending the night out of
doors. In the daytime, on the other hand, in a town the size of Barcelona, you
were fairly safe. The streets were thronged by Civil Guards, Assault Guards,
Carabineros, and ordinary police, besides God knows how many spies in plain
clothes; still, they could not stop everyone who passed, and if you looked
normal you might escape notice. The thing to do was to avoid hanging round
P.O.U.M. buildings and going to cafes and restaurants where the waiters knew you
by sight. I spent a long time that day, and the next, in having a bath at one of
the public baths. This struck me as a good way of putting in the time and
keeping out of sight. Unfortunately the same idea occurred to a lot of people,
and a few days later--after I left Barcelona--the police raided one of the
public baths and arrested a number of 'Trotskyists' in a state of nature.

Half-way up the Ramblas I ran into one of the wounded men from the Sanatorium
Maurin. We exchanged the sort of invisible wink that people were exchanging at
that time, and managed in an unobtrusive way to meet in a cafe farther up the
street. He had escaped arrest when the Maurin was raided, but, like the others,
had been driven into the street. He was in shirt-sleeves--had had to flee
without his jacket--and had no money. He described to me how one of the Civil
Guards had torn the large coloured portrait of Maurin from the wall and kicked
it to pieces. Maurin (one of the founders of the P.O.U.M.) was a prisoner in the
hands of the Fascists and at that time was believed to have been shot by
them.

I met my wife at the British Consulate at ten o'clock. McNair and Cottman
turned up shortly afterwards. The first thing they told me was that Bob Smillie
was dead. He had died in prison at Valencia--of what, nobody knew for certain.
He had been buried immediately, and the I.L.P. representative on the spot, David
Murray, had been refused permission to see his body.

Of course I assumed at once that Smillie had been shot. It was what everyone
believed at the time, but I have since thought that I may have been wrong. Later
the cause of his death was given out as appendicitis, and we heard afterwards
from another prisoner who had been released that Smillie had certainly been ill
in prison. So perhaps the appendicitis story was true. The refusal to let Murray
see his body may have been due to pure spite. I must say this, however. Bob
Smillie was only twenty-two years old and physically he was one of the toughest
people I have met. He was, I think, the only person I knew, English or Spanish,
who went three months in the trenches without a day's illness. People so tough
as that do not usually die of appendicitis if they are properly looked after.
But when you saw what the Spanish jails were like--the makeshift jails used for
political prisoners--you realized how much chance there was of a sick man
getting proper attention. The jails were places that could only be described as
dungeons. In England you would have to go back to the eighteenth century to find
anything comparable. People were penned together in small rooms where there was
barely space for them to lie down, and often they were kept in cellars and other
dark places. This was not as a temporary measure--there were cases of people
being kept four and five months almost without sight of daylight. And they were
fed on a filthy and insufficient diet of two plates of soup and two pieces of
bread a day. (Some months later, however, the food seems to have improved a
little.) I am not exaggerating; ask any political suspect who was imprisoned in
Spain. I have had accounts of the Spanish jails from a number of separate
sources, and they agree with one another too well to be disbelieved; besides, I
had a few glimpses into one Spanish jail myself. Another English friend who was
imprisoned later writes that his experiences in jail 'make Smillie's case easier
to understand'. Smillie's death is not a thing I can easily forgive. Here was
this brave and gifted boy, who had thrown up his career at Glasgow University in
order to come and fight against Fascism, and who, as I saw for myself, had done
his job at the front with faultless courage and willingness; and all they could
find to do with him was to fling him into jail and let him die like a neglected
animal. 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. I fail to see how this kind of thing--
and it is not as though Smillie's case were exceptional--brought victory any
nearer.

My wife and I visited Kopp that afternoon. You were allowed to visit
prisoners who were not incommunicado, though it was not safe to do so more than
once or twice. The police watched the people who came and went, and if you
visited the jails too often you stamped yourself as a friend of 'Trotskyists'
and probably ended in jail yourself. This had already happened to a number of
people.

Kopp was not incommunicado and we got a permit to see him without difficulty.
As they led us through the steel doors into the jail, a Spanish militiaman whom
I had known at the front was being led out between two Civil Guards. His eye met
mine; again the ghostly wink. And the first person we saw inside was an American
militiaman who had left for home a few days earlier; his papers were in good
order, but they had arrested him at the frontier all the same, probably because
he was still wearing corduroy breeches and was therefore identifiable as a
militiaman. We walked past one another as though we had been total strangers.
That was dreadful. I had known him. for months, had shared a dug-out with him,
he had helped to carry me down the line when I was wounded; but it was the only
thing one could do. The blue--clad guards were snooping everywhere. It would be
fatal to recognize too many people.

The so-called jail was really the ground floor of a shop. Into two rooms each
measuring about twenty feet square, close on a hundred people were penned. The
place had the real eighteenth-century Newgate Calendar appearance, with its
frowsy dirt, its huddle of human bodies, its lack of furniture--just the bare
stone floor, one bench, and a few ragged blankets--and its murky light, for the
corrugated steel shutters had been drawn over the windows. On the grimy walls
revolutionary slogans--'Visca P.O.U.M.!' 'Viva la Revolucion!' and so forth--
had been scrawled. The place had been used as a dump for political prisoners for
months past. There was a deafening racket of voices. This was the visiting hour,
and the place was so packed with people that it was difficult to move. Nearly
all of them were of the poorest of the working-class population. You saw women
undoing pitiful packets of food which they had brought for their imprisoned
men-folk. There were several of the wounded men from the Sanatorium Maurin among
the prisoners. Two of them had amputated legs; one of them had been brought to
prison without his crutch and was hopping about on one foot. There was also a
boy of not more than twelve; they were even arresting children, apparently. The
place had the beastly stench that you always get when crowds of people are
penned together without proper sanitary arrangements.

Kopp elbowed his way through the crowd to meet us. His plump fresh--coloured
face looked much as usual, and in that filthy place he had kept his uniform neat
and had even contrived to shave. There was another officer in the uniform of the
Popular Army among the prisoners. He and Kopp saluted as they struggled past one
another; the gesture was pathetic, somehow. Kopp seemed in excellent spirits.
'Well, I suppose we shall all be shot,' he said cheerfully. The word 'shot' gave
me a sort of inward shudder. A bullet had entered my own body recently and the
feeling of it was fresh in my memory; it is not nice to think of that happening
to anyone you know well. At that time I took it for granted that all the
principal people in the P.O.U.M., and Kopp among them, would be shot. The first
rumour of Nin's death had just filtered through, and we knew that the P.O.U.M.
were being accused of treachery and espionage. Everything pointed to a huge
frame-up trial followed by a massacre of leading 'Trotskyists.' It is a terrible
thing to see your friend in jail and to know yourself impotent to help him. For
there was nothing that one could do; useless even to appeal to the Belgian
authorities, for Kopp had broken the law of his own country by coming here. I
had to leave most of the talking to my wife; with my squeaking voice I could not
make myself heard in the din. Kopp was telling us about the friends he had made
among the other prisoners, about the guards, some of whom were good fellows, but
some of whom abused and beat the more timid prisoners, and about the food, which
was 'pig-wash'. Fortunately we had thought to bring a packet of food, also
cigarettes. Then Kopp began telling us about the papers that had been taken from
him when he was arrested. Among them was his letter from the Ministry of War,
addressed to the colonel commanding engineering operations in the Army of the
East. The police had seized it and refused to give it back; it was said to be
lying in the Chief of Police's office. It might make a very great difference if
it were recovered.

I saw instantly how important this might be. An official letter of that kind,
bearing the recommendation of the Ministry of War and of General Pozas, would
establish Kopp's bona fides. But the trouble was to prove that the letter
existed; if it were opened in the Chief of Police's office one could be sure
that some nark or other would destroy it. There was only one person who might
possibly be able to get it back, and that was the officer to whom it was
addressed. Kopp had already thought of this, and he had written a letter which
he wanted me to smuggle out of the jail and post. But it was obviously quicker
and surer to go in person. I left my wife with Kopp, rushed out, and, after a
long search, found a taxi. I knew that time was everything. It was now about
half past five, the colonel would probably leave his office at six, and by
tomorrow the letter might be God knew where--destroyed, perhaps, or lost
somewhere in the chaos of documents that was presumably piling up as suspect
after suspect was arrested. The colonel's office was at the War Department down
by the quay. As I hurried up the steps the Assault Guard on duty at the door
barred the way with his long bayonet and demanded 'papers'. I waved my discharge
ticket at him; evidently he could not read, and he let me pass, impressed by the
vague mystery of' papers'. Inside, the place was a huge complicated warren
running round a central courtyard, with hundreds of offices on each floor; and,
as this was Spain, nobody had the vaguest idea where the office I was looking
for was. I kept repeating: 'El coronet--, jefe de ingenieros, Ejercito de Este!'
People smiled and shrugged their shoulders gracefully. Everyone who had an
opinion sent me in a different direction; up these stairs, down those, along
interminable passages which turned out to be blind alleys. And time was slipping
away. I had the strangest sensation of being in a nightmare: the rushing up and
down flights of stairs, the mysterious people coming and going, the glimpses
through open doors of chaotic offices with papers strewn everywhere and
typewriters clicking; and time slipping away and a life perhaps in the
balance.

However, I got there in time, and slightly to my surprise I was granted a
hearing. I did not see Colonel--, but his aide-de-camp or secretary, a little
slip of an officer in smart uniform, with large and squinting eyes, came out to
interview me in the ante-room. I began to pour forth my story. I had come on
behalf of my superior officer. Major Jorge Kopp, who was on an urgent mission to
the front and had been arrested by mistake. The letter to Colonel--was of a
confidential nature and should be recovered without delay. I had served with
Kopp for months, he was an officer of the highest character, obviously his
arrest was a mistake, the police had confused him with someone else, etc., etc.,
etc. I kept piling it on about the urgency of Kopp's mission to the front,
knowing that this was the strongest point. But it must have sounded a strange
tale, in my villainous Spanish which elapsed into French at every crisis. The
worst was that my voice gave out almost at once and it was only by violent
straining that I could produce a sort of croak. I was in dread that it would
disappear altogether and the little officer would grow tired of trying to listen
to me. I have often wondered what he thought was wrong with my Voice--whether
he thought I was drunk or merely suffering from a guilty conscience.

However, he heard me patiently, nodded his head a great number of times, and
gave a guarded assent to what I said. Yes, it sounded as though there might have
been a mistake. Clearly the matter should be looked into. Manana--I protested.
Not manana! The matter was urgent; Kopp was due at the front already. Again the
officer seemed to agree. Then came the question I was dreading:

'This Major Kopp--what force was he serving in?'

The terrible word had to come out: 'In the P.O.U.M. militia.'

'P.O.U.M.!'

I wish I could convey to you the shocked alarm in his voice. You have got to
remember how the P.O.U.M. was regarded at that moment. The spy--scare was at its
height; probably all good Republicans did believe for a day or two that the
P.O.U.M. was a huge spying organization in German pay. To have to say such a
thing to an officer in the Popular Army was like going into the Cavalry Club
immediately after the Red Letter scare and announcing yourself a Communist. His
dark eyes moved obliquely across my face. Another long pause, then he said
slowly:

'And you say you were with him at the front. Then you were serving in the
P.O.U.M. militia yourself?'

'Yes.'

He turned and dived into the colonel's room. I could hear an agitated
conversation. 'It's all up,' I thought. We should never get Kopp's letter back.
Moreover I had had to confess that I was in the P.O.U.M. myself, and no doubt
they would ring up the police and get me arrested, just to add another
Trotskyist to the bag. Presently, however, the officer reappeared, fitting on
his cap, and sternly signed to me to follow. We were going to the Chief of
Police's office. It was a long way, twenty minutes' walk. The little officer
marched stiffly in front with a military step. We did not exchange a single word
the whole way. When we got to the Chief of Police's office a crowd of the most
dreadful-looking scoundrels, obviously police narks, informers, and spies of
every kind, were hanging about outside the door. The little officer went in;
there was a long, heated conversation. You could hear voices furiously raised;
you pictured violent gestures, shrugging of the shoulders, hangings on the
table. Evidently the police were refusing to give the letter up. At last,
however, the officer emerged, flushed, but carrying a large official envelope.
It was Kopp's letter. We had won a tiny victory--which, as it turned out, made
not the slightest difference. The letter was duly delivered, but Kopp's military
superiors were quite unable to get him out of jail.

The officer promised me that the letter should be delivered. But what about
Kopp? I said. Could we not get him released? He shrugged his shoulders. That was
another matter. They did not know what Kopp had been arrested for. He would only
tell me that the proper inquiries would be made. There was no more to be said;
it was time to part. Both of us bowed slightly. And then there happened a
strange and moving thing. The little officer hesitated a moment, then stepped
across, and shook hands with me.

I do not know if I can bring home to you how deeply that action touched me.
It sounds a small thing, but it was not. You have got to realize what was the
feeling of the time--the horrible atmosphere of suspicion and hatred, the lies
and rumours circulating everywhere, the posters screaming from the hoardings
that I and everyone like me was a Fascist spy. And you have got to remember that
we were standing outside the Chief of Police's office, in front of that filthy
gang of tale-bearers and agents provocateurs, any one of whom might know that I
was 'wanted' by the police. It was like publicly shaking hands with a German
during the Great War. I suppose he had decided in some way that I was not really
a Fascist spy; still, it was good of him to shake hands.

I record this, trivial though it may sound, because it is somehow typical of
Spain--of the flashes of magnanimity that you get from Spaniards in the worst
of circumstances. I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few
bad memories of Spaniards. I only twice remember even being seriously angry with
a Spaniard, and on each occasion, when I look back, I believe I was in the wrong
myself. They have, there is no doubt, a generosity, a species of nobility, that
do not really belong to the twentieth century. It is this that makes one hope
that in Spain even Fascism may take a comparatively loose and bearable form. Few
Spaniards possess the damnable efficiency and consistency that a modern
totalitarian state needs. There had been a queer little illustration of this
fact a few nights earlier, when the police had searched my wife's room. As a
matter of fact that search was a very interesting business, and I wish I had
seen it, though perhaps it is as well that I did not, for I might not have kept
my temper.

The police conducted the search in the recognized Ogpu or Gestapo style. In
the small hours of the morning there was a pounding on the door, and six men
marched in, switched on the light, and immediately took up various positions
about the room, obviously agreed upon beforehand. They then searched both rooms
(there was a bathroom attached) with inconceivable thoroughness. They sounded
the walls, took up the mats, examined the floor, felt the curtains, probed under
the bath and the radiator, emptied every drawer and suitcase and felt every
garment and held it up to the light. They impounded all papers, including the
contents of the waste-paper basket, and all our books into the bargain. They
were thrown into ecstasies of suspicion by finding that we possessed a French
translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf. If that had been the only book they found
our doom would have been sealed. It is obvious that a person who reads Mein
Kampf must be a Fascist. The next moment, however, they came upon a copy of
Stalin's pamphlet. Ways of Liquidating Trotskyists and other Double Dealers,
which reassured them somewhat. In one drawer there was a number of packets of
cigarette papers. They picked each packet to pieces and examined each paper
separately, in case there should be messages written on them. Altogether they
were on the job for nearly two hours. Yet all this time they never searched the
bed. My wife was lying in bed all the while; obviously there might have been
half a dozen sub--machine-guns under the mattress, not to mention a library
of Trotskyist documents under the pillow. Yet the detectives made no move to
touch the bed, never even looked underneath it. I cannot believe that this is a
regular feature of the Ogpu routine. One must remember that the police were
almost entirely under Communist control, and these men were probably Communist
Party members themselves. But they were also Spaniards, and to turn a woman out
of bed was a little too much for them. This part of the job was silently
dropped, making the whole search meaningless.

That night McNair, Cottman, and I slept in some long grass at the edge of a
derelict building-lot. It was a cold night for the time of year and no one slept
much. I remember the long dismal hours of loitering about before one could get a
cup of coffee. For the first time since 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. That afternoon
my wife and I went to see Kopp for the last time. There was nothing that we
could do for him, absolutely nothing, except to say good-bye and leave money
with Spanish friends who would take him food and cigarettes. A little while
later, however, after we had left Barcelona, he was placed incommunicado and not
even food could be sent to him. That night, walking down the Ramblas, we passed
the Cafe Moka, which the Civil Guards were still holding in force. On an impulse
I went in and spoke to two of them who were leaning against the counter with
their rifles slung over their shoulders. I asked them if they knew which of
their comrades had been on duty here at the time of the May fighting. They did
not know, and, with the usual Spanish vagueness, did not know how one could find
out. I said that my friend Jorge Kopp was in prison and would perhaps be put on
trial for something in connexion with the May fighting; that the men who were on
duty here would know that he had stopped the fighting and saved some of their
lives; they ought to come forward and give evidence to that effect. One of the
men I was talking to was a dull, heavy-looking man who kept shaking his head
because he could not hear my voice in the din of the traffic. But the other was
different. He said he had heard of Kopp's action from some of his comrades; Kopp
was buen chico (a good fellow). But even at the time I knew that it was all
useless. If Kopp were ever tried, it would be, as in all such trials, with faked
evidence. If he has been shot (and I am afraid it is quite likely), that will be
his epitaph: the buen chico of the poor Civil Guard who was part of a dirty
system but had remained enough of a human being to know a decent action when he
saw one.

It was an extraordinary, insane existence that we were leading. By night we
were criminals, but by day we were prosperous English visitors--that was our
pose, anyway. Even after a night in the open, a shave, a bath, and a shoe-shine
do wonders with your appearance. The safest thing at present was to look as
bourgeois as possible. We frequented the fashionable residential quarter of the
town, where our faces were not known, went to expensive restaurants, and were
very English with the waiters. For the first time in my life I took to writing
things on walls. The passage-ways of several smart restaurants had 'Visca
P.O.U.M.!' scrawled on them as large as I could write it. All the while, though
I was technically in hiding, I could not feel myself in danger. The whole thing
seemed too absurd. I had the ineradicable English belief that' they' cannot
arrest you unless you have broken the law. It is a most dangerous belief to have
during a political pogrom. There was a warrant out for McNair's arrest, and the
chances were that the rest of us were on the list as well. The arrests, raids,
searchings were continuing without pause; practically everyone we knew, except
those who were still at the front, was in jail by this time. The police were
even boarding the French ships that periodically took off refugees and seizing
suspected 'Trotskyists'.

Thanks to the kindness of the British consul, who must have had a very trying
time during that week, we had managed to get our passports into order. The
sooner we left the better. There was a train that was due to leave for Port Bou
at half past seven in the evening and might normally be expected to leave at
about half past eight. We arranged that my wife should order a taxi beforehand
and then pack her bags, pay her bill, and leave the hotel at the last possible
moment. If she gave the hotel people too much notice they would be sure to send
for the police. I got down to the station at about seven to find that the train
had already gone--it had left at ten to seven. The engine--driver had changed
his mind, as usual. Fortunately we managed to warn my wife in time. There was
another train early the following morning. McNair, Cottman, and I had dinner at
a little restaurant near the station and by cautious questioning discovered that
the restaurant--keeper was a C.N.T. member and friendly. He let us a
three-bedded room and forgot to warn the police. It was the first time in five
nights that I had been able to sleep with my clothes off.

Next morning my wife slipped out of the hotel successfully. The train was
about an hour late in starting. I filled in the time by writing a long letter to
the Ministry of War, telling them about Kopp's case--that without a doubt he
had been arrested by mistake, that he was urgently needed at the front, that
countless people would testify that he was innocent of any offence, etc., etc.,
etc. I wonder if anyone read that letter, written on pages torn out of a
note-book in wobbly handwriting (my fingers were still partly paralysed) and
still more wobbly Spanish. At any rate, neither this letter nor anything else
took effect. As I write, six months after the event, Kopp (if he has not been
shot) is still in jail, untried and uncharged. At the beginning we had two or
three letters from him, smuggled out by released prisoners and posted in France.
They all told the same story--imprisonment in filthy dark dens, bad and
insufficient food, serious illness due to the conditions of imprisonment, and
refusal of medical attention. I have had all this confirmed from several other
sources, English and French. More recently he disappeared into one of the
'secret prisons' with which it seems impossible to make any kind of
communication. His case is the case of scores or hundreds of foreigners and no
one knows how many thousands of Spaniards.

In the end we crossed the frontier without incident. The train had a first
class and a dining-car, the first I had seen in Spain. Until recently there had
been only one class on the trains in Catalonia. Two detectives came round the
train taking the names of foreigners, but when they saw us in the dining-car
they seemed satisfied that we were respectable. It was queer how everything had
changed. Only six months ago, when the Anarchists still reigned, it was looking
like a proletarian that made you respectable. On the way down from Perpignan to
Cerberes a French commercial traveller in my carriage had said to me in all
solemnity: 'You mustn't go into Spain looking like that. Take off that collar
and tie. They'll tear them off you in Barcelona.' He was exaggerating, but it
showed how Catalonia was regarded. And at the frontier the Anarchist guards had
turned back a smartly dressed Frenchman and his wife, solely--I think--because
they looked too bourgeois. Now it was the other way about; to look bourgeois was
the one salvation. At the passport office they looked us up in the card--index
of suspects, but thanks to the inefficiency of the police our names were not
listed, not even McNair's. We were searched from head to foot, but we possessed
nothing incriminating, except my discharge--papers, and the carabineros who
searched me did not know that the 29th Division was the P.O.U.M. So we slipped
through the barrier, and after just six months I was on French soil again. My
only souvenirs of Spain were a goatskin water-bottle and one of those tiny iron
lamps in which the Aragon peasants bum olive oil--lamps almost exactly the
shape of the terra-cotta lamps that the Romans used two thousand years ago--
which I had picked up in some ruined hut, and which had somehow got stuck in my
luggage.

After all, it turned out that we had come away none too soon. The very first
newspaper we saw announced McNair's arrest for espionage. The Spanish
authorities had been a little premature in announcing this. Fortunately,
'Trotskyism'is not extraditable.

I wonder what is the appropriate first action when you come from a country at
war and set foot on peaceful soil. Mine was to rush to the tobacco-kiosk and buy
as many cigars and cigarettes as I could stuff into my pockets. Then we all
went to the buffet and had a cup of tea, the first tea with fresh milk in it
that we had had for many months. It was several days before I could get used to
the idea that you could buy cigarettes whenever you wanted them. I always
half-expected to see the tobacconists' doors barred and the forbidding notice
'No hay tabaco' in the window.

McNair and Cottman were going on to Paris. My wife and I got off the train at
Banyuls, the first station up the line, feeling that we would like a rest. We
were not too well received in Banyuls when they discovered that we had come from
Barcelona. Quite a number of times I was involved in the same conversation: 'You
come from Spain? Which side were you fighting on? The Government? Oh!'--and
then a marked coolness. The little town seemed solidly pro-Franco, no doubt
because of the various Spanish Fascist refugees who had arrived there from time
to time. The waiter at the cafe I frequented was a pro-Franco Spaniard and used
to give me lowering glances as he served me with an aperitif. It was otherwise
in Perpignan, which was stiff with Government partisans and where all the
different factions were caballing against one another almost as in Barcelona.
There was one cafe where the word 'P.O.U.M.' immediately procured you French
friends and smiles from the waiter.

I think we stayed three days in Banyuls. It was a strangely restless time. In
this quiet fishing-town, remote from bombs, machine-guns, food-queues,
propaganda, and intrigue, we ought to have felt profoundly relieved and
thankful. We felt nothing of the kind. The things we had seen in Spain did not
recede and fall into proportion now that we were away from them; instead they
rushed back upon us and were far more vivid than before. We thought, talked,
dreamed incessantly of Spain. For months past we had been telling ourselves that
'when we get out of Spain' we would go somewhere beside the Mediterranean and be
quiet for a little while and perhaps do a little fishing, but now that we were
here it was merely a bore and a disappointment. It was chilly weather, a
persistent wind blew off the sea, the water was dull and choppy, round the
harbour's edge a scum of ashes, corks, and fish-guts bobbed against the stones.
It sounds like lunacy, but the thing that both of us wanted was to be back in
Spain. Though it could have done no good to anybody, might indeed have done
serious harm, both of us wished that we had stayed to be imprisoned along with
the others. I suppose I have failed to convey more than a little of what those
months in Spain meant to me. I have recorded some of the outward events, but I
cannot record the feeling they have left me with. It is all mixed up with
sights, smells, and sounds that cannot be conveyed in writing: the smell of the
trenches, the mountain dawns stretching away into inconceivable distances, the
frosty crackle of bullets, the roar and glare of bombs; the clear cold light of
the Barcelona mornings, and the stamp of boots in the barrack yard, back in
December when people still believed in the revolution; and the food-queues and
the red and black flags and the faces of Spanish militiamen; above all the faces
of militiamen--men whom I knew in the line and who are now scattered Lord knows
where, some killed in battle, some maimed, some in prison--most of them, I
hope, still safe and sound. Good luck to them all; I hope they win their war and
drive all the foreigners out of Spain, Germans, Russians, and Italians alike.
This war, in which I played so ineffectual a part, has left me with memories
that are mostly evil, and yet I do not wish that I had missed it. When you have
had a glimpse of such a disaster as this--and however it ends the Spanish war
will turn out to have been an appalling disaster, quite apart from the slaughter
and physical suffering--the result is not necessarily disillusionment and
cynicism. Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but
more belief in the decency of human beings. And I hope the account I have given
is not too misleading. I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can
be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what
you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone
writes as a partisan. In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book
I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the
distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. And
beware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period of
the Spanish war.

Because of the feeling that we ought to be doing something, though actually
there was nothing we could do, we left Banyuls earlier than we had intended.
With every mile that you went northward France grew greener and softer. Away
from the mountain and the vine, back to the meadow and the elm. When I had
passed through Paris on my way to Spain it had seemed to me decayed and gloomy,
very different from the Paris I had known eight years earlier, when living was
cheap and Hitler was not heard of. Half the cafes I used to know were shut for
lack of custom, and everyone was obsessed with the high cost of living and the
fear of war. Now, after poor Spain, even Paris seemed gay and prosperous. And
the Exhibition was in full swing, though we managed to avoid visiting it.

And then England--southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the
world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are
peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train
carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere.
Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don't worry, the
milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out
on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery
hidden by the curve of the earth's surface. Down here it was still the England I
had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the
deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving
streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the
cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer 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.



THE END

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