Reflections on the Spanish Civil War

In 1938 long before he had written "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty four," George Orwell published an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War an account which was universally as damned as a book can be. Because it was leftist in sentiment it was damned by the Right, which made no distinctions in the Left. It was damned by the Left as heresy, because it showed the Communists for what they were. It sold only a few hundred copies and was promptly forgotten.

Now in a different political climate it has been republished as "one of the important documents of our time." And it is.

Like so many of Stephen Spender's "generation of Hamlets" who saw the world out of order. Orwell went to Spain to fight in the menace of Fascism. He fought in the Trotskyite (POUM) militia was wounded and later fled the country when the Stalinist groups blackballed the POUM in their scramble for power. But he never shared the illusions of the generation: "Homage" is no "I was but I ain't any more" confession. It is rather a synthesis of remarkable portraits of a war of an historical transition and unconsciously of a man.

Orwell's Thoreau like fidelity to the details of life make his war vignettes unforgettable. The soldiers "wretched children" of this "comic opera with an occasional death" were much more concerned with finding firewood killing lice and playing practical jokes than they were with killing Fascists. Orwell's objectivity extended even to his own wound. "The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting," he wrote, "worth describing in detail."

Orwell's journalistic standards were high because he felt that he alone was left to tell the truth, since the press of both Left and Right willingly subverted facts to their own brands of fiction. Obsessed by this loss of objective truth ("History is written by the winners" he remarked later), he limited his evaluations to those things he had actually seen. He saw enough to realize that the Spanish Civil War was a rehearsal that it was no war of "the people" against the Fascists, but a war of power hungry groups who used "the people" only as a high sounding excuse. It was this observation on the use of "the people" which antagonized his fellow literati, who were still enthusiastic about Marz and flags.

Some parts of "Homage," conscientiously documentary are not easy reading; Orwell's attempt to straighten out the intricacies of the Spanish political parties the "plague of initials" will be of interest only to historians. The rest however is in the bright brittle Orwell style giving a good portrait of Orwell as well as of his time. Orwell was so peculiar to his age that Lionel Trilling calls him "virtuous". The label is a confirmation of Orwell's diagnosis of a sick world for an age so amazed at virtue is an age when nice guys always finish last.