Looking Back on the Spanish War - George Orwell
奥威尔散文——《西班牙战争真相》
First of all the physical memories, the sound, the smells and the
surfaces of things
It is curious
that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I
remember the week of so-called training that we received before being sent to
the front – the huge cavalry barracks in Barcelona with its draughty stables
and cobbled yards, the icy cold of the pump where one washed, the filthy meals
made tolerable by pannikins of wine, the trousered militia-women chopping
firewood, and the roll-call in the early mornings where my prosaic English name
made a sort of comic interlude among the resounding Spanish ones, Manuel
Gonzalez, Pedro Aguilar, Ramon Fenellosa, Roque Ballaster, Jaime Domenech,
Sebastian Viltron, Ramon Nuvo Bosch. I name those particular men because I
remember the faces of all of them. Except for two who were mere riff-raff and
have doubtless become good Falangists by this time, it is probable that all of
them are dead. Two of them I know to be dead. The eldest would have been about
twenty-five, the youngest sixteen.
One of the
essential experiences of war is never being able to escape from disgusting
smells of human origin. Latrines are an overworked subject in war literature,
and I would not mention them if it were not that the latrine in our barracks
did its necessary bit towards puncturing my own illusions about the Spanish
Civil War. The Latin type of latrine, at which you have to squat, is bad enough
at its best, but these were made of some kind of polished stone so slippery
that it was all you could do to keep on your feet. In addition they were always
blocked. Now I have plenty of other disgusting things in my memory, but I
believe it was these latrines that first brought home to me the thought, so
often to recur; ‘Here we are, soldiers of a revolutionary army, defending
democracy against Fascism, fighting a war which is about
something, and the detail of our lives is just as sordid and degrading as it
could be in prison, let alone in a bourgeois army.’ Many other things
reinforced this impression later; for instance, the boredom and animal hunger
of trench life, the squalid intrigues over scraps of food, the mean, nagging
quarrels which people exhausted by lack of sleep indulge in.
The essential
horror of army life (whoever has been a soldier will know what I mean by the
essential horror of army life) is barely affected by the nature of the war you
happen to be fighting in. Discipline, for instance, is ultimately the same in
all armies. Orders have to be obeyed and enforced by punishment if necessary,
the relationship of officer and man has to be the relationship of superior and
inferior. The picture of war set forth in books like All
Quiet on the Western Front is substantially true. Bullets, hurt, corpses
stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers. It
is true that the social background from which an army springs will colour its
training, tactics and general efficiency, and also that the consciousness of
being in the right can bolster up morale, though this affects the civilian
population more than the troops. (People forget that a soldier anywhere near
the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or, above all,
too tired to bother about the political origins of the war.) But the laws of
nature are not suspended for a ‘red’ army any more than for a ‘white’ one. A
louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting
for happens to be just.
Why is it worth
while to point out anything so obvious? Because the bulk of the British and
American intelligentsia were manifestly unaware of it then, and are now. Our
memories are short nowadays, but look back a bit, dig out the files of New Masses or the Daily Worker, and
just have a look at the romantic warmongering muck that our left-wingers were
spilling at that time. All the stale old phrases! And the unimaginative
callousness of it! The sang-froid with which London faced the bombing of
Madrid! Here I am not bothering about the counter-propagandists of the Right,
the Lunns, Garvins et hoc genus; they go without
saying. But here were the very people who for twenty years had hooted and
jeered at the ‘glory’ of war, at atrocity stories, at patriotism, even at
physical courage, coming out with stuff that with the alteration of a few names
would have fitted into the Daily Mail of 1918. If
there was one thing that the British intelligentsia were committed to, it was
the debunking version of war, the theory that war is all corpses and latrines
and never leads to any good result. Well, the same people who in 1933 sniggered
pityingly if you said that in certain circumstances you would fight for your
country, in 1937 were denouncing you as a Trotsky-Fascist if you suggested that
the stories in New Masses about freshly wounded men
clamouring to get back into the fighting might be exaggerated. And the Left
intelligentsia made their swing-over from ‘War is hell’ to ‘War is glorious’
not only with no sense of incongruity but almost without any intervening stage.
Later the bulk of them were to make other transitions equally violent. There
must be a quite large number of people, a sort of central core of the
intelligentsia, who approved the ‘King and Country’ declaration in 1935,
shouted for a ‘firm line’ against Germany in 1937, supported the People’s
Convention in 1940, and are demanding a Second Front now.
As far as the
mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur
nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the
result of newspaper and radio hypnosis. In the intelligentsia I should say they
result rather from money and mere physical safety. At a given moment they may
be ‘pro-war’ or ‘anti-war’, but in either case they have no realistic picture
of war in their minds. When they enthused over the Spanish war they knew, of
course, that people were being killed and that to be killed is unpleasant, but
they did feel that for a soldier in the Spanish Republican army the experience
of war was somehow not degrading. Somehow the latrines stank less, discipline
was less irksome. You have only to glance at the New
Statesman to see that they believed that; exactly similar blah is being
written about the Red Army at this moment. We have become too civilized to
grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to
fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often
the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who
don’t take the sword perish by smelly diseases. The fact that such a platitude
is worth writing down shows what the years of rentier
capitalism have done to us.
II
In connexion with what I have just said, a footnote on atrocities.
I have little
direct evidence about the atrocities in the Spanish Civil War. I know that some
were committed by the Republicans, and far more (they are still continuing) by
the Fascists. But what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever since, is
that atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of
political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and
disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the
evidence. Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during the period between
1918 and the present; there was never a year when atrocities were not occurring
somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and Right
believed in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any moment the
situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday’s proved-to-the-hilt
atrocity story can become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political
landscape has changed.
In the present
war we are in the curious situation that our ‘atrocity campaign’ was done
largely before the war started, and done mostly by the Left, the people who
normally pride themselves on their incredulity. In the same period the Right,
the atrocity-mongers of 1914–18, were gazing at Nazi Germany and flatly
refusing to see any evil in it. Then as soon as war broke out it was the
pro-Nazis of yesterday who were repeating horror stories, while the anti-Nazis
suddenly found themselves doubting whether the Gestapo really existed. Nor was
this solely the result of the Russo-German Pact. It was partly because before
the war the Left had wrongly believed that Britain and Germany would never
fight and were therefore able to be anti-German and anti-British
simultaneously; partly also because official war propaganda, with its
disgusting hypocrisy and self-righteousness, always tends to make thinking
people sympathize with the enemy. Part of the price we paid for the systematic
lying of 1914–18 was the exaggerated pro-German reaction which followed. During
the years 1918–33 you were hooted at in left-wing circles if you suggested that
Germany bore even a fraction of responsibility for the war. In all the
denunciations of Versailles I listened to during those years I don’t think I
ever once heard the question, ‘What would have happened if Germany had won?’
even mentioned, let alone discussed. So also with atrocities. The truth, it is
felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it. Recently I noticed that the
very people who swallowed any and every horror story about the Japanese in
Nanking in 1937 refused to believe exactly the same stories about Hong Kong in
1942. There was even a tendency to feel that the Nanking atrocities had become,
as it were retrospectively untrue because the British Government now drew
attention to them.
But unfortunately
the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they are lied about and made
into propaganda. The truth is that they happen. The fact often adduced as a
reason for scepticism – that the same horror stories come up in war after war –
merely makes it rather more likely that these stories are true. Evidently they
are widespread fantasies, and war provides an opportunity of putting them into
practice. Also, although it has ceased to be fashionable to say so, there is
little question that what one may roughly call the ‘whites’ commit far more and
worse atrocities than the ‘reds’. There is not the slightest doubt, for
instance, about the behaviour of the Japanese in China. Nor is there much doubt
about the long tale of Fascist outrages during the last ten years in Europe.
The volume of testimony is enormous, and a respectable proportion of it comes
from the German press and radio. These things really happened, that is the
thing to keep one’s eye on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they
happened. The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the
cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the
machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads – they all happened, and
they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph
has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late
III
Two memories, the first not proving anything in particular, the second,
I think, giving one a certain insight into the atmosphere of a revolutionary
period.
Early one morning
another man and I had gone out to snipe at the Fascists in the trenches outside
Huesca. Their line and ours here lay three hundred yards apart, at which range
our aged rifles would not shoot accurately, but by sneaking out to a spot about
a hundred yards from the Fascist trench you might, if you were lucky, get a
shot at someone through a gap in the parapet. Unfortunately the ground between
was a flat beet-field with no cover except a few ditches, and it was necessary
to go out while it was still dark and return soon after dawn, before the light
became too good. This time no Fascists appeared, and we stayed too long and
were caught by the dawn. We were in a ditch, but behind us were two hundred
yards of flat ground with hardly enough cover for a rabbit. We were still
trying to nerve ourselves to make a dash for it when there was an uproar and a
blowing of whistles in the Fascist trench. Some of our aeroplanes were coming
over. At this moment a man, presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped
out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was
half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I
refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely
to hit a running man at a hundred yards, and also that I was thinking chiefly
about getting back to our trench while the Fascists had their attention fixed
on the aeroplanes. Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about
the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding
up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to
yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him
What does this
incident demonstrate? Nothing very much, because it is the kind of thing that
happens all the time in all wars. The other is different. I don’t suppose that
in telling it I can make it moving to you who read it, but I ask you to believe
that it is moving to me, as an incident characteristic of the moral atmosphere
of a particular moment in time
One of the
recruits who joined us while I was at the barracks was a wild-looking boy from
the back streets of Barcelona. He was ragged and barefooted. He was also
extremely dark (Arab blood, I dare say), and made gestures you do not usually
see a European make; one in particular – the arm outstretched, the palm
vertical – was a gesture characteristic of Indians. One day a bundle of cigars,
which you could still buy dirt cheap at that time, was stolen out of my bunk.
Rather foolishly I reported this to the officer, and one of the scallywags I
have already mentioned promptly came forward and said quite untruly that
twenty-five pesetas had been stolen from his bunk. For some reason the officer
instantly decided that the brown-faced boy must be the thief. They were very
hard on stealing in the militia, and in theory people could be shot for it. The
wretched boy allowed himself to be led off to the guardroom to be searched.
What most struck me was that he barely attempted to protest his innocence. In
the fatalism of his attitude you could see the desperate poverty in which he
had been bred. The officer ordered him to take his clothes off. With a humility
which was horrible to me he stripped himself naked, and his clothes were
searched. Of course neither the cigars nor the money were there; in fact he had
not stolen them. What was most painful of all was that he seemed no less
ashamed after his innocence had been established. That night I took him to the
pictures and give him brandy and chocolate. But that too was horrible – I mean
the attempt to wipe out an injury with money. For a few minutes I had half
believed him to be a thief, and that could not be wiped out.
Well, a few weeks
later at the front I had trouble with one of the men in my section. By this
time I was a ‘cabo’, or corporal, in command of twelve men. It was static
warfare, horribly cold, and the chief job was getting sentries to stay awake
and at their posts. One day a man suddenly refused to go to a certain post,
which he said quite truly was exposed to enemy fire. He was a feeble creature,
and I seized hold of him and began to drag him towards his post. This roused
the feelings of the others against me, for Spaniards, I think, resent being
touched more than we do. Instantly I was surrounded by a ring of shouting men:
‘Fascist! Fascist! Let that man go! This isn’t a bourgeois army. Fascist!’ etc.
etc. As best I could in my bad Spanish I shouted back that orders had got to be
obeyed, and the row developed into one of those enormous arguments by means of
which discipline is gradually hammered out in revolutionary armies. Some said I
was right, others said I was wrong. But the point is that the one who took my
side the most warmly of all was the brown-faced boy. As soon as he saw what was
happening he sprang into the ring and began passionately defending me. With his
strange, wild, Indian gesture he kept exclaiming, ‘He’s the best corporal we’ve
got!’ (¡No hay cabo como el!) Later on he applied for
leave to exchange into my section.
Why is this
incident touching to me? Because in any normal circumstances it would have been
impossible for good feelings ever to be reestablished between this boy and
myself. The implied accusation of theft would not have been made any better,
probably somewhat worse, by my efforts to make amends. One of the effects of
safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the
primary emotions seem somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as
meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude. But in Spain in 1936 we were not
living in a normal time. It was a time when generous feelings and gestures were
easier than they ordinarily are. I could relate a dozen similar incidents, not
really communicable but bound up in my own mind with the special atmosphere of
the time, the shabby clothes and the gay-coloured revolutionary posters, the
universal use of the word ‘comrade’, the anti-Fascist ballads printed on flimsy
paper and sold for a penny, the phrases like ‘international proletarian
solidarity’, pathetically repeated by ignorant men who believed them to mean
something. Could you feel friendly towards somebody, and stick up for him in a
quarrel, after you had been ignominiously searched in his presence for property
you were supposed to have stolen from him? No, you couldn’t; but you might if
you had both been through some emotionally widening experience. That is one of
the by-products of revolution, though in this case it was only the beginnings
of a revolution, and obviously foredoomed to failure.
IV
The struggle for power between the Spanish Republican parties is an
unhappy, far-off thing which I have no wish to revive at this date. I only
mention it in order to say: believe nothing, or next to nothing, of what you
read about internal affairs on the Government side. It is all, from whatever
source, party propaganda – that is to say, lies. The broad truth about the war
is simple enough. The Spanish bourgeoisie saw their chance of crushing the
labour movement, and took it, aided by the Nazis and by the forces of reaction
all over the world. It is doubtful whether more than that will ever be
established.
I remember saying
once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History stopped in 1936,’ at which he nodded in
immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general,
but more particularly of the Spanish Civil War. Early in life I had noticed
that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the
first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the
facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw
great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence
where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely
denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired
hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London
retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures
over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not
in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to
various ‘party lines’. Yet in a way, horrible as all this was, it was
unimportant. It concerned secondary issues – namely, the struggle for power
between the Comintern and the Spanish left-wing parties, and the efforts of the
Russian Government to prevent revolution in Spain. But the broad picture of the
war which the Spanish Government presented to the world was not untruthful. The
main issues were what it said they were. But as for the Fascists and their
backers, how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How could they
possibly mention their real aims? Their version of the war was pure fantasy,
and in the circumstances it could not have been otherwise.
The only propaganda
line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to represent themselves as Christian
patriots saving Spain from a Russian dictatorship. This involved pretending
that life in Government Spain was just one long massacre (vide
the Catholic Herald or the Daily
Mail – but these were child’s play compared with the continental Fascist
press), and it involved immensely exaggerating the scale of Russian
intervention. Out of the huge pyramid of lies which the Catholic and
reactionary press all over the world built up, let me take just one point – the
presence in Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco partisans all believed in
this; estimates of its strength went as high as half a million. Now, there was
no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a handful of airmen and other
technicians, a few hundred at the most, but an army there was not. Some
thousands of foreigners who fought in Spain, not to mention millions of
Spaniards, were witnesses of this. Well, their testimony made no impression at
all upon the Franco propagandists, not one of whom had set foot in Government
Spain. Simultaneously these people refused utterly to admit the fact of German
or Italian intervention, at the same time as the German and Italian press were
openly boasting about the exploits of their ‘legionaries’. I have chosen to
mention only one point, but in fact the whole of Fascist propaganda about the
war was on this level.
This kind of
thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very
concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances
are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How
will the history of the Spanish war be written? If Franco remains in power his
nominees will write the history books, and (to stick to my chosen point) that
Russian army which never existed will become historical fact, and
schoolchildren will learn about it generations hence. But suppose Fascism is
finally defeated and some kind of democratic government restored in Spain in
the fairly near future; even then, how is the history of the war to be written?
What kind of records will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the
records kept on the Government side are recoverable – even so, how is a true
history of the war to be written? For, as I have pointed out already, the
Government also dealt extensively in lies. From the anti-Fascist angle one
could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would be a partisan
history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some
kind of history will be written, and after those who actually remember the war
are dead, it will be universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the
lie will have become truth.
I know it is the
fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to
believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is
peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately
lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after
the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case
they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And
in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been
agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in,
for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you will
find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A
British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on
fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact
on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common
basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species
of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically
denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such
thing as ‘science’. There is only ‘German science’, ‘Jewish science’ etc. The
implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the
Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It
never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five
– well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs –
and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous
statement.
But is it perhaps
childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future?
Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true,
just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare
that couldn’t come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which
black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree,
there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the
truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently
can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so
long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can
be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several Fascisms,
conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist. We in
England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and
our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in
the end and the thing you most fear never really happens. Nourished for
hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the
last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in
the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief. Don’t
resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What
evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modern
industrialized state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military
force?
Consider for instance
the re-institution of slavery. Who could have imagined twenty years ago that
slavery would return to Europe? Well, slavery has been restored under our
noses. The forced-labour camps all over Europe and North Africa where Poles,
Russians, Jews and political prisoners of every race toil at road-making or
swamp-draining for their bare rations, are simple chattel slavery. The most one
can say is that the buying and selling of slaves by individuals is not yet
permitted. In other ways – the breaking-up of families, for instance – the
conditions are probably worse than they were on the American cotton
plantations. There is no reason for thinking that this state of affairs will
change while any totalitarian domination endures. We don’t grasp its full implications,
because in our mystical way we feel that a régime founded on slavery must collapse. But it is worth comparing the duration of the
slave empires of antiquity with that of any modern state. Civilizations founded
on slavery have lasted for such periods as four thousand years.
When I think of
antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of
slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left
behind them no record whatever. We do not even know their names. In the whole
of Greek and Roman history, how many slaves’ names are known to you? I can
think of two, or possibly three. One is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus.
Also, in the Roman room at the British Museum there is a glass jar with the maker’s
name inscribed on the bottom, ‘Felix fecit’. I have a
vivid mental picture of poor Felix (a Gaul with red hair and a metal collar
round his neck), but in fact he may not have been a slave; so there are only
two slaves whose names I definitely know, and probably few people can remember
more. The rest have gone down into utter silence.
V
The backbone of the resistance against Franco was the Spanish working
class, especially the urban trade-union members. In the long run – it is
important to remember that it is only in the long run – the working class
remains the most reliable enemy of Fascism, simply because the working class
stands to gain most by a decent reconstruction of society. Unlike other classes
or categories, it can’t be permanently bribed.
To say this is
not to idealize the working class. In the long struggle that has followed the
Russian Revolution it is the manual workers who have been defeated, and it is
impossible not to feel that it was their own fault. Time after time, in country
after country, the organized working-class movements have been crushed by open,
illegal violence, and their comrades abroad, linked to them in theoretical
solidarity, have simply looked on and done nothing; and underneath this, secret
cause of many betrayals, has lain the fact that between white and coloured
workers there is not even lip-service to solidarity. Who can believe in the
class-conscious international proletariat after the events of the past ten
years? To the British working class the massacre of their comrades in Vienna,
Berlin, Madrid, or wherever it might be, seemed less interesting and less
important than yesterday’s football match. Yet this does not alter the fact
that the working class will go on struggling against Fascism after the others
have caved in. One feature of the Nazi conquest of France was the astonishing
defections among the intelligentsia, including some of the left-wing political
intelligentsia. The intelligentsia are the people who squeal loudest against
Fascism, and yet a respectable proportion of them collapse into defeatism when
the pinch comes. They are far-sighted enough to see the odds against them, and
moreover they can be bribed – for it is evident that the Nazis think it worth
while to bribe intellectuals. With the working class it is the other way about.
Too ignorant to see through the trick that is being played on them, they easily
swallow the promises of Fascism, yet sooner or later they always take up the
struggle again. They must do so, because in their own bodies they always
discover that the promises of Fascism cannot be fulfilled. To win over the
working class permanently, the Fascists would have to raise the general
standard of living, which they are unable and probably unwilling to do. The
struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind
and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and
it will do this in the face of endless discouragements. What are the workers
struggling for? Simply for the decent life which they are more and more aware
is now technically possible. Their consciousness of this aim ebbs and flows. In
Spain, for a while, people were acting consciously, moving towards a goal which
they wanted to reach and believed they could reach. It accounted for the
curiously buoyant feeling that life in Government Spain had during the early
months of the war. The common people knew in their bones that the Republic was
their friend and Franco was their enemy. They knew that they were in the right,
because they were fighting for something which the world owed them and was able
to give them
One has to
remember this to see the Spanish war in its true perspective. When one thinks
of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of war – and in this particular case of
the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings – there is
always the temptation to say: ‘One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral.’
In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing
as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side
stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction. The
hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals,
play-boys, Blimps and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the
land lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the
common people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the
dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real
issue; all else was froth on its surface.
VI
The outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome,
Berlin – at any rate not in Spain. After the summer of 1937 those with eyes in
their heads realized that the Government could not win the war unless there was
some profound change in the international set-up, and in deciding to fight on
Negrin and the others may have been partly influenced by the expectation that
the world war which actually broke out in 1939 was coming in 1938. The
much-publicized disunity on the Government side was not a main cause of defeat.
The Government militias were hurriedly raised, ill-armed and unimaginative in
their military outlook, but they would have been the same if complete political
agreement had existed from the start. At the outbreak of war the average
Spanish factory-worker did not even know how to fire a rifle (there had never
been universal conscription in Spain), and the traditional pacifism of the Left
was a great handicap. The thousands of foreigners who served in Spain made good
infantry, but there were very few experts of any kind among them. The
Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the revolution had not
been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalize factories, demolish churches,
and issue revolutionary manifestos would not have made the armies more
efficient. The Fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modern
arms and the others hadn’t. No political strategy could offset that.
The most baffling
thing in the Spanish war was the behaviour of the great powers. The war was
actually won for Franco by the Germans and Italians, whose motives were obvious
enough. The motives of France and Britain are less easy to understand. In 1936
it was clear to everyone that if Britain would only help the Spanish
Government, even to the extent of a few million pounds’ worth of arms, Franco
would collapse and German strategy would be severely dislocated. By that time
one did not need to be a clairvoyant to foresee that war between Britain and
Germany was coming; one could even foretell within a year or two when it would
come. Yet in the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical way the British ruling class
did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis. Why? Because
they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer. Undoubtedly they were, and yet
when it came to the final showdown they chose to stand up to Germany. It is
still very uncertain what plan they acted on in backing Franco, and they may
have had no clear plan at all. Whether the British ruling class are wicked or
merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time, and at
certain moments a very important question. As to the Russians, their motives in
the Spanish war are completely inscrutable. Did they, as the pinks believed,
intervene in Spain in order to defend democracy and thwart the Nazis? Then why
did they intervene on such a niggardly scale and finally leave Spain in the
lurch? Or did they, as the Catholics maintained, intervene in order to foster
revolution in Spain? They why did they do all in their power to crush the
Spanish revolutionary movements, defend private property and hand power to the
middle class as against the working class? Or did they, as the Trotskyists
suggested, intervene simply in order to prevent a
Spanish revolution? Then why not have backed Franco? Indeed, their actions are
most easily explained if one assumes that they were acting on several
contradictory motives. I believe that in the future we shall come to feel that
Stalin’s foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as it is
claimed to be, has been merely opportunistic and stupid. But at any rate, the
Spanish Civil War demonstrated that the Nazis knew what they were doing and
their opponents did not. The war was fought at a low technical level and its
major strategy was very simple. That side which had arms would win. The Nazis
and the Italians gave arms to their Spanish Fascist friends, and the western
democracies and the Russians didn’t give arms to those who should have been
their friends. So the Spanish Republic perished, having ‘gained what no
republic missed’.
Whether it was
right, as all left-wingers in other countries undoubtedly did, to encourage the
Spaniards to go on fighting when they could not win is a question hard to
answer. I myself think it was right, because I believe that it is better even
from the point of view of survival to fight and be conquered than to surrender
without fighting. The effects on the grand strategy of the struggle against
Fascism cannot be assessed yet. The ragged, weaponless armies of the Republic
held out for two and a half years, which was undoubtedly longer than their
enemies expected. But whether that dislocated the Fascist timetable, or
whether, on the other hand, it merely postponed the major war and gave the
Nazis extra time to get their war machine into trim, is still uncertain
VII
I never think of the Spanish war without two memories coming into my
mind. One is of the hospital ward at Lerida and the rather sad voices of the
wounded militiamen singing some song with a refrain that ended:
‘Una resolucion, Luchar
hast’ al fin!’
Well, they fought to the end all right. For the last eighteen months of
the war the Republican armies must have been fighting almost without
cigarettes, and with precious little food. Even when I left Spain in the middle
of 1937, meat and bread were scarce, tobacco a rarity, coffee and sugar almost
unobtainable
The other memory
is of the Italian militiaman who shook my hand in the guardroom, the day I
joined the militia. I wrote about this man at the beginning of my book on the
Spanish war,1
and do not want to repeat what I said there. When I remember – oh, how vividly!
– his shabby uniform and fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the complex side-issues
of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any rate no
doubt as to who was in the right. In spite of power politics and journalistic
lying, the central issue of the war was the attempt of people like this to win
the decent life which they knew to be their birthright. It is difficult to
think of this particular man’s probable end without several kinds of
bitterness. Since I met him in the Lenin Barracks he was probably a Trotskyist
or an Anarchist, and in the peculiar conditions of our time, when people of
that sort are not killed by the Gestapo they are usually killed by the G.P.U.
But that does not affect the long-term issues. This man’s face, which I saw
only for a minute or two, remains with me as a sort of visual reminder of what
the war was really about. He symbolizes for me the flower of the European
working class, harried by the police of all countries, the people who fill the
mass graves of the Spanish battlefields and are now, to the tune of several
millions, rotting in forced-labour camps.
When one thinks
of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at
their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a
while could bring Hitler, Pétain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph
Hearst, Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father
Coughlin, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverly
Nichols, Lady Houston, and Marinetti all into the same boat! But the clue is
really very simple. They are all people with something to lose, or people who
long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and
equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about ‘godless’
Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple intention of
those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a
partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social
reconstruction not accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the
Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the ‘changes of heart’, much more
reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system.
Pétain attributes the fall of France to the common people’s ‘love of pleasure’.
One sees this in its right perspective if one stops to wonder how much pleasure
the ordinary French peasant’s or working-man’s life would contain compared with
Pétain’s own. The damned impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary
men, and what not who lecture the working-class Socialist for his
‘materialism’! All that the working man demands is what these others would
consider the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at
all. Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the
knowledge that your children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean
linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn’t leak, and short enough working
hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done. Not one of those
who preach against ‘materialism’ would consider life liveable without these
things. And how easily that minimum could be attained if we chose to set our
minds to it for only twenty years! To raise the standard of living of the whole
world to that of Britain would not be a greater undertaking than the war we are
now fighting. I don’t claim, and I don’t know who does, that that would solve
anything in itself. It is merely that privation and brute labour have to be
abolished before the real problems of humanity can be tackled. The major
problem of our time is the decay of the belief in personal immortality, and it
cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an
ox or shivering in fear of the secret police. How right the working classes are
in their ‘materialism’! How right they are to realize that the belly comes
before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time! Understand
that, and the long horror that we are enduring becomes at least intelligible.
All the considerations that are likely to make one falter – the siren voices of
a Pétain or of a Gandhi, the inescapable fact that in order to fight one has to
degrade oneself, the equivocal moral position of Britain, with its democratic
phrases and its coolie empire, the sinister development of Soviet Russia, the
squalid farce of left-wing politics – all this fades away and one sees only the
struggle of the gradually awakening common people against the lords of property
and their hired liars and bumsuckers. The question is very simple. Shall people
like that Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which
is now technically achievable, or shan’t they? Shall the common man be pushed
back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient
grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later, but I want it
to be sooner and not later – some time within the next hundred years, say, and
not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was the real issue of
the Spanish war, and of the present war, and perhaps of other wars yet to come
I never saw the
Italian militiaman again, nor did I ever learn his name. It can be taken as
quite certain that he is dead. Nearly two years later, when the war was visibly
lost, I wrote these verses in his memory:
The Italian soldier shook my hand Beside the guard-room table; The strong hand and the subtle hand
Whose palms are only able
To meet within the sounds of guns, But oh! what peace I knew then In gazing on his battered face
Purer than any woman’s!
For the flyblown words that make me spew Still in his ears were holy, And he was born knowing that I had
learned
Out of books and slowly.
The treacherous guns had told their tale And we both had bought it, But my gold brick was made of gold –
Oh! who ever would have thought it?
Good luck go with you, Italian soldier! But luck is not for the brave; What would the world give back to you?
Always less than you gave.
Between the shadow and the ghost, Between the white and the red, Between the bullet and the lie,
Where would hide your head?
For where is Manuel Gonzalez, And where is Pedro Aguilar, And where is Ramon Fenellosa?
The earthworms know where they are.
Your name and your deeds were forgotten Before your bones were dry, And the lie that slew you is buried
Under a deeper lie;
But the thing that I saw in your face No power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.
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