lower-middle-class novels which are his greatest achievement stopped
short at the other war and never really began again, and since 1920 he
has squandered his talents in slaying paper dragons. But how much it is,
after all, to have any talents to squander.
LOOKING BACK ON THE SPANISH WAR (1942)
1.
First of all the physical memories, the sounds, 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
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.
2
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 the 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 1914-17
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.
3
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 th
e 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 gave 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 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 re-established
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 solidarty', 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