---
title: "Homage to Catalonia"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 11 of 14
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/11/
cite: "George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, section 11. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/11/"
---

# Homage to Catalonia

*George Orwell*

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> Title: Homage to Catalonia
Date of first publication: 1938
Author: George Orwell (1903-1950)
Date first posted: Oct. 23, 2018
Date last updated: Oct. 23, 2018
Faded Page eBook #20181044

> This eBook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Howard Ross
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

> GEORGE ORWELL

> _Homage to Catalonia_

> Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest
             thou be like unto him.
             Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he
             be wise in his own conceit.
                                        PROVERBS, XXVI, 4-5

> Copyright 1938 by Eric Blair

> TRANSCRIBER NOTES

> Hyphenation of words has been made consistent.

> [The end of _Homage to Catalonia_ by George Orwell]

## 11. XI

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/11/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/11/#p-N

[¶0] 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 cafés and wondering whether that
person at the next table was a police spy.

[¶1] Sinister rumours of all kinds were flying round, thanks to the press
censorship. One was that the Negrín-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 cafés, 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 Aragón 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
CNT 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'état_. 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 POUM
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 ILP
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
recognised, 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.

[¶2] Bands of armed Valencian Assault Guards roamed everywhere in the
streets, the local Assault Guards were still holding cafés and other
buildings in strategic spots, and many of the PSUC buildings were still
sandbagged and barricaded. At various points in the town there were
posts manned by local Assault Guards or Carabineros who stopped
passers-by and demanded their papers. Everyone warned me not to show my
POUM militiaman's card but merely to show my passport and my hospital
ticket. Even to be known to have served in the POUM militia was vaguely
dangerous. POUM militiamen who were wounded or on leave were penalised
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.

[¶3] 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 Assault 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.[1] 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.

[¶4] 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 coalminer 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 POUM 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):

[¶5] 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.

[¶6] 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.

[¶7] I was at the Sanatorium Maurín, one of the sanatoria run by the POUM. 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 onto 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.

[¶8] 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 Siétamo to get my papers stamped
at the POUM 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 Siétamo—15 June.

[¶9] It was five days before I got back to Barcelona. A lorry-load of us
reached Siétamo about midnight, and as soon as we got to the POUM
headquarters they lined us up and began handing 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
_mañana_, 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—Siétamo, Barbastro, Monzón, then back
to Siétamo to get my discharge stamped, then down the line again via
Barbastro and Lérida—and the convergence of troops on Huesca had
monopolised all the transport and disorganised 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
walloped 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 onto a lorry without being helped.

[¶10] I slept a night at Monzón 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 hatreds
of the political parties evaporated. During all the time I was at the
front I never once remember any PSUC adherent showing me hostility
because I was POUM. That kind of thing belonged in Barcelona or in
places even remoter from the war. There were a lot of Assault Guards in
Siétamo. 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.

[¶11] At Monzón 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.

[¶12] 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 at 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 Lérida 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 Lérida 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 Málaga and
Alicante, cathedrals, cardinals, bullfights, 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.

[¶13] It was late when I got back to Barcelona, and there were no taxis. It
was no use trying to get to the Sanatorium Maurín, 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.

[¶14] 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:

[¶15] '_Get out!_'

[¶16] 'What?'

[¶17] 'Get out of here _at once_!'

[¶18] 'What?'

[¶19] 'Don't keep standing here! You must get outside quickly!'

[¶20] 'What? Why? What do you mean?'

[¶21] 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 connection with the POUM he was a good friend to us all
during the trouble. He looked at me with a concerned face.

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

[¶23] And behold! at the bottom of the stairs one of the hotel staff, who was
a POUM 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.

[¶24] 'What the devil is all this about?' I said as soon as we were on the
pavement.

[¶25] 'Haven't you _heard_?'

[¶26] 'No. Heard what? I've heard nothing.'

[¶27] 'The POUM's been suppressed. They've seized all the buildings.
Practically everyone's in prison. And they say they're shooting people
already.'

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

[¶29] On 15 June the police had suddenly arrested Andrés Nin in his office,
and the same evening had raided the Hotel Falcón 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 POUM was declared an
illegal organisation and all its offices, bookstalls, 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 connection
with the POUM. 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 number 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.

[¶30] It was all profoundly dismaying. What the devil was it all about? I
could understand their suppressing the POUM, but what were they
arresting people for? For nothing, so far as one could discover.
Apparently the suppression of the POUM had a retrospective effect; the
POUM 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
flaming with the story of a huge 'Fascist plot', radio communication
with the enemy, documents signed in invisible ink, etc. etc. I shall
deal with this story in greater detail in _Appendix II_. 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 POUM, in any Barcelona papers, Communist,
Anarchist, or Republican. We first learned the precise nature of the
charges against the POUM 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
POUM 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 Federica Montseny, 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
_communiqué_.[2] 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.

[¶31] 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 José 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
POUM. All the POUM 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 Lérida, 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 Aragón front), and no doubt one reason for arresting all the POUM
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 POUM
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.

[¶32] 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
Maurín was raided, and were in hiding somewhere. So was John McNair, who
had been in France and had re-entered Spain after the POUM 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.

[¶33] 'What! Kopp? I thought he was in Valencia.'

[¶34] 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 POUM 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.

[¶35] 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 who 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 Maurín. They even carried off a bundle of my
dirty linen. Perhaps they thought it had messages written on it in
invisible ink.

[¶36] 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 POUM. 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 POUM 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 POUM. We
went through the papers in my pockets. My wife made me tear up my
militiaman's card, which had 'POUM' on it in big letters, also a photo
of a group of militiamen with a POUM 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 POUM; but without them I could be arrested as a
deserter.

[¶37] 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 POUM. 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 _mañana_. 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.

[¶38] 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 POUM had practically no underground
organisation. No doubt the leaders had always realised 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 POUM 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
POUM 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.

[¶39] 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.

[¶40] -----

[¶41] [1] The purchasing value of the peseta was about fourpence.

[¶42] [2] See the reports of the Maxton delegation [_in Appendix II_].