---
title: "Homage to Catalonia"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 3 of 14
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/3/
cite: "George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, section 3. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/3/"
---

# 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]

## 3. III

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/3/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/3/#p-N

[¶0] In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco,
candles and the enemy. In winter on the Saragossa front they were
important in that order, with the enemy a bad last. Except at night,
when a surprise-attack was always conceivable, nobody bothered about the
enemy. They were simply remote black insects whom one occasionally saw
hopping to and fro. The real preoccupation of both armies was trying to
keep warm.

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

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

[¶3] Often I used to gaze round the wintry landscape and marvel at the
futility of it all. The inconclusiveness of such a kind of war! Earlier,
about October, there had been savage fighting for all these hills; then,
because the lack of men and arms, especially artillery, made any
large-scale operation impossible, each army had dug itself in and
settled down on the hill-tops it had won. Over to our right there was a
small outpost, also POUM, and on the spur to our left, at seven o'clock
of us, a PSUC position faced a taller spur with several small Fascist
posts dotted on its peaks. The so-called line zigzagged to and fro in a
pattern that would have been quite unintelligible if every position had
not flown a flag. The POUM and PSUC flags were red, those of the
Anarchists red and black; the Fascists generally flew the monarchist
flag (red-yellow-red), but occasionally they flew the flag of the
Republic (red-yellow-purple).[1] The scenery was stupendous, if you
could forget that every mountain-top was occupied by troops and was
therefore littered with tin cans and crusted with dung. To the right of
us the sierra bent south-eastwards and made way for the wide, veined
valley that stretched across to Huesca. In the middle of the plain a few
tiny cubes sprawled like a throw of dice; this was the town of Robres,
which was in Loyalist possession. Often in the mornings the valley was
hidden under seas of cloud, out of which the hills rose flat and blue,
giving the landscape a strange resemblance to a photographic negative.
Beyond Huesca there were more hills of the same formation as our own,
streaked with a pattern of snow which altered day by day. In the far
distance the monstrous peaks of the Pyrenees, where the snow never
melts, seemed to float upon nothing. Even down in the plain everything
looked dead and bare. The hills opposite us were grey and wrinkled like
the skins of elephants. Almost always the sky was empty of birds. I do
not think I have ever seen a country where there were so few birds. The
only birds one saw at any time were a kind of magpie, and the coveys of
partridges that startled one at night with their sudden whirring, and,
very rarely, the flights of eagles that drifted slowly over, generally
followed by rifle-shots which they did not deign to notice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[¶19] 'Don't fire,' I said half-jokingly as I focused the camera.

[¶20] 'Oh no, we won't fire.'

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

[¶22] The difficult passwords which the army was using at this time were a
minor source of danger. They were those tiresome double passwords in
which one word has to be answered by another. Usually they were of an
elevating and revolutionary nature, such as _Cultura_—_progreso_, or
_Seremos_—_invencibles_, and it was often impossible to get illiterate
sentries to remember these highfalutin' words. One night, I remember,
the password was _Cataluña_—_heroica_, and a moon-faced peasant lad
named Jaime Domenech approached me, greatly puzzled, and asked me to
explain.

[¶23] '_Heroica_—what does _heroica_ mean?'

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

[¶25] '_Alto! Cataluña!_'

[¶26] '_Valiente!_' yelled Jaime, certain that he was saying the right thing.

[¶27] Bang!

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

[¶29] -----

[¶30] [1] Orwell, in his list of Errata, noted: 'Am not now completely certain
that I ever saw Fascists flying the republican flag, though I _think_
they sometimes flew it with a small imposed swastika.'