---
title: "Homage to Catalonia"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 7 of 14
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/7/
cite: "George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, section 7. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/7/"
---

# 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]

## 7. VII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/7/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/7/#p-N

[¶0] The days grew hotter and even the nights grew tolerably warm. On a
bullet-chipped tree in front of our parapet thick clusters of cherries
were forming. Bathing in the river ceased to be an agony and became
almost a pleasure. Wild roses with pink blooms the size of saucers
straggled over the shell-holes round Torre Fabián. Behind the line you
met peasants wearing wild roses over their ears. In the evenings they
used to go out with green nets, hunting quails. You spread the net over
the tops of the grasses and then lay down and made a noise like a female
quail. Any male quail that was within hearing then came running towards
you, and when he was underneath the net you threw a stone to scare him,
whereupon he sprang into the air and was entangled in the net.
Apparently only male quails were caught, which struck me as unfair.

[¶1] There was a section of Andalusians next to us in the line now. I do not
know quite how they got to this front. The current explanation was that
they had run away from Málaga so fast that they had forgotten to stop at
Valencia; but this, of course, came from the Catalans, who professed to
look down on the Andalusians as a race of semi-savages. Certainly the
Andalusians were very ignorant. Few if any of them could read, and they
seemed not even to know the one thing that everybody knows in
Spain—which political party they belonged to. They thought they were
Anarchists, but were not quite certain; perhaps they were Communists.
They were gnarled, rustic-looking men, shepherds or labourers from the
olive groves, perhaps, with faces deeply stained by the ferocious suns
of further south. They were very useful to us, for they had an
extraordinary dexterity at rolling the dried-up Spanish tobacco into
cigarettes. The issue of cigarettes had ceased, but in Monflorite it was
occasionally possible to buy packets of the cheapest kind of tobacco,
which in appearance and texture was very like chopped chaff. Its flavour
was not bad, but it was so dry that even when you had succeeded in
making a cigarette the tobacco promptly fell out and left an empty
cylinder. The Andalusians, however, could roll admirable cigarettes and
had a special technique for tucking the ends in.

[¶2] Two Englishmen were laid low by sunstroke. My salient memories of that
time are the heat of the midday sun, and working half-naked with
sandbags punishing one's shoulders which were already flayed by the sun;
and the lousiness of our clothes and boots, which were literally
dropping to pieces; and the struggles with the mule which brought our
rations and which did not mind rifle-fire but took to flight when
shrapnel burst in the air; and the mosquitoes (just beginning to be
active) and the rats, which were a public nuisance and would even devour
leather belts and cartridge-pouches. Nothing was happening except an
occasional casualty from a sniper's bullet and the sporadic
artillery-fire and air-raids on Huesca. Now that the trees were in full
leaf we had constructed snipers' platforms, like _machans_, in the
poplar trees that fringed the line. On the other side of Huesca the
attacks were petering out. The Anarchists had had heavy losses and had
not succeeded in completely cutting the Jaca road. They had managed to
establish themselves close enough on either side to bring the road
itself under machine-gun fire and make it impassable for traffic; but
the gap was a kilometre wide and the Fascists had constructed a sunken
road, a sort of enormous trench, along which a certain number of lorries
could come and go. Deserters reported that in Huesca there were plenty
of munitions and very little food. But the town was evidently not going
to fall. Probably it would have been impossible to take it with the
fifteen thousand ill-armed men who were available. Later, in June, the
Government brought troops from the Madrid front and concentrated thirty
thousand men on Huesca, with an enormous quantity of aeroplanes, but
still the town did not fall.

[¶3] When we went on leave I had been a hundred and fifteen days in the line,
and at the time this period seemed to me to have been one of the most
futile of my whole life. I had joined the militia in order to fight
against Fascism, and as yet I had scarcely fought at all, had merely
existed as a sort of passive object, doing nothing in return for my
rations except to suffer from cold and lack of sleep. Perhaps that is
the fate of most soldiers in most wars. But now that I can see this
period in perspective I do not altogether regret it. I wish, indeed,
that I could have served the Spanish Government a little more
effectively; but from a personal point of view—from the point of view
of my own development—those first three or four months that I spent in
the line were less futile than I then thought. They formed a kind of
interregnum in my life, quite different from anything that had gone
before and perhaps from anything that is to come, and they taught me
things that I could not have learned in any other way.

[¶4] The essential point is that all this time I had been isolated—for at
the front one was almost completely isolated from the outside world:
even of what was happening in Barcelona one had only a dim
conception—among people who could roughly but not too inaccurately be
described as revolutionaries. This was the result of the militia-system,
which on the Aragón front was not radically altered till about June
1937. The workers' militias, based on the trade unions and each composed
of people of approximately the same political opinions, had the effect
of canalising into one place all the most revolutionary sentiment in the
country. I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of
any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief
in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragón
one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of
working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms
of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it
was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say
that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that
the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the
normal motives of civilised life—snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of
the boss, etc.—had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division
of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in
the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the
peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master. Of
course such a state of affairs could not last. It was simply a temporary
and local phase in an enormous game that is being played over the whole
surface of the earth. But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon
anyone who experienced it. However much one cursed at the time, one
realised afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange
and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal
than apathy or cynicism, where the word 'comrade' stood for comradeship
and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of
equality. I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that
Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the
world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy
'proving' that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism
with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a
vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts
ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for
it, the 'mystique' of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast
majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means
nothing at all. And it was here that those few months in the militia
were valuable to me. For the Spanish militias, while they lasted, were a
sort of microcosm of a classless society. In that community where no one
was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no
privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of
what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all,
instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me. The effect was to
make my desire to see Socialism established much more actual than it had
been before. Partly, perhaps, this was due to the good luck of being
among Spaniards, who, with their innate decency and their ever-present
Anarchist tinge, would make even the opening stages of Socialism
tolerable if they had the chance.

[¶5] Of course at the time I was hardly conscious of the changes that were
occurring in my own mind. Like everyone about me I was chiefly conscious
of boredom, heat, cold, dirt, lice, privation, and occasional danger. It
is quite different now. This period which then seemed so futile and
eventless is now of great importance to me. It is so different from the
rest of my life that already it has taken on the magic quality which, as
a rule, belongs only to memories that are years old. It was beastly
while it was happening, but it is a good patch for my mind to browse
upon. I wish I could convey to you the atmosphere of that time. I hope I
have done so, a little, in the earlier chapters of this book. It is all
bound up in my mind with the winter cold, the ragged uniforms of
militiamen, the oval Spanish faces, the Morse-like tapping of
machine-guns, the smells of urine and rotting bread, the tinny taste of
bean-stews wolfed hurriedly out of unclean pannikins.

[¶6] The whole period stays by me with curious vividness. In my memory I live
over incidents that might seem too petty to be worth recalling. I am in
the dug-out at Monte Pocero again, on the ledge of limestone that serves
as a bed, and young Ramón is snoring with his nose flattened between my
shoulder-blades. I am stumbling up the mucky trench, through the mist
that swirls round me like cold steam. I am half-way up a crack in the
mountain-side, struggling to keep my balance and to tug a root of wild
rosemary out of the ground. High overhead some meaningless bullets are
singing.

[¶7] I am lying hidden among small fir-trees on the low ground west of Monte
Trazo, with Kopp and Bob Edwards and three Spaniards. Up the naked grey
hill to the right of us a string of Fascists are climbing like ants.
Close in front a bugle-call rings out from the Fascist lines. Kopp
catches my eye and, with a schoolboy gesture, thumbs his nose at the
sound.

[¶8] I am in the mucky yard at La Granja, among the mob of men who are
struggling with their tin pannikins round the cauldron of stew. The fat
and harassed cook is warding them off with the ladle. At a table nearby
a bearded man with a huge automatic pistol strapped to his belt is
hewing loaves of bread into five pieces. Behind me a Cockney voice (Bill
Chambers, with whom I quarrelled bitterly and who was afterwards killed
outside Huesca) is singing:

[¶9] _There are rats, rats,_
                        _Rats as big as cats,_
                        _In the_ . . .

[¶10] A shell comes screaming over. Children of fifteen fling themselves on
their faces. The cook dodges behind the cauldron. Everyone rises with a
sheepish expression as the shell plunges and booms a hundred yards away.

[¶11] I am walking up and down the line of sentries, under the dark boughs of
the poplars. In the flooded ditch outside the rats are paddling about,
making as much noise as otters. As the yellow dawn comes up behind us,
the Andalusian sentry, muffled in his cloak, begins singing. Across
no-man's-land, a hundred or two hundred yards away, you can hear the
Fascist sentry also singing.

[¶12] On 25 April, after the usual _mañanas_, another section relieved us and
we handed over our rifles, packed our kits and marched back to
Monflorite. I was not sorry to leave the line. The lice were multiplying
in my trousers far faster than I could massacre them, and for a month
past I had had no socks and my boots had very little sole left, so that
I was walking more or less barefoot. I wanted a hot bath, clean clothes
and a night between sheets more passionately than it is possible to want
anything when one has been living a normal civilised life. We slept a
few hours in a barn in Monflorite, jumped a lorry in the small hours,
caught the five o'clock train at Barbastro and—having the luck to
connect with a fast train at Lérida—were in Barcelona by three o'clock
in the afternoon of the 26th. And after that the trouble began.