---
title: "Homage to Catalonia"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 8 of 14
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/8/
cite: "George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, section 8. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/8/"
---

# 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]

## 8. VIII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/8/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-homage-catalonia-fp20181044/8/#p-N

[¶0] From Mandalay, in Upper Burma, you can travel by train to Maymyo, the
principal hill-station of the province, on the edge of the Shan plateau.
It is rather a queer experience. You start off in the typical atmosphere
of an eastern city—the scorching sunlight, the dusty palms, the smells
of fish and spices and garlic, the squashy tropical fruits, the swarming
dark-faced human beings—and because you are so used to it you carry
this atmosphere intact, so to speak, in your railway carriage. Mentally
you are still in Mandalay when the train stops at Maymyo, four thousand
feet above sea-level. But in stepping out of the carriage you step into
a different hemisphere. Suddenly you are breathing cool sweet air that
might be that of England, and all round you are green grass, bracken,
fir-trees, and hill-women with pink cheeks selling baskets of
strawberries.

[¶1] Getting back to Barcelona, after three and a half months at the front,
reminded me of this. There was the same abrupt and startling change of
atmosphere. In the train, all the way to Barcelona, the atmosphere of
the front persisted; the dirt, the noise, the discomfort, the ragged
clothes, the feeling of privation, comradeship and equality. The train,
already full of militiamen when it left Barbastro, was invaded by more
and more peasants at every station on the line; peasants with bundles of
vegetables, with terrified fowls which they carried head-downwards, with
sacks which looped and writhed all over the floor and were discovered to
be full of live rabbits—finally with a quite considerable flock of
sheep which were driven into the compartments and wedged into every
empty space. The militiamen shouted revolutionary songs which drowned
the rattle of the train and kissed their hands or waved red and black
handkerchiefs to every pretty girl along the line. Bottles of wine and
of anis, the filthy Aragonese liqueur, travelled from hand to hand. With
the Spanish goatskin water-bottles you can squirt a jet of wine right
across a railway carriage into your friend's mouth, which saves a lot of
trouble. Next to me a black-eyed boy of fifteen was recounting
sensational and, I do not doubt, completely untrue stories of his own
exploits at the front to two old leather-faced peasants who listened
open-mouthed. Presently the peasants undid their bundles and gave us
some sticky dark-red wine. Everyone was profoundly happy, more happy
than I can convey. But when the train had rolled through Sabadell and
into Barcelona, we stepped into an atmosphere that was scarcely less
alien and hostile to us and our kind than if this had been Paris or
London.

[¶2] Everyone who has made two visits, at intervals of months, to Barcelona
during the war has remarked upon the extraordinary changes that took
place in it. And curiously enough, whether they went there first in
August and again in January, or, like myself, first in December and
again in April, the thing they said was always the same: that the
revolutionary atmosphere had vanished. No doubt to anyone who had been
there in August, when the blood was scarcely dry in the streets and
militia were quartered in the smart hotels, Barcelona in December would
have seemed bourgeois; to me, fresh from England, it was liker to a
workers' city than anything I had conceived possible. Now the tide had
rolled back. Once again it was an ordinary city, a little pinched and
chipped by war, but with no outward sign of working-class predominance.

[¶3] The change in the aspect of the crowds was startling. The militia
uniform and the blue overalls had almost disappeared; everyone seemed to
be wearing the smart summer suits in which Spanish tailors specialise.
Fat prosperous men, elegant women, and sleek cars were everywhere. (It
appeared that there were still no private cars; nevertheless, anyone who
'was anyone' seemed able to command a car.) The officers of the new
Popular Army, a type that had scarcely existed when I left Barcelona,
swarmed in surprising numbers. The Popular Army was officered at the
rate of one officer to ten men. A certain number of these officers had
served in the militia and been brought back from the front for technical
instruction, but the majority were young men who had gone to the School
of War in preference to joining the militia. Their relation to their men
was not quite the same as in a bourgeois army, but there was a definite
social difference, expressed by the difference of pay and uniform. The
men wore a kind of coarse brown overalls, the officers wore an elegant
khaki uniform with a tight waist, like a British Army officer's uniform,
only a little more so. I do not suppose that more than one in twenty of
them had yet been to the front, but all of them had automatic pistols
strapped to their belts; we, at the front, could not get pistols for
love or money. As we made our way up the street I noticed that people
were staring at our dirty exteriors. Of course, like all men who have
been several months in the line, we were a dreadful sight. I was
conscious of looking like a scarecrow. My leather jacket was in tatters,
my woollen cap had lost its shape and slid perpetually over one eye, my
boots consisted of very little beyond splayed-out uppers. All of us were
in more or less the same state, and in addition we were dirty and
unshaven, so it was no wonder that the people stared. But it dismayed me
a little, and brought it home to me that some queer things had been
happening in the last three months.

[¶4] During the next few days I discovered by innumerable signs that my first
impression had not been wrong. A deep change had come over the town.
There were two facts that were the keynote of all else. One was that the
people—the civil population—had lost much of their interest in the
war; the other was that the normal division of society into rich and
poor, upper class and lower class, was reasserting itself.

[¶5] The general indifference to the war was surprising and rather
disgusting. It horrified people who came to Barcelona from Madrid or
even from Valencia. Partly it was due to the remoteness of Barcelona
from the actual fighting; I noticed the same thing a month later in
Tarragona, where the ordinary life of a smart seaside town was
continuing almost undisturbed. But it was significant that all over
Spain voluntary enlistment had dwindled from about January onwards. In
Catalonia, in February, there had been a wave of enthusiasm over the
first big drive for the Popular Army, but it had not led to any great
increase in recruiting. The war was only six months old or thereabouts
when the Spanish Government had to resort to conscription, which would
be natural in a foreign war, but seems anomalous in a civil war.
Undoubtedly it was bound up with the disappointment of the revolutionary
hopes with which the war had started. The trade union members who formed
themselves into militias and chased the Fascists back to Saragossa in
the first few weeks of war had done so largely because they believed
themselves to be fighting for working-class control; but it was becoming
more and more obvious that working-class control was a lost cause, and
the common people, especially the town proletariat, who have to fill the
ranks in any war, civil or foreign, could not be blamed for a certain
apathy. Nobody wanted to lose the war, but the majority were chiefly
anxious for it to be over. You noticed this wherever you went.
Everywhere you met with the same perfunctory remark: 'This
war—terrible, isn't it? When is it going to end?' Politically conscious
people were far more aware of the internecine struggle between Anarchist
and Communist than of the fight against Franco. To the mass of the
people the food-shortage was the most important thing. 'The front' had
come to be thought of as a mythical far-off place to which young men
disappeared and either did not return or returned after three or four
months with vast sums of money in their pockets. (A militiaman usually
received his back pay when he went on leave.) Wounded men, even when
they were hopping about on crutches, did not receive any special
consideration. To be in the militia was no longer fashionable. The
shops, always the barometers of public taste, showed this clearly. When
I first reached Barcelona the shops, poor and shabby though they were,
had specialised in militiamen's equipment. Forage-caps, zipper jackets,
Sam Browne belts, hunting-knives, water-bottles, revolver-holsters were
displayed in every window. Now the shops were markedly smarter, but the
war had been thrust into the background. As I discovered later, when
buying my kit before going back to the front, certain things that one
badly needed at the front were very difficult to procure.

[¶6] Meanwhile there was going on a systematic propaganda against the party
militias and in favour of the Popular Army. The position here was rather
curious. Since February the entire armed forces had theoretically been
incorporated in the Popular Army, and the militias were, on paper,
reconstructed along Popular Army lines, with differential pay-rates,
gazetted rank, etc. etc. The divisions were made up of 'mixed brigades',
which were supposed to consist partly of Popular Army troops and partly
of militia. But the only changes that had actually taken place were
changes of name. The POUM troops, for instance, previously called the
Lenin Division, were now known as the 29th Division. Until June very few
Popular Army troops reached the Aragón front, and in consequence the
militias were able to retain their separate structure and their special
character. But on every wall the Government agents had stencilled: 'We
need a Popular Army,' and over the radio and in the Communist Press
there was a ceaseless and sometimes very malignant jibing against the
militias, who were described as ill-trained, undisciplined, etc. etc.;
the Popular Army was always described as 'heroic'. From much of this
propaganda you would have derived the impression that there was
something disgraceful in having gone to the front voluntarily and
something praiseworthy in waiting to be conscripted. For the time being,
however, the militias were holding the line while the Popular Army was
training in the rear, and this fact had to be advertised as little as
possible. Drafts of militia returning to the front were no longer
marched through the streets with drums beating and flags flying. They
were smuggled away by train or lorry at five o'clock in the morning. A
few drafts of the Popular Army were now beginning to leave for the
front, and these, as before, were marched ceremoniously through the
streets; but even they, owing to the general waning of interest in the
war, met with comparatively little enthusiasm. The fact that the militia
troops were also, on paper, Popular Army troops, was skilfully used in
the Press propaganda. Any credit that happened to be going was
automatically handed to the Popular Army, while all blame was reserved
for the militias. It sometimes happened that the same troops were
praised in one capacity and blamed in the other.

[¶7] But besides all this there was the startling change in the social
atmosphere—a thing difficult to conceive unless you have actually
experienced it. When I first reached Barcelona I had thought it a town
where class distinctions and great differences of wealth hardly existed.
Certainly that was what it looked like. 'Smart' clothes were an
abnormality, nobody cringed or took tips, waiters and flower-women and
bootblacks looked you in the eye and called you 'comrade'. I had not
grasped that this was mainly a mixture of hope and camouflage. The
working class believed in a revolution that had been begun but never
consolidated, and the bourgeoisie were scared and temporarily disguising
themselves as workers. In the first months of revolution there must have
been many thousands of people who deliberately put on overalls and
shouted revolutionary slogans as a way of saving their skins. Now things
were returning to normal. The smart restaurants and hotels were full of
rich people wolfing expensive meals, while for the working-class
population food-prices had jumped enormously without any corresponding
rise in wages. Apart from the expensiveness of everything, there were
recurrent shortages of this and that, which, of course, always hit the
poor rather than the rich. The restaurants and hotels seemed to have
little difficulty in getting whatever they wanted, but in the
working-class quarters the queues for bread, olive oil, and other
necessaries were hundreds of yards long. Previously in Barcelona I had
been struck by the absence of beggars; now there were quantities of
them. Outside the delicatessen shops at the top of the Ramblas gangs of
barefooted children were always waiting to swarm round anyone who came
out and clamour for scraps of food. The 'revolutionary' forms of speech
were dropping out of use. Strangers seldom addressed you as _tú_ and
_camarada_ nowadays; it was usually _señor_ and _Usted. Buenos días_ was
beginning to replace _salud_. The waiters were back in their boiled
shirts and the shop-walkers were cringing in the familiar manner. My
wife and I went into a hosiery shop on the Ramblas to buy some
stockings. The shopman bowed and rubbed his hands as they do not do even
in England nowadays, though they used to do it twenty or thirty years
ago. In a furtive indirect way the practice of tipping was coming back.
The workers' patrols had been ordered to dissolve and the pre-war police
forces were back on the streets. One result of this was that the cabaret
shows and high-class brothels, many of which had been closed by the
workers' patrols, had promptly re-opened.[1] A small but significant
instance of the way in which everything was now orientated in favour of
the wealthier classes could be seen in the tobacco shortage. For the
mass of the people the shortage of tobacco was so desperate that
cigarettes filled with sliced liquorice-root were being sold in the
streets. I tried some of these once. (A lot of people tried them once.)
Franco held the Canaries, where all the Spanish tobacco is grown;
consequently the only stocks of tobacco left on the Government side were
those that had been in existence before the war. These were running so
low that the tobacconists' shops only opened once a week; after waiting
for a couple of hours in a queue you might, if you were lucky, get a
three-quarter-ounce packet of tobacco. Theoretically the Government
would not allow tobacco to be purchased from abroad, because this meant
reducing the gold-reserves, which had got to be kept for arms and other
necessities. Actually there was a steady supply of smuggled foreign
cigarettes of the more expensive kinds, Lucky Strikes and so forth,
which gave a grand opportunity for profiteering. You could buy the
smuggled cigarettes openly in the smart hotels and hardly less openly in
the streets, provided that you could pay ten pesetas (a militiaman's
daily wage) for a packet. The smuggling was for the benefit of wealthy
people, and was therefore connived at. If you had enough money there was
nothing that you could not get in any quantity, with the possible
exception of bread, which was rationed fairly strictly. This open
contrast of wealth and poverty would have been impossible a few months
earlier, when the working class still were or seemed to be in control.
But it would not be fair to attribute it solely to the shift of
political power. Partly it was a result of the safety of life in
Barcelona, where there was little to remind one of the war except an
occasional air-raid. Everyone who had been in Madrid said that it was
completely different there. In Madrid the common danger forced people of
almost all kinds into some sense of comradeship. A fat man eating quails
while children are begging for bread is a disgusting sight, but you are
less likely to see it when you are within sound of the guns.

[¶8] A day or two after the street-fighting I remember passing through one of
the fashionable streets and coming upon a confectioner's shop with a
window full of pastries and bon-bons of the most elegant kinds, at
staggering prices. It was the kind of shop you see in Bond Street or the
Rue de la Paix. And I remember feeling a vague horror and amazement that
money could still be wasted upon such things in a hungry war-stricken
country. But God forbid that I should pretend to any personal
superiority. After several months of discomfort I had a ravenous desire
for decent food and wine, cocktails, American cigarettes, and so forth,
and I admit to having wallowed in every luxury that I had money to buy.
During that first week, before the street-fighting began, I had several
preoccupations which interacted upon one another in a curious way. In
the first place, as I have said, I was busy making myself as comfortable
as I could. Secondly, thanks to over-eating and over-drinking, I was
slightly out of health all that week. I would feel a little unwell, go
to bed for half a day, get up and eat another excessive meal, and then
feel ill again. At the same time I was making secret negotiations to buy
a revolver. I badly wanted a revolver—in trench-fighting much more
useful than a rifle—and they were very difficult to get hold of. The
Government issued them to policemen and Popular Army officers, but
refused to issue them to the militia; you had to buy them, illegally,
from the secret stores of the Anarchists. After a lot of fuss and
nuisance an Anarchist friend managed to procure me a tiny ·26-inch
automatic pistol, a wretched weapon, useless at more than five yards,
but better than nothing. And besides all this I was making preliminary
arrangements to leave the POUM militia and enter some other unit that
would ensure my being sent to the Madrid front.

[¶9] I had told everyone for a long time past that I was going to leave the
POUM. As far as my purely personal preferences went I would have liked
to join the Anarchists. If one became a member of the CNT it was
possible to enter the FAI militia, but I was told that the FAI were
likelier to send me to Teruel than to Madrid. If I wanted to go to
Madrid I must join the International Column, which meant getting a
recommendation from a member of the Communist Party. I sought out a
Communist friend, attached to the Spanish Medical Aid, and explained my
case to him. He seemed very anxious to recruit me and asked me, if
possible, to persuade some of the other ILP Englishmen to come with me.
If I had been in better health I should probably have agreed there and
then. It is hard to say now what difference this would have made. Quite
possibly I should have been sent to Albacete before the Barcelona
fighting started; in which case, not having seen the fighting at close
quarters, I might have accepted the official version of it as truthful.
On the other hand, if I had been in Barcelona during the fighting, under
Communist orders but still with a sense of personal loyalty to my
comrades in the POUM, my position would have been impossible. But I had
another week's leave due to me and I was very anxious to get my health
back before returning to the line. Also—the kind of detail that is
always deciding one's destiny—I had to wait while the bootmakers made
me a new pair of marching boots. (The entire Spanish army had failed to
produce a pair of boots big enough to fit me.) I told my Communist
friend that I would make definite arrangements later. Meanwhile I wanted
a rest. I even had a notion that we—my wife and I—might go to the
seaside for two or three days. What an idea! The political atmosphere
ought to have warned me that that was not the kind of thing one could do
nowadays.

[¶10] For under the surface-aspect of the town, under the luxury and growing
poverty, under the seeming gaiety of the streets, with their
flower-stalls, their many-coloured flags, their propaganda-posters, and
thronging crowds, there was an unmistakable and horrible feeling of
political rivalry and hatred. People of all shades of opinion were
saying forebodingly: 'There's going to be trouble before long.' The
danger was quite simple and intelligible. It was the antagonism between
those who wished the revolution to go forward and those who wished to
check or prevent it—ultimately, between Anarchists and Communists.
Politically there was now no power in Catalonia except the PSUC and
their Liberal allies. But over against this there was the uncertain
strength of the CNT, less well-armed and less sure of what they wanted
than their adversaries, but powerful because of their numbers and their
predominance in various key industries. Given this alignment of forces
there was bound to be trouble. From the point of view of the
PSUC-controlled Generalidad, the first necessity, to make their position
secure, was to get the weapons out of the CNT workers' hands. As I have
pointed out earlier,[2] the move to break up the party militias was at
bottom a manoeuvre towards this end. At the same time the pre-war armed
police forces, Civil Guards, and so forth, had been brought back into
use and were being heavily reinforced and armed. This could mean only
one thing. The Civil Guards, in particular, were a gendarmerie of the
ordinary continental type, who for nearly a century past had acted as
the bodyguards of the possessing class. Meanwhile a decree had been
issued that all arms held by private persons were to be surrendered.
Naturally this order had not been obeyed; it was clear that the
Anarchists' weapons could only be taken from them by force. Throughout
this time there were rumours, always vague and contradictory owing to
newspaper censorship, of minor clashes that were occurring all over
Catalonia. In various places the armed police forces had made attacks on
Anarchist strongholds. At Puigcerdà, on the French frontier, a band of
Carabineros were sent to seize the Customs Office, previously controlled
by Anarchists, and Antonio Martín, a well-known Anarchist, was killed.
Similar incidents had occurred at Figueras and, I think, at Tarragona.
In Barcelona there had been a series of more or less unofficial brawls
in the working-class suburbs. CNT and UGT members had been murdering one
another for some time past; on several occasions the murders were
followed by huge, provocative funerals which were quite deliberately
intended to stir up political hatred. A short time earlier a CNT member
had been murdered, and the CNT had turned out in hundreds of thousands
to follow the cortège. At the end of April, just after I got to
Barcelona, Roldán Cortada, a prominent member of the UGT, was murdered,
presumably by someone in the CNT. The Government ordered all shops to
close and staged an enormous funeral procession, largely of Popular Army
troops, which took two hours to pass a given point. From the hotel
window I watched it without enthusiasm. It was obvious that the
so-called funeral was merely a display of strength; a little more of
this kind of thing and there might be bloodshed. The same night my wife
and I were woken by a fusillade of shots from the Plaza de Cataluña, a
hundred or two hundred yards away. We learned next day that it was a CNT
man being bumped off, presumably by someone in the UGT. It was of course
distinctly possible that all these murders were committed by _agents
provocateurs_. One can gauge the attitude of the foreign capitalist
Press towards the Communist-Anarchist feud by the fact that Roldán
Cortada's murder was given wide publicity, while the answering murder
was carefully unmentioned.

[¶11] The 1st of May was approaching, and there was talk of a monster
demonstration in which both the CNT and the UGT were to take part. The
CNT leaders, more moderate than many of their followers, had long been
working for a reconciliation with the UGT; indeed the keynote of their
policy was to try and form the two blocks of unions into one huge
coalition. The idea was that the CNT and the UGT should march together
and display their solidarity. But at the last moment the demonstration
was called off. It was perfectly clear that it would only lead to
rioting. So nothing happened on 1 May. It was a queer state of affairs.
Barcelona, the so-called revolutionary city, was probably the only city
in non-Fascist Europe that had no celebrations that day. But I admit I
was rather relieved. The ILP contingent was expected to march in the
POUM section of the procession, and everyone expected trouble. The last
thing I wished for was to be mixed up in some meaningless street-fight.
To be marching up the street behind red flags inscribed with elevating
slogans, and then to be bumped off from an upper window by some total
stranger with a sub-machine-gun—that is not my idea of a useful way to
die.

[¶12] -----

[¶13] [1] The workers' patrols are said to have closed 75 per cent. of the
brothels.

[¶14] [In his list of Errata, Orwell noted: 'I have no good evidence that
prostitution decreased 75% in the early days of the war, and I believe
the Anarchists went on the principle of "collectivising" the brothels,
not suppressing them. But there was a drive against prostitution
(posters etc.) and it is a fact that the smart brothel and naked cabaret
shows were shut in the early months of the war and open again when the
war was about a year old.' The French-language text retains the original
footnote without comment. _Ed._]

[¶15] [2] See Appendix I: originally placed between Sections IV and V.