Orwell in Spain
The author and journalist joined the Republican cause on the frontline, but uncovered a sinister Soviet betrayal
In 1936, Eric Arthur Blair (better known by his pen name George Orwell) was 33 years old and an established journalist and author, with four books already published. However, after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell decided to join the Republican cause, arriving in Barcelona on 26 December 1936, five months after Francisco Franco launched his military uprising. In the same year, some 35,000 volunteers from 80 countries flocked to Spain to assist the Republican forces in the fight against fascism. The Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) had been formed during the Second Republic and it was this group who organised the militia that Orwell joined. Quite how Orwell found himself in a militia is another story.
Originally he had intended to join the International Brigades, but after a tense meeting he found himself rejected by Harry Pollitt (who in his review of The Road to
Wigan Pier would describe Orwell as “a delusioned little middle class boy”). It’s not clear why Pollitt refused Orwell, though Orwell himself believed Pollitt found him “politically unreliable”. Instead Orwell sought the assistance of the Independent Labour Party, who arranged the means for him to travel to Spain, purportedly to write newspaper articles. But upon arriving Orwell, as he later wrote, “joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do”.
By January 1937 he had been given the rank of corporal and that same month he saw action, being sent to join the offensive at Aragón – the first major Republican attack. Many of the recruits he was fighting alongside were young and undisciplined and Orwell’s previous training in the Indian Imperial Police gave him the necessary experience to become a sort of leader to the men. He would drill the troops at the Barcelona barracks square and his large stature allowed him to drink them under the table during the evenings. However, he soon left his Catalan unit to join a British volunteer contingent, seeing real action as he assisted in creating a diversion for a larger operation further down the lines.
Orwell’s connection with the POUM eventually became a source of danger to the young writer. The group was essentially anti-stalinist and its members found themselves targeted following the 1937 riots where revolutionary movements in Catalonia fought with Republican Police. At this point the government of Juan Negrin was dependent on the support of the Soviet Union and targeted any organisations which they felt were under the influence of Leon Trotsky. The Republic placed the leaders of POUM on trial and the leader, Andreu Nin, was sent to a camp where he was tortured and killed under the supervision of the NKVD. It would not be long before Orwell himself would face the wrath of Moscow. However, any fears of repercussions from the Republic were soon to be the least of his worries when, on 20 May, Orwell was shot through the throat and nearly killed.
He reunited with his wife and fled first to France and from there to England. On 13
July a secret police file named the couple as confirmed communists. Orwell later learned that a 22-year-old journalist called Bob Smillie, who he had served alongside, had died in prison under suspicious circumstances.
It was in 1938, as the Spanish Civil War still raged, that Orwell’s memoir of his time as a volunteer soldier, Homage to Catalonia, was published. On its initial release it sold a mere 683 copies in the first six months of publication. However, in successive decades the book has become one of the defining narratives of the conflict alongside Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls. Lionel Trilling, the respected American literary critic and author of the essay George Orwell
and the Politics of Truth, wrote that Homage
to Catalonia “is one of the most important historical documents of our time… a testimony to the nature of modern political life… a demonstration on the part of the author of one of the right ways of confronting that life”.