I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what
happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.
happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.
Orwell
Churchill’s estimate of the Bolsheviks, however,
was nearer the mark than Wells’s. The early Bolshevik s may have been angels or
demons, according as one chooses to regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible
men. They were not introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints, which, like
the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by witchcraft trials.
The same misconception reappears in an inverted fonn in Wells’s attitude to the Nazis.
Hitler is all the war-lords and witchdoctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues
Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost
immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense does not
really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a civilising influence
but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that
fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much
of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The
order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the
aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age.
Science is lighting on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for Wells to
accept this. It would contradict the world-view on which his own works are based. The
war-lords and the witch-doctors MUST fail, the common-sense World State, as seen by a
nineteenth-century liberal whose heart does not leap at the sound of bugles, MUST
triumph. Treachery and defeatism apart, Hitler CANNOT be a danger. That he should
finally win would be an impossible reversal of history, like a Jacobite restoration.
But is it not a sort of parricide for a person of my age (thirty-eight) to find fault with H. G.
Wells? Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some
sense Wells’s own creation. How much influence any mere writer has, and especially a
“popular” writer whose work takes effect quickly, is questionable, but I doubt whether
anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English
language, influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us, and therefore the
physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed. Only, just the
singleness of mind, the one-sided imagination that made him seem like an inspired
prophet in the Edwardian age, make him a shallow, inadequate thinker now. When Wells
was young, the antithesis between science and reaction was not false. Society was ruled
by narrow-minded, profoundly incurious people, predatory businessmen, dull squires,
bishops, politicians who could quote Horace but had never heard of algebra. Science was
faintly disreputable and religious belief obligatory. Traditionalism, stupidity,
snobbishness, patriotism, superstition and love of war seemed to be all on the same side;
there was need of someone who could state the opposite point of view. Back in the
nineteen-hundreds it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H. G. Wells. There
you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers, with your future employers
exhorting you to “get on or get out”, your parents systematically warping your sexual life,
and your dull-witted schoolmasters sniggering over their Latin tags; and here was this
wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the planets and the bottom of
the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people
imagined. A decade or so before aeroplanes were technically feasible Wells knew that
within a little while men would be able to fly. He knew that because he himself wanted to
be able to fly, and therefore felt sure that research in that direction would continue. On
the other hand, even when I was a little boy, at a time when the Wright brothers had
actually lifted their machine off the ground for fifty-nine seconds, the generally accepted
opinion was that if God had meant us to fly He would have given us wings. Up to 1914
Wells was in the main a true prophet. In physical details his vision of the new world has
been fulfilled to a surprising extent.
But because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a non-military nation and class,
he could not grasp the tremendous strength of the old world which was symbolised in his
mind by fox-hunting Tories. He was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that
nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what
he himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching
into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong
magic to lay them. The people who have shown the best understanding of Fascism are
either those who have suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in themselves.
A crude book like THE IRON HEEL, written nearly thirty years ago, is a truer prophecy
of the future than either BRAVE NEW WORLD or THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO
COME. If one had to choose among Wells’s own contemporaries a writer who could
stand towards him as a corrective, one might choose Kipling, who was not deaf to the evil
voices of power and military “glory”. Kipling would have understood the appeal of
Hitler, or for that matter of Stalin, whatever his attitude towards them might be. Wells is
too sane to understand the modern world. The succession of lower-middle-class novels
which are his greatest achievement stopped short at the other war and never really began
again, and since 1920 he has squandered his talents in slaying paper dragons. But how
much it is, after all, to have any talents to squander.
LOOKING BACK ON THE SPANISH WAR (1942)
1
First of all the physical memories, the sounds, the smells and the surfaces of things.
It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I
remember the week of so-called training that we received before being sent to the front —
the huge cavalry barracks in Barcelona with its draughty stables and cobbled yards, the
icy cold of the pump where one washed, the filthy meals made tolerable by pannikins of
wine, the Trousered militia-women chopping firewood, and the roll-call in the early
mornings where my prosaic English name made a sort of comic interlude among the
resounding Spanish ones, Manuel Gonzalez, Pedro Aguilar, Ramon Fenellosa, Roque
Ballaster, Jaime Domenech, Sebastian Viltron, Ramon Nuvo Bosch. I name those
particular men because I remember the faces of all of them. Except for two who were
mere riff-raff and have doubtless become good Falangists by this time, it is probable that
all of them are dead. Two of them I know to be dead. The eldest would have been about
twenty-five, the youngest sixteen.
One of the essential experiences of war is never being able to escape from disgusting
smells of human origin. Latrines are an overworked subject in war literature, and I would
not mention them if it were not that the latrine in our barracks did its necessary bit
towards puncturing my own illusions about the Spanish civil war. The Latin type of
latrine, at which you have to squat, is bad enough at its best, but these were made of some
kind of polished stone so slippery that it was all you could do to keep on your feet. In
addition they were always blocked. Now I have plenty of other disgusting things in my
memory, but I believe it was these latrines that first brought home to me the thought, so
often to recur: ‘Here we are, soldiers of a revolutionary army, defending Democracy
against Fascism, fighting a war which is ABOUT something, and the detail of our lives is
just as sordid and degrading as it could be in prison, let alone in a bourgeois army. ’ Many
other things reinforced this impression later; for instance, the boredom and animal hunger
of trench life, the squalid intrigues over scraps of food, the mean, nagging quarrels which
people exhausted by lack of sleep indulge in.
The essential horror of anny life (whoever has been a soldier will know what I mean by
the essential horror of army life) is barely affected by the nature of the war you happen to
be fighting in. Discipline, for instance, is ultimately the same in all annies. Orders have
to be obeyed and enforced by punishment if necessary, the relationship of officer and
man has to be the relationship of superior and inferior. The picture of war set forth in
books like ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT is substantially true. Bullets hurt,
corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers. It is true
that the social background from which an army springs will colour its training, tactics and
general efficiency, and also that the consciousness of being in the right can bolster up
morale, though this affects the civilian population more than the troops. (People forget
that a soldier anywhere near the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or,
above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war. ) But the laws of nature
are not suspended for a ‘red’ army any more than for a ‘white’ one. A louse is a louse and
a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just.
Why is it worth while to point out anything so obvious? Because the bulk of the British
and American intelligentsia were manifestly unaware of it then, and are now. Our
memories are short nowadays, but look back a bit, dig out the files of NEW MASSES or
the DAILY WORKER, and just have a look at the romantic warmongering muck that our
left-wingers were spilling at that time. All the stale old phrases! And the unimaginative
callousness of it! The sang-froid with which London faced the bombing of Madrid! Here
I am not bothering about the counter-propagandists of the Right, the Lunns, Garvins ET
HOC GENUS; they go without saying. But here were the very people who for twenty
years had hooted and jeered at the ‘glory’ of war, at atrocity stories, at patriotism, even at
physical courage, coming out with stuff that with the alteration of a few names would
have fitted into the DAILY MAIL of 1918. If there was one thing that the British
intelligentsia were committed to, it was the debunking version of war, the theory that war
is all corpses and latrines and never leads to any good result. Well, the same people who
in 1933 sniggered pityingly if you said that in certain circumstances you would fight for
your country, in 1937 were denouncing you as a Trotsky-Fascist if you suggested that the
stories in NEW MASSES about freshly wounded men clamouring to get back into the
fighting might be exaggerated. And the Left intelligentsia made their swing-over from
‘War is hell’ to ‘War is glorious’ not only with no sense of incongruity but almost
without any intervening stage. Later the bulk of them were to make other transitions
equally violent. There must be a quite large number of people, a sort of central core of the
intelligentsia, who approved the ‘King and Country’ declaration in 1935, shouted for a’
firm line against Germany’ in 1937, supported the People’s Convention in 1940, and are
demanding a Second Front now.
As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur
nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of
newspaper and radio hypnosis. In the intelligentsia I should say they result rather from
money and mere physical safety. At a given moment they may be ‘pro-war’ or ‘ anti-war
but in either case they have no realistic picture of war in their minds. When they enthused
over the Spanish war they knew, of course, that people were being killed and that to be
killed is unpleasant, but they did feel that for a soldier in the Spanish Republican army
the experience of war was somehow not degrading. Somehow the latrines stank less,
discipline was less irksome. You have only to glance at the NEW STATESMAN to see
that they believed that; exactly similar blah is being written about the Red Army at this
moment. We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple.
To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil,
and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those
who don’t take the sword perish by smelly diseases. The fact that such a platitude is
worth writing down shows what the years of RENTIER capitalism have done to us.
2
In connexion with what I have just said, a footnote, on atrocities.
I have little direct evidence about the atrocities in the Spanish civil war. I know that some
were committed by the Republicans, and far more (they are still continuing) by the
Fascists. But what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever since, is that atrocities
are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone
believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without
ever bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during
the period between 1918 and the present; there was never a year when atrocities were not
occurring somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the
Right believed in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any moment the
situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday’s proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can
become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed.
In the present war we are in the curious situation that our ‘atrocity campaign’ was done
largely before the war started, and done mostly by the Left, the people who normally
pride themselves on their incredulity. In the same period the Right, the atrocity-mongers
of 1914-18, were gazing at Nazi Germany and flatly refusing to see any evil in it. Then as
soon as war broke out it was the pro-Nazis of yesterday who were repeating horror
stories, while the anti-Nazis suddenly found themselves doubting whether the Gestapo
really existed. Nor was this solely the result of the Russo-German Pact. It was partly
because before the war the Left had wrongly believed that Britain and Gennany would
never fight and were therefore able to be anti-German and anti-British simultaneously;
partly also because official war-propaganda, with its disgusting hypocrisy and self-
righteousness, always tends to make thinking people sympathize with the enemy. Part of
the price we paid for the systematic lying of 1914-17 was the exaggerated pro-German
reaction which followed. During the years 1918-33 you were hooted at in left-wing
circles if you suggested that Gennany bore even a fraction of responsibility for the war.
In all the denunciations of Versailles I listened to during those years I don’t think I ever
once heard the question, ‘What would have happened if Germany had won? ’ even
mentioned, let alone discussed. So also with atrocities. The truth, it is felt, becomes
untruth when your enemy utters it. Recently I noticed that the very people who
swallowed any and every horror story about the Japanese in Nanking in 1937 refused to
believe exactly the same stories about Hong Kong in 1942. There was even a tendency to
feel that the Nanking atrocities had become, as it were, retrospectively untrue because the
British Government now drew attention to them.
But unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they are lied about and
made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen. The fact often adduced as a reason
for scepticism — that the same horror stories come up in war after war — merely makes it
rather more likely that these stories are true. Evidently they are widespread fantasies, and
war provides an opportunity of putting them into practice. Also, although it has ceased to
be fashionable to say so, there is little question that what one may roughly call the
‘whites’ commit far more and worse atrocities than the ‘reds’. There is not the slightest
doubt, for instance, about the behaviour of the Japanese in China. Nor is there much
doubt about the long tale of Fascist outrages during the last ten years in Europe. The
volume of testimony is enormous, and a respectable proportion of it comes from the
Gennan press and radio. These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one’s eye
on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened. The raping and
butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish
professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish
roads — they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the DAILY
TELEGRAPH has suddenly found out about them when it is live years too late.
3
Two memories, the first not proving anything in particular, the second, I think, giving one
a certain insight into the atmosphere of a revolutionary period:
Early one morning another man and I had gone out to snipe at the Fascists in the trenches
outside Huesca. Their line and ours here lay three hundred yards apart, at which range
our aged rifles would not shoot accurately, but by sneaking out to a spot about a hundred
yards from the Fascist trench you might, if you were lucky, get a shot at someone through
a gap in the parapet. Unfortunately the ground between was a flat beet field with no cover
except a few ditches, and it was necessary to go out while it was still-dark and return
soon after dawn, before the light became too good. This time no Fascists appeared, and
we stayed too long and were caught by the dawn. We were in a ditch, but behind us were
two hundred yards of flat ground with hardly enough cover for a rabbit. We were still
trying to nerve ourselves to make a dash for it when there was an uproar and a blowing of
whistles in the Fascist trench. Some of our aeroplanes were coming over. At this moment,
a man presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran
along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his
trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I am a
poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards, and also that I was
thinking chiefly about getting back to our trench while the Fascists had their attention
fixed on the aeroplanes. Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the
trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers
isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like
shooting at him.
What does this incident demonstrate? Nothing very much, because it is the kind of thing
that happens all the time in all wars. The other is different. I don’t suppose that in telling
it I can make it moving to you who read it, but I ask you to believe that it is moving to
me, as an incident characteristic of the moral atmosphere of a particular moment in time.
One of the recruits who joined us while I was at the barracks was a wild-looking boy
from the back streets of Barcelona. He was ragged and barefooted. He was also extremely
dark (Arab blood, I dare say), and made gestures you do not usually see a European
make; one in particular — the ann outstretched, the palm vertical — was a gesture
characteristic of Indians. One day a bundle of cigars, which you could still buy dirt cheap
at that time, was stolen out of my bunk. Rather foolishly I reported this to the officer, and
one of the scallywags I have already mentioned promptly came forward and said quite
untruly that twenty-five pesetas had been stolen from his bunk. For some reason the
officer instantly decided that the brown-faced boy must be the thief. They were very hard
on stealing in the militia, and in theory people could be shot for it. The wretched boy
allowed himself to be led off to the guardroom to be searched. What most struck me was
that he barely attempted to protest his innocence. In the fatalism of his attitude you could
see the desperate poverty in which he had been bred. The officer ordered him to take his
clothes off. With a humility which was horrible to me he stripped himself naked, and his
clothes were searched. Of course neither the cigars nor the money were there; in fact he
had not stolen them. What was most painful of all was that he seemed no less ashamed
after his innocence had been established. That night I took him to the pictures and gave
him brandy and chocolate. But that too was horrible — I mean the attempt to wipe out an
injury with money. For a few minutes I had half believed him to be a thief, and that could
not be wiped out.
Well, a few weeks later at the front I had trouble with one of the men in my section. By
this time I was a ‘cabo’, or corporal, in command of twelve men. It was static warfare,
horribly cold, and the chief job was getting sentries to stay awake at their posts. One day
a man suddenly refused to go to a certain post, which he said quite truly was exposed to
enemy fire. He was a feeble creature, and I seized hold of him and began to drag him
towards his post. This roused the feelings of the others against me, for Spaniards, I think,
resent being touched more than we do. Instantly I was surrounded by a ring of shouting
men:’ Fascist! Fascist! Let that man go! This isn’t a bourgeois army. Fascist! ’ etc. , etc.
As best I could in my bad Spanish I shouted back that orders had got to be obeyed, and
the row developed into one of those enormous arguments by means of which discipline is
gradually hammered out in revolutionary armies. Some said I was right, others said I was
wrong. But the point is that the one who took my side the most warmly of all was the
brown-faced boy. As soon as he saw what was happening he sprang into the ring and
began passionately defending me. With his strange, wild, Indian gesture he kept
exclaiming, ‘He’s the best corporal we’ve got! ’ (NO HAY CABO COMO EL! ) Later on
he applied for leave to exchange into my section.
Why is this incident touching to me? Because in any normal circumstances it would have
been impossible for good feelings ever to be re-established between this boy and myself.
The implied accusation of theft would not have been made any better, probably
somewhat worse, by my efforts to make amends. One of the effects of safe and civilized
life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions seem
somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as
ingratitude. But in Spain in 1936 we were not living in a nonnal time. It was a time when
generous feelings and gestures were easier than they ordinarily are. I could relate a dozen
similar incidents, not really communicable but bound up in my own mind with the special
atmosphere of the time, the shabby clothes and the gay-coloured revolutionary posters,
the universal use of the word ‘comrade’, the anti-Fascist ballads printed on flimsy paper
and sold for a penny, the phrases like ‘international proletarian solidarty’, pathetically
repeated by ignorant men who believed them to mean something. Could you feel friendly
towards somebody, and stick up for him in a quarrel, after you had been ignominiously
searched in his presence for property you were supposed to have stolen from him? No,
you couldn’t; but you might if you had both been through some emotionally widening
experience. That is one of the by-products of revolution, though in this case it was only
the beginnings of a revolution, and obviously foredoomed to failure.
4
The struggle for power between the Spanish Republican parties is an unhappy, far-off
thing which I have no wish to revive at this date. I only mention it in order to say: believe
nothing, or next to nothing, of what you read about internal affairs on the Government
side. It is all, from whatever source, party propaganda — that is to say, lies. The broad
truth about the war is simple enough. The Spanish bourgeoisie saw their chance of
crushing the labour movement, and took it, aided by the Nazis and by the forces of
reaction all over the world. It is doubtful whether more than that will ever be established.
I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History stopped in 1936’, at which he
nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general,
but more particularly of the Spanish civil war. Early in life I have noticed that no event is
ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper
reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is
implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting,
and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had
fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot
fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London
retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events
that had never happened.
I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what
happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. Yet in a
way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant. It concerned secondary issues —
namely, the struggle for power between the Comintern and the Spanish left-wing parties,
and the efforts of the Russian Government to prevent revolution in Spain. But the broad
picture of the war which the Spanish Government presented to the world was not
untruthful. The main issues were what it said they were. But as for the Fascists and their
backers, how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How could they possibly
mention their real aims? Their version of the war was pure fantasy, and in the
circumstances it could not have been otherwise.
The only propaganda line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to represent themselves as
Christian patriots saving Spain from a Russian dictatorship. This involved pretending that
life in Government Spain was just one long massacre (VIDE the CATHOLIC HERALD
or the DAILY MAIL — but these were child’s play compared with the Continental Fascist
press), and it involved immensely exaggerating the scale of Russian intervention. Out of
the huge pyramid of lies which the Catholic and reactionary press all over the world built
up, let me take just one point — the presence in Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco
partisans all believed in this; estimates of its strength went as high as half a million. Now,
there was no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a handful of airmen and other
technicians, a few hundred at the most, but an army there was not. Some thousands of
foreigners who fought in Spain, not to mention millions of Spaniards, were witnesses of
this. Well, their testimony made no impression at all upon the Franco propagandists, not
one of whom had set foot in Government Spain. Simultaneously these people refused
utterly to admit the fact of German or Italian intervention at the same time as the
Gennany and Italian press were openly boasting about the exploits of their’ legionaries’. I
have chosen to mention only one point, but in fact the whole of Fascist propaganda about
the war was on this level.
This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very
concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those
lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish
war be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books,
and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never existed will become
historical fact, and schoolchildren will leam about it generations hence. But suppose
Fascism is finally defeated and some kind of democratic government restored in Spain in
the fairly near future; even then, how is the history of the war to be written? What kind of
records will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the records kept on the
Government side are recoverable — even so, how is a true history of the war to be written?
For, as I have pointed out already, the Government, also dealt extensively in lies. From
the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would
be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history
will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be
universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to
believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our
own age is the abandonment of the idea that history COULD be truthfully written. In the
past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they
struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each
case they believed that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice
there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost
everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, you will find that a respectable amount of the
material is drawn from German sources. A British and a Gennan historian would disagree
deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it
were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this
common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of
animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a
thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science’. There is only
‘German Science’, ‘Jewish Science’, etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a
nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future
but THE PAST. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ — well,
it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five. This
prospect frightens me much more than bombs — and after our experiences of the last few
years that is not a frivolous statement.
But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future?
Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just
remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t
come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white
tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two
safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it
were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military
efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the
liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several
Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist. We in
England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past
security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing
you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in
which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil
always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this
belief. Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What
evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modem industrialized state
collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?
Consider for instance the re-institution of slavery. Who could have imagined twenty
years ago that slavery would return to Europe? Well, slavery has been restored under our
noses. The forced-labour camps all over Europe and North Africa where Poles, Russians,
Jews and political prisoners of every race toil at road-making or swamp-draining for their
bare rations, are simple chattle slavery. The most one can say is that the buying and
selling of slaves by individuals is not yet permitted. In other ways — the breaking-up of
families, for instance — the conditions are probably worse than they were on the
American cotton plantations. There is no reason for thinking that this state of affairs will
change while any totalitarian domination endures. We don’t grasp its full implications,
because in our mystical way we feel that a regime founded on slavery MUST collapse.
But it is worth comparing the duration of the slave empires of antiquity with that of any
modem state. Civilizations founded on slavery have lasted for such periods as four
thousand years.
When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions
of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind
them no record whatever. We do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and
Roman history, how many slaves’ names are known to you? I can think of two, or
possibly three. One is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus. Also, in the Roman room at
the British Museum there is a glass jar with the maker’s name inscribed on the bottom,
‘FELIX FECIT’. I have a mental picture of poor Felix (a Gaul with red hair and a metal
collar round his neck), but in fact he may not have been a slave; so there are only two
slaves whose names I definitely know, and probably few people can remember more. The
rest have gone down into utter silence.
5
The backbone of the resistance against Franco was the Spanish working class, especially
the urban trade union members. In the long run — it is important to remember that it is
only in the long run — the working class remains the most reliable enemy of Fascism,
simply because the working-class stands to gain most by a decent reconstruction of
society. Unlike other classes or categories, it can’t be permanently bribed.
To say this is not to idealize the working class. In the long struggle that has followed the
Russian Revolution it is the manual workers who have been defeated, and it is impossible
not to feel that it was their own fault. Time after time, in country after country, the
organized working-class movements have been crushed by open, illegal violence, and
their comrades abroad, linked to themin theoretical solidarity, have simply looked on and
done nothing; and underneath this, secret cause of many betrayals, has lain the fact that
between white and coloured workers there is not even lip-service to solidarity. Who can
believe in the class-conscious international proletariat after the events of the past ten
years? To the British working class the massacre of their comrades in Vienna, Berlin,
Madrid, or wherever it might be seemed less interesting and less important than
yesterday’s football match. Yet this does not alter the fact that the working class will go
on struggling against Fascism after the others have caved in. One feature of the Nazi
conquest of France was the astonishing defections among the intelligentsia, including
some of the left-wing political intelligentsia. The intelligentsia are the people who squeal
loudest against Fascism, and yet a respectable proportion of them collapse into defeatism
when the pinch comes. They are far-sighted enough to see the odds against them, and
moreoever they can be bribed — for it is evident that the Nazis think it worth while to
bribe intellectuals. With the working class it is the other way about. Too ignorant to see
through the trick that is being played on them, they easily swallow the promises of
Fascism, yet sooner or later they always take up the struggle again. They must do so,
because in their own bodies they always discover that the promises of Fascism cannot be
fulfilled. To win over the working class permanently, the Fascists would have to raise the
general standard of living, which they are unable and probably unwilling to do. The
struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid,
but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the
face of endless discouragements. What are the workers struggling for? Simply for the
decent life which they are more and more aware is now technically possible. Their
consciousness of this aim ebbs and flows. In Spain, for a while, people were acting
consciously, moving towards a goal which they wanted to reach and believed they could
reach. It accounted for the curiously buoyant feeling that life in Government Spain had
during the early months of the war. The common people knew in their bones that the
Republic was their friend and Franco was their enemy. They knew that they were in the
right, because they were fighting for something which the world owed them and was able
to give them.
One has to remember this to see the Spanish war in its true perspective. When one thinks
of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of War — and in this particular case of the intrigues, the
persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings — there is always the temptation to say:
‘One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral’. In practice, however, one cannot be
neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who
wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for
reaction. The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals,
play-boys, Blimps, and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay.
In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people
everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over
the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface.
6
The outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin — at any rate
not in Spain. After the summer of 1937 those with eyes in their heads realized that the
Government could not win the war unless there were some profound change in the
international set-up, and in deciding to fight on Negrin and the others may have been
partly influenced by the expectation that the world war which actually broke out in 1939
was coming in 1938. The much-publicized disunity on the Government side was not a
main cause of defeat. The Government militias were hurriedly raised, ill-armed and
unimaginative in their military outlook, but they would have been the same if complete
political agreement had existed from the start. At the outbreak of war the average Spanish
factory-worker did not even know how to fire a rifle (there had never been universal
conscription in Spain), and the traditional pacifism of the Left was a great handicap. The
thousands of foreigners who served in Spain made good infantry, but there were very few
experts of any kind among them. The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won
if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalize factories,
demolish churches, and issue revolutionary manifestoes would not have made the armies
more efficient. The Fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modem arms
and the others hadn’t. No political strategy could offset that.
The most baffling thing in the Spanish war was the behaviour of the great powers. The
war was actually won for Franco by the Germans and Italians, whose motives were
obvious enough. The motives of France and Britain are less easy to understand. In 1936 it
was clear to everyone that if Britain would only help the Spanish Government, even to
the extent of a few million pounds’ worth of arms, Franco would collapse and German
strategy would be severely dislocated. By that time one did not need to be a clairvoyant
to foresee that war between Britain and Gennany was coming; one could even foretell
within a year or two when it would come. Yet in the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical
way the British ruling class did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis.
Why? Because they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer. Undoubtedly they were,
and yet when it came to the final showdown they chose to Stand up to Gennany. It is still
very uncertain what plan they acted on in backing Franco, and they may have had no
clear plan at all. Whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the
most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question.
As to the Russians, their motives in the Spanish war are completely inscrutable. Did they,
as the pinks believed, intervene in Spain in order to defend Democracy and thwart the
Nazis? Then why did they intervene on such a niggardly scale and finally leave Spain in
the lurch? Or did they, as the Catholics maintained, intervene in order to foster revolution
in Spain? Then why did they do all in their power to crush the Spanish revolutionary
movements, defend private property and hand power to the middle class as against the
working class? Or did they, as the Trotskyists suggested, intervene simply in order to
PREVENT a Spanish revolution? Then why not have backed Franco? Indeed, their
actions are most easily explained if one assumes that they were acting on several
contradictory motives. I believe that in the future we shall come to feel that Stalin’s
foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as it is claimed to be, has been
merely opportunistic and stupid. But at any rate, the Spanish civil war demonstrated that
the Nazis knew what they were doing and their opponents did not. The war was fought at
a low technical level and its major strategy was very simple. That side which had arms
would win. The Nazis and the Italians gave arms to the Spanish Fascist friends, and the
western democracies and the Russians didn’t give arms to those who should have been
their friends. So the Spanish Republic perished, having’ gained what no republic missed’.
Whether it was right, as all left-wingers in other countries undoubtedly did, to encourage
the Spaniards to go on fighting when they could not win is a question hard to answer. I
myself think it was right, because I believe that it is better even from the point of view of
survival to fight and be conquered than to surrender without fighting. The effects on the
grand strategy of the struggle against Fascism cannot be assessed yet. The ragged,
weaponless annies of the Republic held out for two and a half years, which was
undoubtedly longer than their enemies expected. But whether that dislocated the Fascist
timetable, or whether, on the other hand, it merely postponed the major war and gave the
Nazis extra time to get their war machine into trim, is still uncertain.
7
I never think of the Spanish war without two memories coming into my mind. One is of
the hospital ward at Lerida and the rather sad voices of the wounded militiamen singing
some song with a refrain that ended —
UNA RESOLUCION,
LUCHAR HAST’ AL FIN!
Well, they fought to the end all right. For the last eighteen months of the war the
Republican armies must have been fighting almost without cigarettes, and with precious
little food. Even when I left Spain in the middle of 1937, meat and bread were scarce,
tobacco a rarity, coffee and sugar almost unobtainable.
The other memory is of the Italian militiaman who shook my hand in the guardroom, the
day I joined the militia. I wrote about this man at the beginning of my book on the
Spanish war [Homage to Catalonia! , and do not want to repeat what I said there. When I
remember — oh, how vividly! — his shabby uniform and fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the
complex side-issues of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any
rate no doubt as to who was in the right. In spite of power politics and journalistic lying,
the central issue of the war was the attempt of people like this to win the decent life
which they knew to be their birthright. It is difficult to think of this particular man’s
probable end without several kinds of bitterness. Since I met him in the Lenin Barracks
he was probably a Trotskyist or an Anarchist, and in the peculiar conditions of our time,
when people of that sort are not killed by the Gestapo they are usually killed by the
G. P. U. But that does not affect the long-tenn issues. This man’s face, which I saw only
for a minute or two, remains with me as a sort of visual reminder of what the war was
really about. He symbolizes for me the flower of the European working class, harried by
the police of all countries, the people who fill the mass graves of the Spanish battlefields
and are now, to the tune of several millions, rotting in forced-labour camps.
When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands
amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a
while could bring Hitler, Petain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst,
Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the
Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady
Houston, and Marinetti all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are
all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread
the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is
talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple
intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a
partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not
accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of
California, are great on the’ change of heart’, much more reassuring from their point of
view than a change in the economic system. Petain attributes the fall of France to the
common people’s ‘love of pleasure’. One sees this in its right perspective if one stops to
wonder how much pleasure the ordinary French peasant’s or working-man’s life would
contain compared with Petain’ s own. The damned impertinence of these politicians,
priests, literary men, and what-not who lecture the working-class socialist for his
‘materialism’! All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the
indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all. Enough to eat,
freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children
will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn’t
leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is
done. Not one of those who preach against ‘materialism’ would consider life livable
without these things. And how easily that minimum could be attained if we chose to set
our minds to it for only twenty years! To raise the standard of living of the whole world
to that of Britain would not be a greater undertaking than the war we have just fought. I
don’t claim, and I don’t know who does, that that wouldn’t solve anything in itself. It is
merely that privation and brute labour have to be abolished before the real problems of
humanity can be tackled. The major problem of our time is the decay of the belief in
personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either
drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police. How right the working
classes are in their ‘materialism’! How right they are to realize that the belly comes
before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time! Understand that, and the
long horror that we are enduring becomes at least intelligible. All the considerations are
likely to make one falter — the siren voices of a Petain or of a Gandhi, the inescapable fact
that in order to fight one has to degrade oneself, the equivocal moral position of Britain,
with its democratic phrases and its coolie empire, the sinister development of Soviet
Russia, the squalid farce of left-wing politics — all this fades away and one sees only the
struggle of the gradually awakening common people against the lords of property and
their hired liars and bumsuckers. The question is very simple. Shall people like that
Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which is now technically
achievable, or shan’t they? Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall
he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win
his light sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not later — some time within the
next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was
the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the last war, and perhaps of other wars yet to
come.
I never saw the Italian militiaman again, nor did I ever learn his name. It can be taken as
quite certain that he is dead. Nearly two years later, when the war was visibly lost, I
wrote these verses in his memory:
The Italian soldier shook my hand
Beside the guard-room table;
The strong hand and the subtle hand
Whose palms are only able
To meet within the sound of guns,
But oh! what peace I knew then
In gazing on his battered face
Purer than any woman’s!
For the flyblown words that make me spew
Still in his ears were holy,
And he was born knowing what I had learned
Out of books and slowly.
The treacherous guns had told their tale
And we both had bought it,
But my gold brick was made of gold —
Oh!
was nearer the mark than Wells’s. The early Bolshevik s may have been angels or
demons, according as one chooses to regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible
men. They were not introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints, which, like
the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by witchcraft trials.
The same misconception reappears in an inverted fonn in Wells’s attitude to the Nazis.
Hitler is all the war-lords and witchdoctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues
Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost
immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense does not
really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a civilising influence
but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that
fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much
of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The
order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the
aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age.
Science is lighting on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for Wells to
accept this. It would contradict the world-view on which his own works are based. The
war-lords and the witch-doctors MUST fail, the common-sense World State, as seen by a
nineteenth-century liberal whose heart does not leap at the sound of bugles, MUST
triumph. Treachery and defeatism apart, Hitler CANNOT be a danger. That he should
finally win would be an impossible reversal of history, like a Jacobite restoration.
But is it not a sort of parricide for a person of my age (thirty-eight) to find fault with H. G.
Wells? Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some
sense Wells’s own creation. How much influence any mere writer has, and especially a
“popular” writer whose work takes effect quickly, is questionable, but I doubt whether
anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English
language, influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us, and therefore the
physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed. Only, just the
singleness of mind, the one-sided imagination that made him seem like an inspired
prophet in the Edwardian age, make him a shallow, inadequate thinker now. When Wells
was young, the antithesis between science and reaction was not false. Society was ruled
by narrow-minded, profoundly incurious people, predatory businessmen, dull squires,
bishops, politicians who could quote Horace but had never heard of algebra. Science was
faintly disreputable and religious belief obligatory. Traditionalism, stupidity,
snobbishness, patriotism, superstition and love of war seemed to be all on the same side;
there was need of someone who could state the opposite point of view. Back in the
nineteen-hundreds it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H. G. Wells. There
you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers, with your future employers
exhorting you to “get on or get out”, your parents systematically warping your sexual life,
and your dull-witted schoolmasters sniggering over their Latin tags; and here was this
wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the planets and the bottom of
the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people
imagined. A decade or so before aeroplanes were technically feasible Wells knew that
within a little while men would be able to fly. He knew that because he himself wanted to
be able to fly, and therefore felt sure that research in that direction would continue. On
the other hand, even when I was a little boy, at a time when the Wright brothers had
actually lifted their machine off the ground for fifty-nine seconds, the generally accepted
opinion was that if God had meant us to fly He would have given us wings. Up to 1914
Wells was in the main a true prophet. In physical details his vision of the new world has
been fulfilled to a surprising extent.
But because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a non-military nation and class,
he could not grasp the tremendous strength of the old world which was symbolised in his
mind by fox-hunting Tories. He was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that
nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what
he himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching
into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong
magic to lay them. The people who have shown the best understanding of Fascism are
either those who have suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in themselves.
A crude book like THE IRON HEEL, written nearly thirty years ago, is a truer prophecy
of the future than either BRAVE NEW WORLD or THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO
COME. If one had to choose among Wells’s own contemporaries a writer who could
stand towards him as a corrective, one might choose Kipling, who was not deaf to the evil
voices of power and military “glory”. Kipling would have understood the appeal of
Hitler, or for that matter of Stalin, whatever his attitude towards them might be. Wells is
too sane to understand the modern world. The succession of lower-middle-class novels
which are his greatest achievement stopped short at the other war and never really began
again, and since 1920 he has squandered his talents in slaying paper dragons. But how
much it is, after all, to have any talents to squander.
LOOKING BACK ON THE SPANISH WAR (1942)
1
First of all the physical memories, the sounds, the smells and the surfaces of things.
It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I
remember the week of so-called training that we received before being sent to the front —
the huge cavalry barracks in Barcelona with its draughty stables and cobbled yards, the
icy cold of the pump where one washed, the filthy meals made tolerable by pannikins of
wine, the Trousered militia-women chopping firewood, and the roll-call in the early
mornings where my prosaic English name made a sort of comic interlude among the
resounding Spanish ones, Manuel Gonzalez, Pedro Aguilar, Ramon Fenellosa, Roque
Ballaster, Jaime Domenech, Sebastian Viltron, Ramon Nuvo Bosch. I name those
particular men because I remember the faces of all of them. Except for two who were
mere riff-raff and have doubtless become good Falangists by this time, it is probable that
all of them are dead. Two of them I know to be dead. The eldest would have been about
twenty-five, the youngest sixteen.
One of the essential experiences of war is never being able to escape from disgusting
smells of human origin. Latrines are an overworked subject in war literature, and I would
not mention them if it were not that the latrine in our barracks did its necessary bit
towards puncturing my own illusions about the Spanish civil war. The Latin type of
latrine, at which you have to squat, is bad enough at its best, but these were made of some
kind of polished stone so slippery that it was all you could do to keep on your feet. In
addition they were always blocked. Now I have plenty of other disgusting things in my
memory, but I believe it was these latrines that first brought home to me the thought, so
often to recur: ‘Here we are, soldiers of a revolutionary army, defending Democracy
against Fascism, fighting a war which is ABOUT something, and the detail of our lives is
just as sordid and degrading as it could be in prison, let alone in a bourgeois army. ’ Many
other things reinforced this impression later; for instance, the boredom and animal hunger
of trench life, the squalid intrigues over scraps of food, the mean, nagging quarrels which
people exhausted by lack of sleep indulge in.
The essential horror of anny life (whoever has been a soldier will know what I mean by
the essential horror of army life) is barely affected by the nature of the war you happen to
be fighting in. Discipline, for instance, is ultimately the same in all annies. Orders have
to be obeyed and enforced by punishment if necessary, the relationship of officer and
man has to be the relationship of superior and inferior. The picture of war set forth in
books like ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT is substantially true. Bullets hurt,
corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers. It is true
that the social background from which an army springs will colour its training, tactics and
general efficiency, and also that the consciousness of being in the right can bolster up
morale, though this affects the civilian population more than the troops. (People forget
that a soldier anywhere near the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or,
above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war. ) But the laws of nature
are not suspended for a ‘red’ army any more than for a ‘white’ one. A louse is a louse and
a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just.
Why is it worth while to point out anything so obvious? Because the bulk of the British
and American intelligentsia were manifestly unaware of it then, and are now. Our
memories are short nowadays, but look back a bit, dig out the files of NEW MASSES or
the DAILY WORKER, and just have a look at the romantic warmongering muck that our
left-wingers were spilling at that time. All the stale old phrases! And the unimaginative
callousness of it! The sang-froid with which London faced the bombing of Madrid! Here
I am not bothering about the counter-propagandists of the Right, the Lunns, Garvins ET
HOC GENUS; they go without saying. But here were the very people who for twenty
years had hooted and jeered at the ‘glory’ of war, at atrocity stories, at patriotism, even at
physical courage, coming out with stuff that with the alteration of a few names would
have fitted into the DAILY MAIL of 1918. If there was one thing that the British
intelligentsia were committed to, it was the debunking version of war, the theory that war
is all corpses and latrines and never leads to any good result. Well, the same people who
in 1933 sniggered pityingly if you said that in certain circumstances you would fight for
your country, in 1937 were denouncing you as a Trotsky-Fascist if you suggested that the
stories in NEW MASSES about freshly wounded men clamouring to get back into the
fighting might be exaggerated. And the Left intelligentsia made their swing-over from
‘War is hell’ to ‘War is glorious’ not only with no sense of incongruity but almost
without any intervening stage. Later the bulk of them were to make other transitions
equally violent. There must be a quite large number of people, a sort of central core of the
intelligentsia, who approved the ‘King and Country’ declaration in 1935, shouted for a’
firm line against Germany’ in 1937, supported the People’s Convention in 1940, and are
demanding a Second Front now.
As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur
nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of
newspaper and radio hypnosis. In the intelligentsia I should say they result rather from
money and mere physical safety. At a given moment they may be ‘pro-war’ or ‘ anti-war
but in either case they have no realistic picture of war in their minds. When they enthused
over the Spanish war they knew, of course, that people were being killed and that to be
killed is unpleasant, but they did feel that for a soldier in the Spanish Republican army
the experience of war was somehow not degrading. Somehow the latrines stank less,
discipline was less irksome. You have only to glance at the NEW STATESMAN to see
that they believed that; exactly similar blah is being written about the Red Army at this
moment. We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple.
To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil,
and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those
who don’t take the sword perish by smelly diseases. The fact that such a platitude is
worth writing down shows what the years of RENTIER capitalism have done to us.
2
In connexion with what I have just said, a footnote, on atrocities.
I have little direct evidence about the atrocities in the Spanish civil war. I know that some
were committed by the Republicans, and far more (they are still continuing) by the
Fascists. But what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever since, is that atrocities
are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone
believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without
ever bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during
the period between 1918 and the present; there was never a year when atrocities were not
occurring somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the
Right believed in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any moment the
situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday’s proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can
become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed.
In the present war we are in the curious situation that our ‘atrocity campaign’ was done
largely before the war started, and done mostly by the Left, the people who normally
pride themselves on their incredulity. In the same period the Right, the atrocity-mongers
of 1914-18, were gazing at Nazi Germany and flatly refusing to see any evil in it. Then as
soon as war broke out it was the pro-Nazis of yesterday who were repeating horror
stories, while the anti-Nazis suddenly found themselves doubting whether the Gestapo
really existed. Nor was this solely the result of the Russo-German Pact. It was partly
because before the war the Left had wrongly believed that Britain and Gennany would
never fight and were therefore able to be anti-German and anti-British simultaneously;
partly also because official war-propaganda, with its disgusting hypocrisy and self-
righteousness, always tends to make thinking people sympathize with the enemy. Part of
the price we paid for the systematic lying of 1914-17 was the exaggerated pro-German
reaction which followed. During the years 1918-33 you were hooted at in left-wing
circles if you suggested that Gennany bore even a fraction of responsibility for the war.
In all the denunciations of Versailles I listened to during those years I don’t think I ever
once heard the question, ‘What would have happened if Germany had won? ’ even
mentioned, let alone discussed. So also with atrocities. The truth, it is felt, becomes
untruth when your enemy utters it. Recently I noticed that the very people who
swallowed any and every horror story about the Japanese in Nanking in 1937 refused to
believe exactly the same stories about Hong Kong in 1942. There was even a tendency to
feel that the Nanking atrocities had become, as it were, retrospectively untrue because the
British Government now drew attention to them.
But unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they are lied about and
made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen. The fact often adduced as a reason
for scepticism — that the same horror stories come up in war after war — merely makes it
rather more likely that these stories are true. Evidently they are widespread fantasies, and
war provides an opportunity of putting them into practice. Also, although it has ceased to
be fashionable to say so, there is little question that what one may roughly call the
‘whites’ commit far more and worse atrocities than the ‘reds’. There is not the slightest
doubt, for instance, about the behaviour of the Japanese in China. Nor is there much
doubt about the long tale of Fascist outrages during the last ten years in Europe. The
volume of testimony is enormous, and a respectable proportion of it comes from the
Gennan press and radio. These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one’s eye
on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened. The raping and
butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish
professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish
roads — they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the DAILY
TELEGRAPH has suddenly found out about them when it is live years too late.
3
Two memories, the first not proving anything in particular, the second, I think, giving one
a certain insight into the atmosphere of a revolutionary period:
Early one morning another man and I had gone out to snipe at the Fascists in the trenches
outside Huesca. Their line and ours here lay three hundred yards apart, at which range
our aged rifles would not shoot accurately, but by sneaking out to a spot about a hundred
yards from the Fascist trench you might, if you were lucky, get a shot at someone through
a gap in the parapet. Unfortunately the ground between was a flat beet field with no cover
except a few ditches, and it was necessary to go out while it was still-dark and return
soon after dawn, before the light became too good. This time no Fascists appeared, and
we stayed too long and were caught by the dawn. We were in a ditch, but behind us were
two hundred yards of flat ground with hardly enough cover for a rabbit. We were still
trying to nerve ourselves to make a dash for it when there was an uproar and a blowing of
whistles in the Fascist trench. Some of our aeroplanes were coming over. At this moment,
a man presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran
along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his
trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I am a
poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards, and also that I was
thinking chiefly about getting back to our trench while the Fascists had their attention
fixed on the aeroplanes. Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the
trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers
isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like
shooting at him.
What does this incident demonstrate? Nothing very much, because it is the kind of thing
that happens all the time in all wars. The other is different. I don’t suppose that in telling
it I can make it moving to you who read it, but I ask you to believe that it is moving to
me, as an incident characteristic of the moral atmosphere of a particular moment in time.
One of the recruits who joined us while I was at the barracks was a wild-looking boy
from the back streets of Barcelona. He was ragged and barefooted. He was also extremely
dark (Arab blood, I dare say), and made gestures you do not usually see a European
make; one in particular — the ann outstretched, the palm vertical — was a gesture
characteristic of Indians. One day a bundle of cigars, which you could still buy dirt cheap
at that time, was stolen out of my bunk. Rather foolishly I reported this to the officer, and
one of the scallywags I have already mentioned promptly came forward and said quite
untruly that twenty-five pesetas had been stolen from his bunk. For some reason the
officer instantly decided that the brown-faced boy must be the thief. They were very hard
on stealing in the militia, and in theory people could be shot for it. The wretched boy
allowed himself to be led off to the guardroom to be searched. What most struck me was
that he barely attempted to protest his innocence. In the fatalism of his attitude you could
see the desperate poverty in which he had been bred. The officer ordered him to take his
clothes off. With a humility which was horrible to me he stripped himself naked, and his
clothes were searched. Of course neither the cigars nor the money were there; in fact he
had not stolen them. What was most painful of all was that he seemed no less ashamed
after his innocence had been established. That night I took him to the pictures and gave
him brandy and chocolate. But that too was horrible — I mean the attempt to wipe out an
injury with money. For a few minutes I had half believed him to be a thief, and that could
not be wiped out.
Well, a few weeks later at the front I had trouble with one of the men in my section. By
this time I was a ‘cabo’, or corporal, in command of twelve men. It was static warfare,
horribly cold, and the chief job was getting sentries to stay awake at their posts. One day
a man suddenly refused to go to a certain post, which he said quite truly was exposed to
enemy fire. He was a feeble creature, and I seized hold of him and began to drag him
towards his post. This roused the feelings of the others against me, for Spaniards, I think,
resent being touched more than we do. Instantly I was surrounded by a ring of shouting
men:’ Fascist! Fascist! Let that man go! This isn’t a bourgeois army. Fascist! ’ etc. , etc.
As best I could in my bad Spanish I shouted back that orders had got to be obeyed, and
the row developed into one of those enormous arguments by means of which discipline is
gradually hammered out in revolutionary armies. Some said I was right, others said I was
wrong. But the point is that the one who took my side the most warmly of all was the
brown-faced boy. As soon as he saw what was happening he sprang into the ring and
began passionately defending me. With his strange, wild, Indian gesture he kept
exclaiming, ‘He’s the best corporal we’ve got! ’ (NO HAY CABO COMO EL! ) Later on
he applied for leave to exchange into my section.
Why is this incident touching to me? Because in any normal circumstances it would have
been impossible for good feelings ever to be re-established between this boy and myself.
The implied accusation of theft would not have been made any better, probably
somewhat worse, by my efforts to make amends. One of the effects of safe and civilized
life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions seem
somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as
ingratitude. But in Spain in 1936 we were not living in a nonnal time. It was a time when
generous feelings and gestures were easier than they ordinarily are. I could relate a dozen
similar incidents, not really communicable but bound up in my own mind with the special
atmosphere of the time, the shabby clothes and the gay-coloured revolutionary posters,
the universal use of the word ‘comrade’, the anti-Fascist ballads printed on flimsy paper
and sold for a penny, the phrases like ‘international proletarian solidarty’, pathetically
repeated by ignorant men who believed them to mean something. Could you feel friendly
towards somebody, and stick up for him in a quarrel, after you had been ignominiously
searched in his presence for property you were supposed to have stolen from him? No,
you couldn’t; but you might if you had both been through some emotionally widening
experience. That is one of the by-products of revolution, though in this case it was only
the beginnings of a revolution, and obviously foredoomed to failure.
4
The struggle for power between the Spanish Republican parties is an unhappy, far-off
thing which I have no wish to revive at this date. I only mention it in order to say: believe
nothing, or next to nothing, of what you read about internal affairs on the Government
side. It is all, from whatever source, party propaganda — that is to say, lies. The broad
truth about the war is simple enough. The Spanish bourgeoisie saw their chance of
crushing the labour movement, and took it, aided by the Nazis and by the forces of
reaction all over the world. It is doubtful whether more than that will ever be established.
I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History stopped in 1936’, at which he
nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general,
but more particularly of the Spanish civil war. Early in life I have noticed that no event is
ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper
reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is
implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting,
and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had
fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot
fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London
retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events
that had never happened.
I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what
happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. Yet in a
way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant. It concerned secondary issues —
namely, the struggle for power between the Comintern and the Spanish left-wing parties,
and the efforts of the Russian Government to prevent revolution in Spain. But the broad
picture of the war which the Spanish Government presented to the world was not
untruthful. The main issues were what it said they were. But as for the Fascists and their
backers, how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How could they possibly
mention their real aims? Their version of the war was pure fantasy, and in the
circumstances it could not have been otherwise.
The only propaganda line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to represent themselves as
Christian patriots saving Spain from a Russian dictatorship. This involved pretending that
life in Government Spain was just one long massacre (VIDE the CATHOLIC HERALD
or the DAILY MAIL — but these were child’s play compared with the Continental Fascist
press), and it involved immensely exaggerating the scale of Russian intervention. Out of
the huge pyramid of lies which the Catholic and reactionary press all over the world built
up, let me take just one point — the presence in Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco
partisans all believed in this; estimates of its strength went as high as half a million. Now,
there was no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a handful of airmen and other
technicians, a few hundred at the most, but an army there was not. Some thousands of
foreigners who fought in Spain, not to mention millions of Spaniards, were witnesses of
this. Well, their testimony made no impression at all upon the Franco propagandists, not
one of whom had set foot in Government Spain. Simultaneously these people refused
utterly to admit the fact of German or Italian intervention at the same time as the
Gennany and Italian press were openly boasting about the exploits of their’ legionaries’. I
have chosen to mention only one point, but in fact the whole of Fascist propaganda about
the war was on this level.
This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very
concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those
lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish
war be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books,
and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never existed will become
historical fact, and schoolchildren will leam about it generations hence. But suppose
Fascism is finally defeated and some kind of democratic government restored in Spain in
the fairly near future; even then, how is the history of the war to be written? What kind of
records will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the records kept on the
Government side are recoverable — even so, how is a true history of the war to be written?
For, as I have pointed out already, the Government, also dealt extensively in lies. From
the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would
be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history
will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be
universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to
believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our
own age is the abandonment of the idea that history COULD be truthfully written. In the
past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they
struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each
case they believed that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice
there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost
everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, you will find that a respectable amount of the
material is drawn from German sources. A British and a Gennan historian would disagree
deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it
were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this
common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of
animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a
thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science’. There is only
‘German Science’, ‘Jewish Science’, etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a
nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future
but THE PAST. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ — well,
it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five. This
prospect frightens me much more than bombs — and after our experiences of the last few
years that is not a frivolous statement.
But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future?
Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just
remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t
come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white
tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two
safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it
were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military
efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the
liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several
Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist. We in
England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past
security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing
you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in
which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil
always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this
belief. Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What
evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modem industrialized state
collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?
Consider for instance the re-institution of slavery. Who could have imagined twenty
years ago that slavery would return to Europe? Well, slavery has been restored under our
noses. The forced-labour camps all over Europe and North Africa where Poles, Russians,
Jews and political prisoners of every race toil at road-making or swamp-draining for their
bare rations, are simple chattle slavery. The most one can say is that the buying and
selling of slaves by individuals is not yet permitted. In other ways — the breaking-up of
families, for instance — the conditions are probably worse than they were on the
American cotton plantations. There is no reason for thinking that this state of affairs will
change while any totalitarian domination endures. We don’t grasp its full implications,
because in our mystical way we feel that a regime founded on slavery MUST collapse.
But it is worth comparing the duration of the slave empires of antiquity with that of any
modem state. Civilizations founded on slavery have lasted for such periods as four
thousand years.
When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions
of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind
them no record whatever. We do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and
Roman history, how many slaves’ names are known to you? I can think of two, or
possibly three. One is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus. Also, in the Roman room at
the British Museum there is a glass jar with the maker’s name inscribed on the bottom,
‘FELIX FECIT’. I have a mental picture of poor Felix (a Gaul with red hair and a metal
collar round his neck), but in fact he may not have been a slave; so there are only two
slaves whose names I definitely know, and probably few people can remember more. The
rest have gone down into utter silence.
5
The backbone of the resistance against Franco was the Spanish working class, especially
the urban trade union members. In the long run — it is important to remember that it is
only in the long run — the working class remains the most reliable enemy of Fascism,
simply because the working-class stands to gain most by a decent reconstruction of
society. Unlike other classes or categories, it can’t be permanently bribed.
To say this is not to idealize the working class. In the long struggle that has followed the
Russian Revolution it is the manual workers who have been defeated, and it is impossible
not to feel that it was their own fault. Time after time, in country after country, the
organized working-class movements have been crushed by open, illegal violence, and
their comrades abroad, linked to themin theoretical solidarity, have simply looked on and
done nothing; and underneath this, secret cause of many betrayals, has lain the fact that
between white and coloured workers there is not even lip-service to solidarity. Who can
believe in the class-conscious international proletariat after the events of the past ten
years? To the British working class the massacre of their comrades in Vienna, Berlin,
Madrid, or wherever it might be seemed less interesting and less important than
yesterday’s football match. Yet this does not alter the fact that the working class will go
on struggling against Fascism after the others have caved in. One feature of the Nazi
conquest of France was the astonishing defections among the intelligentsia, including
some of the left-wing political intelligentsia. The intelligentsia are the people who squeal
loudest against Fascism, and yet a respectable proportion of them collapse into defeatism
when the pinch comes. They are far-sighted enough to see the odds against them, and
moreoever they can be bribed — for it is evident that the Nazis think it worth while to
bribe intellectuals. With the working class it is the other way about. Too ignorant to see
through the trick that is being played on them, they easily swallow the promises of
Fascism, yet sooner or later they always take up the struggle again. They must do so,
because in their own bodies they always discover that the promises of Fascism cannot be
fulfilled. To win over the working class permanently, the Fascists would have to raise the
general standard of living, which they are unable and probably unwilling to do. The
struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid,
but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the
face of endless discouragements. What are the workers struggling for? Simply for the
decent life which they are more and more aware is now technically possible. Their
consciousness of this aim ebbs and flows. In Spain, for a while, people were acting
consciously, moving towards a goal which they wanted to reach and believed they could
reach. It accounted for the curiously buoyant feeling that life in Government Spain had
during the early months of the war. The common people knew in their bones that the
Republic was their friend and Franco was their enemy. They knew that they were in the
right, because they were fighting for something which the world owed them and was able
to give them.
One has to remember this to see the Spanish war in its true perspective. When one thinks
of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of War — and in this particular case of the intrigues, the
persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings — there is always the temptation to say:
‘One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral’. In practice, however, one cannot be
neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who
wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for
reaction. The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals,
play-boys, Blimps, and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay.
In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people
everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over
the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface.
6
The outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin — at any rate
not in Spain. After the summer of 1937 those with eyes in their heads realized that the
Government could not win the war unless there were some profound change in the
international set-up, and in deciding to fight on Negrin and the others may have been
partly influenced by the expectation that the world war which actually broke out in 1939
was coming in 1938. The much-publicized disunity on the Government side was not a
main cause of defeat. The Government militias were hurriedly raised, ill-armed and
unimaginative in their military outlook, but they would have been the same if complete
political agreement had existed from the start. At the outbreak of war the average Spanish
factory-worker did not even know how to fire a rifle (there had never been universal
conscription in Spain), and the traditional pacifism of the Left was a great handicap. The
thousands of foreigners who served in Spain made good infantry, but there were very few
experts of any kind among them. The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won
if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalize factories,
demolish churches, and issue revolutionary manifestoes would not have made the armies
more efficient. The Fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modem arms
and the others hadn’t. No political strategy could offset that.
The most baffling thing in the Spanish war was the behaviour of the great powers. The
war was actually won for Franco by the Germans and Italians, whose motives were
obvious enough. The motives of France and Britain are less easy to understand. In 1936 it
was clear to everyone that if Britain would only help the Spanish Government, even to
the extent of a few million pounds’ worth of arms, Franco would collapse and German
strategy would be severely dislocated. By that time one did not need to be a clairvoyant
to foresee that war between Britain and Gennany was coming; one could even foretell
within a year or two when it would come. Yet in the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical
way the British ruling class did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis.
Why? Because they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer. Undoubtedly they were,
and yet when it came to the final showdown they chose to Stand up to Gennany. It is still
very uncertain what plan they acted on in backing Franco, and they may have had no
clear plan at all. Whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the
most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question.
As to the Russians, their motives in the Spanish war are completely inscrutable. Did they,
as the pinks believed, intervene in Spain in order to defend Democracy and thwart the
Nazis? Then why did they intervene on such a niggardly scale and finally leave Spain in
the lurch? Or did they, as the Catholics maintained, intervene in order to foster revolution
in Spain? Then why did they do all in their power to crush the Spanish revolutionary
movements, defend private property and hand power to the middle class as against the
working class? Or did they, as the Trotskyists suggested, intervene simply in order to
PREVENT a Spanish revolution? Then why not have backed Franco? Indeed, their
actions are most easily explained if one assumes that they were acting on several
contradictory motives. I believe that in the future we shall come to feel that Stalin’s
foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as it is claimed to be, has been
merely opportunistic and stupid. But at any rate, the Spanish civil war demonstrated that
the Nazis knew what they were doing and their opponents did not. The war was fought at
a low technical level and its major strategy was very simple. That side which had arms
would win. The Nazis and the Italians gave arms to the Spanish Fascist friends, and the
western democracies and the Russians didn’t give arms to those who should have been
their friends. So the Spanish Republic perished, having’ gained what no republic missed’.
Whether it was right, as all left-wingers in other countries undoubtedly did, to encourage
the Spaniards to go on fighting when they could not win is a question hard to answer. I
myself think it was right, because I believe that it is better even from the point of view of
survival to fight and be conquered than to surrender without fighting. The effects on the
grand strategy of the struggle against Fascism cannot be assessed yet. The ragged,
weaponless annies of the Republic held out for two and a half years, which was
undoubtedly longer than their enemies expected. But whether that dislocated the Fascist
timetable, or whether, on the other hand, it merely postponed the major war and gave the
Nazis extra time to get their war machine into trim, is still uncertain.
7
I never think of the Spanish war without two memories coming into my mind. One is of
the hospital ward at Lerida and the rather sad voices of the wounded militiamen singing
some song with a refrain that ended —
UNA RESOLUCION,
LUCHAR HAST’ AL FIN!
Well, they fought to the end all right. For the last eighteen months of the war the
Republican armies must have been fighting almost without cigarettes, and with precious
little food. Even when I left Spain in the middle of 1937, meat and bread were scarce,
tobacco a rarity, coffee and sugar almost unobtainable.
The other memory is of the Italian militiaman who shook my hand in the guardroom, the
day I joined the militia. I wrote about this man at the beginning of my book on the
Spanish war [Homage to Catalonia! , and do not want to repeat what I said there. When I
remember — oh, how vividly! — his shabby uniform and fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the
complex side-issues of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any
rate no doubt as to who was in the right. In spite of power politics and journalistic lying,
the central issue of the war was the attempt of people like this to win the decent life
which they knew to be their birthright. It is difficult to think of this particular man’s
probable end without several kinds of bitterness. Since I met him in the Lenin Barracks
he was probably a Trotskyist or an Anarchist, and in the peculiar conditions of our time,
when people of that sort are not killed by the Gestapo they are usually killed by the
G. P. U. But that does not affect the long-tenn issues. This man’s face, which I saw only
for a minute or two, remains with me as a sort of visual reminder of what the war was
really about. He symbolizes for me the flower of the European working class, harried by
the police of all countries, the people who fill the mass graves of the Spanish battlefields
and are now, to the tune of several millions, rotting in forced-labour camps.
When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands
amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a
while could bring Hitler, Petain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst,
Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the
Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady
Houston, and Marinetti all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are
all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread
the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is
talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple
intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a
partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not
accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of
California, are great on the’ change of heart’, much more reassuring from their point of
view than a change in the economic system. Petain attributes the fall of France to the
common people’s ‘love of pleasure’. One sees this in its right perspective if one stops to
wonder how much pleasure the ordinary French peasant’s or working-man’s life would
contain compared with Petain’ s own. The damned impertinence of these politicians,
priests, literary men, and what-not who lecture the working-class socialist for his
‘materialism’! All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the
indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all. Enough to eat,
freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children
will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn’t
leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is
done. Not one of those who preach against ‘materialism’ would consider life livable
without these things. And how easily that minimum could be attained if we chose to set
our minds to it for only twenty years! To raise the standard of living of the whole world
to that of Britain would not be a greater undertaking than the war we have just fought. I
don’t claim, and I don’t know who does, that that wouldn’t solve anything in itself. It is
merely that privation and brute labour have to be abolished before the real problems of
humanity can be tackled. The major problem of our time is the decay of the belief in
personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either
drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police. How right the working
classes are in their ‘materialism’! How right they are to realize that the belly comes
before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time! Understand that, and the
long horror that we are enduring becomes at least intelligible. All the considerations are
likely to make one falter — the siren voices of a Petain or of a Gandhi, the inescapable fact
that in order to fight one has to degrade oneself, the equivocal moral position of Britain,
with its democratic phrases and its coolie empire, the sinister development of Soviet
Russia, the squalid farce of left-wing politics — all this fades away and one sees only the
struggle of the gradually awakening common people against the lords of property and
their hired liars and bumsuckers. The question is very simple. Shall people like that
Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which is now technically
achievable, or shan’t they? Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall
he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win
his light sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not later — some time within the
next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was
the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the last war, and perhaps of other wars yet to
come.
I never saw the Italian militiaman again, nor did I ever learn his name. It can be taken as
quite certain that he is dead. Nearly two years later, when the war was visibly lost, I
wrote these verses in his memory:
The Italian soldier shook my hand
Beside the guard-room table;
The strong hand and the subtle hand
Whose palms are only able
To meet within the sound of guns,
But oh! what peace I knew then
In gazing on his battered face
Purer than any woman’s!
For the flyblown words that make me spew
Still in his ears were holy,
And he was born knowing what I had learned
Out of books and slowly.
The treacherous guns had told their tale
And we both had bought it,
But my gold brick was made of gold —
Oh!
