I’m fascinated by the Spanish Civil War, but other than Giles Tremlett’s Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country’s Hidden Past , the joint Australian/Spanish approach in Amnesia Road by Luke Stegemann and Amanda Vaill’s Hotel Florida I haven’t really read much about it. But spurred on by seeing The Teacher Who Promised the Sea a couple of months ago, I turned to a book that I’ve been meaning to read for some time: George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.
To be honest, I thought that Homage to Catalonia was a novel, and it never even occurred to me that it might be an eye-witness account, written in the year after his return from fighting in Spain. The book starts in Barcelona, where he embarks on rudimentary training using antiquated equipment before heading for the front. He had joined to support the Republican government from an ideological commitment, entering Spain under the auspices of the Independent Labour Party and by chance ended up with the POUM militia (Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista) an anti-Stalinist communist party.
His account, which was written after the event, traces his arrival in Barcelona, and his time on the front first in the hills around Zaragoza and his later deployment with a group of Englishmen to a position at Monte Oscuro, within sight of Zaragoza. He is then sent 50 miles away to Huesca where he takes part in an attack, throwing two bombs which he thinks may have hit their target. After three months on the front, which seem mainly to have been a time of lice-picking and boredom, he returns to Barcelona where the Republican forces have turned on each other. Disillusioned by the political infighting, he returns to the front, where he is shot through the throat, shuffled from hospital to hospital and finally discharged from duty. At this point, the internal Republican politics mean that he is in danger because of his previous involvement with POUM and so he and his wife decide to leave Spain.
The political infighting amongst the Republicans was completely unknown to me. I had always thought of the Spanish Civil War as being Republicans vs. Franco’s Nationalists. But the battle was just as much one within the Republican forces. At one stage while reading, I became completely overwhelmed by the acronyms for the various Republican groups and just happened to notice a footnote that referred to ‘Appendix 1’. (I was reading this as an e-book, and footnotes at the bottom of the page are awkward, clunky things). Lo and behold, there were two chapters attached as appendices, completely about the politics and machinations of the various Republican groups that had previously been part of the text, but had been later shifted to be appendices lest they disrupt the flow. I found these two fairly long chapters illuminating, describing the ideological differences between the Russian government and the other communist groups over the role of proletariat and whether they were ‘ready’ for Revolution. Once I had this sorted out in my mind, I could return to the rest of the book.
[Was it the right decision to excise these chapters from the main text? Probably, because he does get into the ideological weeds here. But I would have struggled on with the acronyms had I not followed up on the footnote to the appendices. Perhaps he should have sign-posted the appendices better.]
As a journalist, Orwell is a keen observer, and he captures well the boredom of trench warfare, interspersed with times of frantic, bumbling terror. His description of being shot reminded me a little of Tolstoy’s account of the battlefield in War and Peace. I must say, though, that he seems to be a particularly inept soldier, with little solidarity with the Spanish soldiers he was fighting alongside, with whom he could barely converse with his rudimentary Spanish.
And I can see why Anna Funder in Wifedom looked at the space around “my wife” in Orwell’s work and wondered about Eileen O’Shaughnessy. In Orwell’s book, she is this nameless, shapeless figure bobbing around behind the lines (literally), sending parcels, warning her husband, fleeing with him, but always just “my wife”.
My rating: 8/10
Sourced from: free as part of Kobo subscription. Inspired to read it by the film ‘The Teacher Who Promised the Sea’.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 