This is the third review about the Spanish Civil war. The first was written by an author sympathetic to the mostly Communist Republicans. The second was a book critical for how the Soviets used the conflict to rob the Spanish treasury while they spent as much time fighting allies as they did fighting Franco’s Fascists. This book was one of many written by Eric Arthur Blair under the name George Orwell, and I recommend it. Amazon has 123 reviews with an average rating of four and a half stars out of five. The book is based on Orwell’s personal experiences after he went to Spain as a journalist. He volunteered to join the Trotsky Communist army forces called the POUM as a foot soldier. The descriptions of his experiences paint indelible images of the harsh life of the soldiers. They maintained loyalty to one another while living in cold mud mixed with human waste in the trenches while dealing with continual infections of lice and shortages of food and fuel. Orwell’s battles ended after being shot through the neck by a sniper.

Orwell writes that the only real difference between the ragged, miserable men and boys in the trenches on the hills opposite his trench was the color of the flags and uniforms. The soldiers in both sets of trenches were there for no other purpose than to kill the people like themselves in the other trenches. People were enlisting their 15 year-old sons for the small enlistment payment and food they could return to their parents. Some were as young as eleven. Orwell says he was never certain he actually killed anyone. He describes how a “dot” that was a man’s (or boy’s) head above the lip of a distant trench disappeared after he fired a shot, and how he heard lengthy screaming after he tossed a hand grenade into a parapet. He observes he only wished to kill one Nationalist, because if every Republican killed one Nationalist, the war would be won. He maintained his loyalty to the Republicans despite admitting to atrocities being committed by them. He wrote “…the foreign anti-Fascist papers even descended to the pitiful lie of pretending that churches were only attacked when they were used as Fascist fortresses. Actually churches were pillaged everywhere….because….the Spanish Church was part of the capitalist racket.” 





Orwell joined the POUM army by chance, and didn’t realize there were serious differences between the various groups making up the Republicans. He lists eight of the organizations representing various factions of communists, socialists, anarchists, and liberals that made up the Republican army. The factions were known by the initials, and he observes, “It looked at first sight as though Spain was suffering from a plaque of initials.” POUM officers and noncommissioned officers were selected for those positions by popular agreement. No one saluted or called anyone sir, but instead called each other comrade or “thou.” They also were given no military training except how to stand in formation and march before going to the front. They weren’t given rifles until they were leaving for the trenches, and many of the rifles were in such disrepair they malfunctioned and sometime even exploded on the first shot. Orwell says the five things important in the trenches were firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy, in that order of importance. Orwell concedes that he and his comrades were poorly trained, but says of those in the opposite trenches, “….goodness knows how many times the Spanish standard of marksmanship had saved my life.”

Orwell was on leave in Barcelona when one of the most famous events of the Spanish Civil War occurred. Stalinists had ordered the anarchists in the telephone exchange to surrender their weapons, and the anarchists resisted. Soon there were pockets of soldiers of the various political factions building barricades to protect themselves from the soldiers from other factions literally across the street from one another. Orwell and his comrades reached an unspoken agreement with the soldiers opposing them not to shoot at each other. However, it was not as peaceful in other places. The Stalinist Communists used the incident to replace the Spanish government with a man sympathetic to Stalin and then accused the POUM as the “…fifth column for the fascists,” and that they had planned and caused the uprising. There was a widely distributed political cartoon showing a POUM caricature removing a mask marked with the hammer and sickle to reveal a face marked with a swastika. What really happened, of course, was that Stalin’s paranoia and petty hatred of his rival Trotsky took precedence over the lives of soldiers he declared “enemies of the state.” The Republicans were forced to implement his brutal demands because of their dependence on his supply of war materials.

The POUM was declared to be an illegal organization after a massive propaganda campaign about “Trotskyist treachery and treason.” Soldiers coming off the front line wounded or on leave were arrested and imprisoned without charges. Those who had been discharged and were returning to their home countries were detained at the borders for the same fate. Orwell had been taken from the front lines after being shot through the neck. He survived both the wound, which had missed the carotid by a millimeter, and the treatment, much to amazement of the doctors who eventually treated him. He observes, “No one I met….failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.”

Orwell and his wife were among the fortunate foreigners involved with the POUM who were able to escape from Spain back to their comfortable lives in London. He closes the book with a remarkable prophetic sentence about the “….deep sleep of England from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.” Orwell also would write the anti-Stalinist book “Animal Farm” and the warning titled, “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”