What Happened in Spain

HOMAGE TO CATALONIA (232 pp.)-- George Orwell -- Harcourt, Brace ($3.50).

In December 1936, a 33-year-old Englishman named Eric Blair arrived in Barcelona to have a look at Spain's civil war and write some pieces about it. A radical in politics and an antiFascist, he decided to fight instead, and enlisted in a militia outfit. Seven months later, badly used up and sporting the scars of a near-fatal bullet hole through his neck, he went back to England and wrote a book about his experience. It was not a popular book because it was antiCommunist, and the fashion then was to cheer the Communist-controlled "Popular Front" that was running Spain. In the U.S., the book wasn't published at all. It was a pity, because Homage to Catalonia was an eye-opener. It makes fine reading even now, published here at last because Eric Blair, who died two years ago (TIME, Feb. 6, 1950) wrote under a name that has become famous: he was George (Nineteen Eighty-Four) Orwell.

Meaningless Bullets. Orwell showed what has since become clear even to U.S. liberals, that the Communists used Spain's civil war for their own purposes, worked as hard to destroy their Loyalist allies as they did to defeat Franco. But today the best of Homage to Catalonia is its crisply accurate description of men at war.

Some of the militiamen in Orwell's outfit were mere children, all were badly trained, few knew how to fire a rifle. Orwell, who had once been a policeman in Burma, was appalled when he was handed his weapon, an 1896 German Mauser with a corroded barrel. Assigned to a section on the Aragon front, his ragged company of 100 went into the trenches with twelve overcoats among them. Before long, Orwell had learned the basic fact of infantry life: boredom. Wrote he: "A life as uneventful as a city clerk's and almost as regular. Sentry-go, patrols, digging; digging, patrols, sentry-go. On every hilltop, Fascist or Loyalist, a knot of ragged, dirty men shivering round their flag and trying to keep warm. And all day and night the meaningless bullets wandering across the empty valleys and only by some rare improbable chance getting home on a human body."

The Deeper Wound. The improbable chance caught up with Orwell when a sniper winged him. But for a man of his intense integrity the deeper wound came when he went back to Barcelona on sick leave. To his horror he discovered that the Communists, now firmly in the saddle, considered him a Fascist because he had served in a non-Communist unit. Faced with arrest, he had to sleep in the streets, found himself a criminal in the country he had come to fight for. His disgust exceeding his fear, Orwell crossed the border into France, wrote what is still the best book on the Spanish civil war.

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