Homage to Catalonia

This was the first book I read on the Spanish Civil War. I found it very captivating. I read it a long time ago so I can't say much more...

I've never fully understood how the Spanish Civil War came about, or really who could be said to have won it. I've read Hemingway's 'For Whom The Bell Tolls' and there are allusions to the period in some of the other novels I've read, but Orwell's account comes closest to filling in the gaps.

I most

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enjoyed the portions of the book that told about Orwell's own memories and experiences of the war. His writing is accessible and dramatic, and he paints a vivid picture of what he thought was going on around him. Although I appreciated his political discourses, I found that they were not terribly helpful, though this should be no surprise - the Spanish Civil War was very possibly the most confusing conflict of the 20th century.

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One of the guys on my course lent this to me: it's an autobiographical account of the author's experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Very easy to read, despite not knowing much about the period in question; he kindly separates the political analysis from the rest of the books and asks you

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to feel free to skip those chapters. I believe that in later editions these two chapters are moved to the end to be appendices, but I read them where they were originally placed. These parts took me much longer to get through due to the vast number of acronyms, but were interesting nonetheless.

I thought he got across very well the way that events differed from their official versions, the general dullness of most parts of war, the problems of organisation and administration and so on, although he says at several points that he doesn't think he's doing it justice. It was interesting to me that the book ends before the war does; I looked up some more about it online afterwards.

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When I was about fourteen or fifteen I did a holiday homework history project on the Spanish Civil War. It made a big impression on me. On the first day back at school I sought out the other boy who had done his project on the same subject. Patrick Drumgoole. Now that’s name I haven’t thought

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of in a very long time. Full of the injustice of it all I ranted about the way the Spanish government had been left to the slavering Italian and German wolves by the lily livered democratic soon-to-be-allies, only to find he was delighted at the way the dangerous left wing anarcho-commies had been defeated by the Catholic forces of (the) right. It was the first time I had ever really encountered a political debate. If you can call telling Patrick Drumgoole he was a f**king t**t a political debate.



George Orwell’s experience of the Spanish Civil War, as recounted in Homage To Catalonia, seemed to have made a similarly big impression on him, albeit his was a lot more ‘first hand’ than mine in that he was actually there, being shot at whilst I was at home, er, not being shot at. Patrick Drumgoole wasn’t even a particularly big bloke.



His story is of the ‘War is Boring, Cold, Hungry, Dirty and Irritating’ kind, rather than the ‘War Is Hell’ kind. Even when recounting going over the top or actually being shot he doesn’t make it sound actually frightening. In fact the time spent behind the lines, on leave, in Barcelona where political in-fighting between the anarchists and communists led to a civil war within a civil war and a virtual police state sounded a lot more frightening. Which could explain a lot about his later fiction.

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