The hero’s journey you seek is not always the one you find.
In 1936, a young English novelist embarked on what, at the time, would have been the most romantic and heroic journey possible — fighting the rising tide of European Fascism and helping create and sustain a true worker’s state in war-torn Spain. What he found first thrilled, then disappointed, and finally appalled him. He surely expected that whatever the emotions and transformation his journey wrought, it would be on the battlefield that its most important and life-changing experiences would occur. Yet despite ending up with a bullet-hole in his neck, the most important part of his hero’s journey turned out to be what happened after he was carted on a stretcher from the front.
These days, a book called Homage to Catalonia might easily be mistaken for a sophisticated, backroads travelogue on the wonders surrounding Barcelona. Except, of course, that the author is George Orwell, and the only travelogue Orwell wrote was Down and Out in Paris and London about his time living rough.
Though the title has not aged well, Homage to Catalonia is the story of Orwell’s time fighting outside (and inside) Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War as a volunteer for the anti-Fascist government. Largely forgotten, swallowed by the events that followed, the Spanish Civil War was, for a brief moment, the focal point of world history. It was the first great clash between Stalin, Hitler, and the rest of Europe all mediated through the peculiar lens of Spanish politics and culture. Orwell, young, idealistic and very much a political innocent, did what today would be nearly unthinkable — going abroad to help fight someone else’s war.
His story, told plainly with the clean but unremarkable style that was Orwell’s stock-in-trade, is both a straightforward narrative of soldiering and a hero’s journey into the wilderness of politics. Life as a volunteer in a makeshift Spanish volunteer unit fighting in the mountains is about what you would expect. Cold, ineffectual, boring, and occasionally very dangerous. Orwell never seems the slightest bit fazed by any of it.
Now that I had seen the front I was profoundly disgusted. They called this war! And we were hardly even in touch with the enemy! I made no attempt to keep my head below the level of the trench. A little while later, however, a bullet shot past my ear with a vicious crack and banged into the parados behind.
Alas! I ducked. All my life I had sworn that I would not duck the first time a bullet passed over me; but the movement appears to be instinctive, and almost everybody does it at least once.
Even the terror of combat seems natural in Orwell’s hands.
As I rounded the corner of the hut I saw a man…I gripped my rifle by the small of the butt and lunged at the man’s back. He was just out of my reach. Another lunge: still out of reach. And for a little distance we proceeded like this, he rushing up the trench and I after him on the ground above, prodding at his shoulder-blades and never quite getting there a comic memory for me to look back upon, though I suppose it seemed less comic to him.
…
I remember feeling a deep horror at everything: the chaos, the darkness, the frightful din, the slithering to and fro in the mud, the struggles with the bursting sandbags — all the time encumbered with my rifle, which I dared not put down for fear of losing it. I even shouted to someone as we staggered along with a bag between us: ‘This is war! Isn’t it bloody?’
His matter-of-fact handling of fear and battle-lust lack any trace of vanity or introspection. Everything at the front just is what it is, and one has the sense this probably made him a very good soldier. Though the war being what it was, he never achieves anything at all except a small promotion in his unit before a Fascist sniper puts a bullet through his throat:
I felt a tremendous shock — no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing… The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense.
There is surely not one way of reacting to being shot. Yet something about Orwell’s version makes you think — yes — this is what it must be like. A bullet through the throat really ought to be fatal (Orwell must bear countless doctors telling him how lucky he is), but in Orwell’s case it merely cost him a copious loss of blood, some difficulties with his arm, and the loss of his voice for many months. It also bought him a ticket back to Barcelona where his adventure, which should have been over, really begins.
For Barcelona, far from the front lines facing Franco, turns out to be a more dangerous battleground. A battle for which Orwell is deeply mis-prepared, at which he is terribly incompetent, and into which he is most unexpectedly thrust. His experiences in the few weeks back in Barcelona would do more to shape the future George Orwell than all his time fighting Franco.
While Orwell and his fellow soldiers were on the front line, another battle between the communists and the non-communists was taking place behind Republican lines. It was a civil war inside the civil war. Unannounced, undocumented, and largely ignored by all those who were sympathetic to the anti-Fascist cause.
He found himself swept up in a mad, incomprehensible struggle for power between factions of the government. Anarchists, socialists and communists all had armed units and confusing territories. The Ramblas — the great central throughfare of Barcelona — became a front-line held by hotel forts and restaurant command-centers.
To the right of the Ramblas, the working-class quarters solidly Anarchist; to the left a confused fight going on among the tortuous by-streets, but on that side the PSUC and the Assault Guards were more or less in control. Up at our end of the Ramblas, round the Plaza de Cataluna, the position was so complicated that it would have been quite unintelligible if every building had not flown a party flag.
Orwell had — somewhat haphazardly — signed on with a unit of what amounts to a worker’s socialist party — POUM. Eventually, the Communists, ever intolerant of any party not religiously toeing the line, had decided to liquidate it — arresting its leaders and hunting down anyone affiliated with it. Orwell’s hotel room is searched:
They picked each packet to pieces and examined each paper separately, in case there should be messages written on them. Altogether they were on the job for nearly two hours. Yet all this time they never searched the bed…they were also Spaniards, and to turn a woman out of bed was a little too much for them. This part of the job was silently dropped, making the whole search meaningless.
Later, trying to escape Spain before he’s arrested, he wanders the city, living a bizarre double life as bourgeois Englishman and fugitive.
The worst of being wanted by the police in a town like Barcelona is that everything opens so late. When you sleep out of doors you always wake about dawn, and none of the Barcelona cafés opens much before nine. It was hours before I could get a cup of coffee or a shave.
The safest thing at present was to look as bourgeois as possible. We frequented the fashionable residential quarter of the town, where our faces were not known, went to expensive restaurants and were very English with the waiters.
Nothing galls so much as the realization that not only are he and his friends being hunted, but they are being described to an accepting world, as fascist puppets and spies.
Imagine it.
You leave your country with all its safety, calm and prosperity and volunteer as a foot-soldier to fight against Franco and Fascism for pesetas. You do your duty. Are nearly killed. Only to find that your own side is trying to arrest and kill you while telling everyone that you and your comrades are actually Fascist spies.
I had served under him for months, I had been under fire with him, and I knew his history. He was a man who had sacrificed everything — family, nationality, livelihood-simply to come to Spain and fight against Fascism…And all they could do in return was to fling him into jail. It is waste of time to be angry, but the stupid malignity of this kind of thing does try one’s patience.
Welcome to 1984.
If nothing on the front lines surprised or fazed Orwell, everything about the madness of Barcelona political warfare managed to do both.
All the while, though I was technically in hiding, I could not feel myself in danger. The whole thing seemed too absurd. I had the ineradicable English belief that “they’ cannot arrest you unless you have broken the law. It is a most dangerous belief to have during a political pogrom. There was a warrant out for McNair’s arrest, and the chances were that the rest of us were on the list as well.
The arrests, raids, searchings were continuing without pause; practically everyone we knew, except those who were still at the front, was in jail by this time.
The George Orwell who escaped Spain was not the same George Orwell who had come to fight Fascists less than a year before. He returned, like every hero, a changed man. Yet the hero’s journey he was on wasn’t the hero’s journey he sought and probably wasn’t even a journey he recognized at the time.
He might have thought that not much had changed.
This war, in which I played so ineffectual a part, has left me with memories that are mostly evil, and yet I do not wish that I had missed it. When you have had a glimpse of such a disaster as this-and however it ends the Spanish war will turn out to have been an appalling disaster, quite apart from the slaughter and physical suffering — the result is not necessarily disillusionment and cynicism.
Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.
Perhaps it was only in the aftermath of denial, that Orwell came to appreciate what had happened. The communists did not win the war in Spain, but they certainly won their war in the papers and against Orwell. Their betrayal of those fighting by their side raised not so much as an eyebrow in the rest of the world and no amount of Orwell’s truth telling mattered at all.
He writes, presciently for his time and for ours:
…the usual war-stuff, the tub-thumping, the heroics, the vilification of the enemy-all these were done, as usual, by people who were not fighting and who in many cases would have run a hundred miles sooner than fight. One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right…As late as October 1937 the New Statesman was treating us to tales of Fascist barricades made of the bodies of living children (a most unhandy thing to make barricades with), and Mr. Arthur Bryant was declaring that ‘the sawing-off of a Conservative tradesman’s legs’ was ‘a commonplace’ in Loyalist Spain. The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting.
It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.
The young man searching for a just war had met the enemy not across 200 yards of battle-scarred terrain, but amongst his allies in the watering holes of a civilized Barcelona and back in the cozy environs of England and France.
It was an enemy that Orwell’s later and more famous work laid bare. And only in the mind of a man as tightly bound to the matter-of-fact, the merely human, and the plain truth as the George Orwell of Homage to Catalonia could the fine steel of moral rage at the tricks, lies, and seductions of the ideological totalitarians have been forged.
There’s no denying and no getting way from Orwell’s plain Englishness even as he is its prophet of doom. He writes of coming home to England as Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins wrote of returning to the Shire, though in Orwell’s case, the dark shadow was already growing very strong:
Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen — all sleeping the deep, 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.
Animal Farm[1] was still seven years and a bigger war away. 1984 still a decade off. But the George Orwell who, more than any other writer, would paint for us the madness at the heart of the totalitarian state, was surely born on the streets of Barcelona in the heart of Catalonia.
[1] Animal Farm is something of a legend in my family ever since my 5th Grade daughter pulled a copy of it from the library shelves based on the title and had the misfortune to read it all the way through. She, truly, had the shattering, Orwellian experience of venturing from the dawn of innocence and hope (yay pigs!) to the mad dreams of night.