George Orwell: A Life in Letters (19 page)

The Stores

Wallington

Dear Mr Brailsford,

I cannot exactly claim your acquaintance, though I believe I did meet you for a moment in Barcelona, and I know you met my wife there.

I have been trying to get the truth about certain aspects of the May fighting in Barcelona. I see that in the
New Statesman
of May 22
^nd
you state that the P.O.U.M. partisans attacked the Government with tanks and guns ‘stolen from Government arsenals.’ I was, of course, in Barcelona throughout the fighting, and though I cannot answer for tanks I know as well as one can be certain about such a thing that no guns were firing anywhere. In various papers there occurs a version of what is evidently the same story, to the effect that the P.O.U.M. were using a battery of stolen 75 mm. guns on the Plaza de España. I know this story to be untrue for a number of reasons. To begin with, I have it from eye-witnesses who were on the spot that there were no guns there; secondly, I examined the buildings round the square afterwards and there were no signs of gunfire; thirdly, throughout the fighting I did not hear the sound of artillery, which is unmistakeable if one is used to it. It would seem therefore that there has been a mistake. I wonder if you could be kind enough to tell me what was the source of the story about the guns and tanks? I am sorry to trouble you, but I want to get this story cleared up if I can.

Perhaps I ought to tell you that I write under the name of George Orwell.

Yours truly

Eric Blair

[XX, 413A, pp. 309–10; typewritten]

To H. N. Brailsford*

18 December 1937

The Stores

Wallington

Dear Mr Brailsford,

Thank you very much for your letter.
¹
I was very interested to know the source of the story about tanks and guns. I have no doubt the Russian ambassador told it you in good faith and from what little I know myself I should think it quite likely it was true in the form in which he gave it you. But because of the special circumstances, incidents of that kind are apt to be a little misleading. I hope it will not bore you if I add one or two more remarks about this question.

As I say, it is quite conceivable that at some time or other the guns
were
stolen, because to my own knowledge, though I never actually saw it done, there was a great deal of stealing of weapons from one militia to another. But people who were not actually in the militia do not seem to have understood the arms situation. As far as possible arms were prevented from getting to the P.O.U.M. and Anarchist militias, and they were left only with the bare minimum that would enable them to hold the line but not to make any offensive action. There were times when the men in the trenches actually had not enough rifles to go round, and at no time until the militias were broken up was artillery allowed to get to the Aragon front in any quantity. When the Anarchists made their attacks on the Jaca road in March–April they had to do so with very little artillery support and had frightful casualties. At this time (March–April) there were only about 12 of our aeroplanes operating over Huesca. When the Popular Army attacked in June a man who took part in the attack tells me that there were 160. In particular, the Russian arms were kept from the Aragon front at the time when they were being issued to the police forces in the rear. Until April I saw only one Russian weapon, a sub-machine gun, which quite possibly had been stolen. In April two batteries of Russian 75 mm. guns arrived—again possibly stolen and conceivably the guns referred to by the Russian ambassador. As to pistols and revolvers, which are very necessary in trench warfare, the Government would not issue permits to ordinary militiamen and militia officers to buy them, and one could only buy them illegally from the Anarchists. In these circumstances the outlook everyone had was that one had to get hold of weapons by hook or by crook, and all the militias were constantly pilfering them from one another. I remember an officer describing to me how he and some others had stolen a field gun from a gun-park belonging to the P.S.U.C.,
²
and I would have done the same myself without any hesitation in the circumstances. This kind of thing always goes on in war-time, but, coming together with the newspaper stories to the effect that the P.O.U.M. was a disguised Fascist organisation, it was easy to suggest that they stole weapons not to use against the Fascists but to use against the Government. Owing to the Communist control of the press the similar behaviour by other units was kept dark. For instance there is not much doubt that in March some partisans of the P.S.U.C. stole 12 tanks from a Government arsenal by means of a forged order.
La Battalia
, the P.O.U.M. paper, was fined 5000 pesetas and suppressed for 4 days for reporting this, but the Anarchist paper,
Solidaridad Obrera
, was able to report it with impunity. As to the guns, if stolen, being kept in Barcelona, it seems to me immensely unlikely. Some of the men at the front would certainly have heard of it and would have raised hell if they had known weapons were being kept back, and I should doubt if you could keep two batteries of guns concealed even in a town the size of Barcelona. In any case they would have come to light later, when the P.O.U.M. was suppressed. I do not, of course, know what was in all the P.O.U.M. strongholds, but I was in the three principle° ones during the Barcelona fighting, and I know that they had only enough weapons for the usual armed guards that were kept on buildings. They had no machine guns, for instance. And I think it is certain that there was no artillery-fire during the fighting. I see that you refer to the Friends of Durruti
³
being more or less under P.O.U.M. control, and John Langdon-Davies
⁴
says something to the same effect in his report in the
News Chronicle
. This story was only put about in order to brand the P.O.U.M. as ‘Trotskyist.’ Actually the Friends of Durruti, which was an extremist organisation, was bitterly hostile to the P.O.U.M. (from their point of view a more or less right-wing organisation) and so far as I know no one was a member of both. The only connection between the two is that at the time of the May fighting the P.O.U.M. are said to have published approval of an inflammatory poster which was put up by the Friends of Durruti. Again there is some doubt about this—it is certain that there was no
poster
, as described in the
News Chronicle
and elsewhere, but there may have been a handbill of some kind. It is impossible to discover, as all records have been destroyed and the Spanish authorities would not allow me to send out of Spain files even of the P.S.U.C. newspapers, let alone the others. The only sure thing is that the Communist reports on the May fighting, and still more on the alleged Fascist plot by the P.O.U.M., are completely untruthful. What worries me is not these lies being told, which is what one expects in war-time, but that the English left-wing press has refused to allow the other side a hearing. Eg. the papers made a tremendous splash about Nin
⁵
and the others being in Fascist pay, but have failed to mention that the Spanish Government, other than the Communist members, have denied that there was any truth in the story. I suppose the underlying idea is that they are somehow aiding the Spanish Government by allowing the Communists a free hand. I am sorry to burden you with all this stuff, but I have tried to do all I can, which is not much, to get the truth about what has happened in Spain more widely known. It does not matter to me personally when they say that I am in Fascist pay, but it is different for the thousands who are in prison in Spain and are liable to be murdered by the secret police as so many have been already. I doubt whether it would be possible to do much for the Spanish anti-Fascist prisoners, but some kind of organised protest would probably get many of the foreigners released.

My wife wishes to be remembered to you. Neither of us suffered any ill-effects from being in Spain, though, of course, the whole thing was terribly distressing and disillusioning. The effects of my wound passed off more quickly than was expected. If it would interest I will send you a copy of my book on Spain when it comes out.

Yours sincerely

Eric Blair

[XX, 413B, pp. 310–12; typewritten]

1
.
Brailsford replied on 17 December 1937 (XI, 424, p. 119). He said he had the information from the Soviet Consul General, Vladimir Antonov-Ovsëenko (1884–19
37) in Barcelona. He ‘has since been purged’. He and his wife, Sofia, were recalled to the
USSR
after the ‘May Events’ and arrested in October 1937 with their daughter, Valentina (aged 15). The parents were shot on 8 February 1938. For the daughter’s future life, see Orlando Figes,
The Whisperers
(2007; Penguin 2008), pp. 336–8.

2
.
Partido Socialists Unificado de Cataluña (The United Catalan Socialist Party, a communist party).

3
.
The Friends of Durruti was an extreme anarchist group within the Federación Anarquista Ibérica. (See
Homage to Catalonia
, pp. 219, 220, and 237, and Thomas, p. 656, n. 1.) It was named after Buenaventura Durruti (1896–1936) who had been mortally wounded fighting in Madrid and thereafter became a ‘legendary anarchist warrior’ (see Thomas, p. 36).

4
.
John Langdon-Davies (1897–1
971), journalist and author. He wrote for the
News Chronicle
in Spain and was joint secretary with the Communist lawyer Geoffrey Bing of the Comintern-sponsored Commission of Inquiry into Alleged Breaches of the Non-Intervention Agreement in Spain (see Thomas, pp. 397–8). Orwell’s refusal to ‘accept the politics of liquidation and elimination’ led to sneering by ‘harder Communists’, of which Langdon-Davies was one (see Valentine Cunningham,
British Writers of the Thirties,
1988, p. 4). Following his experiences in Barcelona, he wrote
Air Raid
(1938), advocating large-scale evacuation and underground highways.

Eileen* to Norah Myles*

The Stores had no electricity. This letter, because seemingly typed by the light of a candle, which towards the end is guttering, has a small number of typographical errors. These have been silently corrected.

New Year’s Day 1938

The Stores, Wallington

[
no salutation
]

You see I have no pen, no ink, no glasses and the prospect of no light, because the pens, the inks, the glasses and the candles are all in the room where George is working and if I disturb him again it will be for the fifteenth time tonight. But full of determined ingenuity I found a typewriter, and blind people are said to type in their dark.

I have also to write to a woman who has suddenly sent me a Christmas present (I think it may be intended for a wedding present after an estrangement of five or ten years, and in looking to see whether I had any clues to her address I found a bit of a letter to you, a very odd hysterical little letter, much more like Spain than any I can have written in that country. So here it is. The difficulty about the Spanish war is that it still dominates our lives in a most unreasonable manner because
Eric
George (or do you call him Eric?) is just finishing the book about it and I give him typescripts the reverse sides of which are covered with manuscript emendations that he can’t read, and he is always having to speak about it and I have returned to complete pacifism and joined the P.P.U.
¹
partly because of it. (Incidentally, you must join the P.P.U. too. War is fun so far as the shooting goes and much less alarming than an aeroplane in a shop window, but it does appalling things to people normally quite sane and intelligent – some make desperate efforts to retain some kind of integrity and others like Langdon-Davies make no efforts at all but hardly anyone can stay reasonable, let alone honest.) The Georges Kopp *
²
situation is now more Dellian
³
than ever. He is still in jail but has somehow managed to get several letters out to me, one of which George opened and read because I was away. He is very fond of Georges, who indeed cherished him with real tenderness in Spain and anyway is admirable as a soldier because of his quite remarkable courage, and he is extraordinarily magnanimous about the whole business – just as Georges was extraordinarily magnanimous. Indeed they went about saving each other’s lives or trying to in a way that was almost horrible to me, though George had not then noticed that Georges was more than ‘a bit gone on’ me. I sometimes think no one ever had such a sense of guilt before. It was always understood that I wasn’t what they call in love with Georges – our association progressed in little leaps, each leap immediately preceding some attack or operation in which he would almost inevitably be killed,
⁴
but the last time I saw him he was in jail waiting, as we were both confident, to be shot, and I simply couldn’t explain to him again as a kind of farewell that he could never be a rival to George. So he has rotted in a filthy prison for more than six months with nothing to do but remember me in my most pliant moments. If he never gets out, which is indeed most probable, it’s good that he has managed to have some thoughts in a way pleasant, but if he does get out I don’t know how one reminds a man immediately he is a free man again that one has only once missed the cue for saying that nothing on earth would induce one to marry him. Being in prison in Spain means living in a room with a number of others (about fifteen to twenty in a room the size of your sitting-room) and never getting out of it; if the window has steel shutters, as many have, never seeing daylight, never having a letter; never being charged, let alone tried; never knowing whether you will be shot tomorrow or released, in either case without explanation; when your money runs out never eating anything but a bowl of the worst imaginable soup and a bit of bread at 3 p.m. and at 11 p.m.