Barbastro, though a long way from the front line,
looked bleak and chipped.
Swarms of militiamen in shabby uniforms wandered up and down the streets, trying to keep warm.
On a ruinous wall I came upon a poster dating from the previous year and announcing that 'six handsome bulls' would be killed in the arena
As the road struck into the sierra we branched off
to the right and
climbed a narrow mule-track that wound round the mountain-side. The
hills in that part of Spain are of a queer formation, horseshoe-shaped
with flattish tops and very steep sides running down into immense
ravines. On the higher slopes nothing grows except stunted shrubs and
heath, with the white bones of the limestone sticking out everywhere. The
front line here was not a continuous line of trenches, which would have
been impossible in such mountainous country; it was simply a chain of
fortified posts, always known as 'positions', perched on each hill-top.
In the distance you could see our 'position' at the crown of the
horseshoe; a ragged barricade of sand-bags, a red flag fluttering, the
smoke of dug-out fires. A little nearer, and you could smell a sickening
sweetish stink that lived in my nostrils for weeks afterwards. Into the
cleft immediately behind the position all the refuse of months had been
tipped--a deep festering bed of breadcrusts, excrement, and rusty tins.
The company we were relieving were getting their kits together. They had
been three months in the line; their uniforms were caked with mud, their
boots falling to pieces, their faces mostly bearded. The captain
commanding the position, Levinski by name, but known to everyone as
Benjamin, and by birth a Polish Jew, but speaking French as his native
language, crawled out of his dug-out and greeted us. He was a short
youth of about twenty-five, with stiff black hair and a pale eager face
which at this period of the war was always very dirty. A few stray
bullets were cracking high overhead. The position was a semi-circular
enclosure about fifty yards across, with a parapet that was partly
sand-bags and partly lumps of limestone. There were thirty or forty
dug-outs running into the ground like rat-holes. Williams, myself, and
Williams's Spanish brother-in-law made a swift dive for the nearest
unoccupied dug-out that looked habitable. Somewhere in front an
occasional rifle banged, making queer rolling echoes among the stony
hills. We had just dumped our kits and were crawling out of the dug-out
when there was another bang and one of the children of our company
rushed back from the parapet with his face pouring blood. He had fired
his rifle and had somehow managed to blow out the bolt; his scalp was
torn to ribbons by the splinters of the burst cartridge-case. It was our
first casualty, and, characteristically, self-inflicted.
In the afternoon we did our first guard and Benjamin showed us round the
position. In front of the parapet there ran a system of narrow trenches
hewn out of the rock, with extremely primitive loopholes made of piles
of limestone. There were twelve sentries, placed at various points in
the trench and behind the inner parapet. In front of the trench was the
barbed wire, and then the hillside slid down into a seemingly bottomless
ravine; opposite were naked hills, in places mere cliffs of rock, all
grey and wintry, with no life anywhere, not even a bird. I peered
cautiously through a loophole, trying to find the Fascist trench.
'Where are the enemy?'
Benjamin waved his hand expansively. 'Over zere.' (Benjamin spoke
English--terrible English.)
'But _where?_'
According to my ideas of trench warfare the Fascists would be fifty or a
hundred yards away. I could see nothing--seemingly their trenches were
very well concealed. Then with a shock of dismay I saw where Benjamin
was pointing; on the opposite hill-top, beyond the ravine, seven hundred
metres away at the very least, the tiny outline of a parapet and a
red-and-yellow flag--the Fascist position. I was indescribably
disappointed. We were nowhere near them! At that range our rifles were
completely useless. But at this moment there was a shout of excitement.
Two Fascists, greyish figurines in the distance, were scrambling up the
naked hill-side opposite. Benjamin grabbed the nearest man's rifle, took
aim, and pulled the trigger. Click! A dud cartridge; I thought it a bad
omen.
The new sentries were no sooner in the trench than they began firing a
terrific fusillade at nothing in particular. I could see the Fascists,
tiny as ants, dodging to and fro behind their parapet, and sometimes a
black dot which was a head would pause for a moment, impudently exposed.
It was obviously no use firing. But presently the sentry on my left,
leaving his post in the typical Spanish fashion, sidled up to me and
began urging me to fire. I tried to explain that at that range and with
these rifles you could not hit a man except by accident. But he was only
a child, and he kept motioning with his rifle towards one of the dots,
grinning as eagerly as a dog that expects a pebble to be thrown. Finally
I put my sights up to seven hundred and let fly. The dot disappeared.
I hope it went near enough to make him jump. It was the first time in
my life that I had fired a gun at a human being.
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.
Chapter 3
In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco,
candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were
important in that order, with the enemy a bad last. Except at night,
when a surprise-attack was always conceivable, nobody bothered about the
enemy. They were simply remote black insects whom one occasionally saw
hopping to and fro. The real preoccupation of both armies was trying to
keep warm.
I ought to say in passing that all the time I was in Spain I saw very
little fighting. I was on the Aragón front from January to May, and
between January and late March little or nothing happened on that front,
except at Teruel. In March there was heavy fighting round Huesca, but I
personally played only a minor part in it. Later, in June, there was the
disastrous attack on Huesca in which several thousand men were killed in
a single day, but I had been wounded and disabled before that happened.
The things that one normally thinks of as the horrors of war seldom
happened to me. No aeroplane ever dropped a bomb anywhere near me, I do
not think a shell ever exploded within fifty yards of me, and I was only
in hand-to-hand fighting once (once is once too often, I may say). Of
course I was often under heavy machine-gun fire, but usually at longish
ranges. Even at Huesca you were generally safe enough if you took
reasonable precautions.
Up here, in the hills round Zaragoza, it was simply the mingled boredom
and discomfort of stationary warfare. A life as uneventful as a city
clerk's, and almost as regular. Sentry-go, patrols, digging; digging,
patrols, sentry-go. On every hill-top, 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.
Often I used to gaze round the wintry landscape and marvel at the
futility of it all. The inconclusiveness of such a kind of war! Earlier,
about October, there had been savage fighting for all these hills; then,
because the lack of men and arms, especially artillery, made any
large-scale operation impossible, each army had dug itself in and
settled down on the hill-tops it had won. Over to our right there was a
small outpost, also P.O.U.M., and on the spur to our left, at seven
o'clock of us, a P.S.U.C. position faced a taller spur with several
small Fascist posts dotted on its peaks. The so-called line zigzagged to
and fro in a pattern that would have been quite unintelligible if every
position had not flown a flag. The P.O.U.M. and P.S.U.C. flags were red,
those of the Anarchists red and black; the Fascists generally flew the
monarchist flag (red-yellow-red), but occasionally they flew the flag
of the Republic (red-yellow-purple).* The scenery was stupendous,
if you could forget that every mountain-top was occupied by troops and
was therefore littered with tin cans and crusted with dung. To the right
of us the sierra bent south-eastwards and made way for the wide, veined
valley that stretched across to Huesca. In the middle of the plain a few
tiny cubes sprawled like a throw of dice; this was the town of Robres,
which was in Loyalist possession. Often in the mornings the valley was
hidden under seas of cloud, out of which the hills rose flat and blue,
giving the landscape a strange resemblance to a photographic negative.
Beyond Huesca there were more hills of the same formation as our own,
streaked with a pattern of snow which altered day by day. In the far
distance the monstrous peaks of the Pyrenees, where the snow never
melts, seemed to float upon nothing. Even down in the plain everything
looked dead and bare. The hills opposite us were grey and wrinkled like
the skins of elephants. Almost always the sky was empty of birds. I do
not think I have ever seen a country where there were so few birds. The
only birds one saw at any time were a kind of magpie, and the coveys of
partridges that startled one at night with their sudden whirring, and,
very rarely, the flights of eagles that drifted slowly over, generally
followed by rifle-shots which they did not deign to notice.
[* Footnote: An errata note found in Orwell's papers after his death:
"Am not now completely certain that I ever saw Fascists flying the
republican flag, though I _think_ they sometimes flew it with a small
imposed swastika."]
At night and in misty weather, patrols were sent out in the valley
between ourselves and the Fascists. The job was not popular, it was too
cold and too easy to get lost, and I soon found that I could get leave
to go out on patrol as often as I wished. In the huge jagged ravines
there were no paths or tracks of any kind; you could only find your way
about by making successive journeys and noting fresh landmarks each
time. As the bullet flies the nearest Fascist post was seven hundred
metres from our own, but it was a mile and a half by the only
practicable route. It was rather fun wandering about the dark valleys
with the stray bullets flying high overhead like redshanks whistling.
Better than night-time were the heavy mists, which often lasted all day
and which had a habit of clinging round the hill-tops and leaving the
valleys clear. When you were anywhere near the Fascist lines you had to
creep at a snail's pace; it was very difficult to move quietly on those
hill-sides, among the crackling shrubs and tinkling limestones. It was
only at the third or fourth attempt that I managed to find my way to the
Fascist lines. The mist was very thick, and I crept up to the barbed
wire to listen. I could hear the Fascists talking and singing inside.
Then to my alarm I heard several of them coming down the hill towards
me. I cowered behind a bush that suddenly seemed very small, and tried
to cock my rifle without noise. However, they branched off and did not
come within sight of me. Behind the bush where I was hiding I came upon
various relics of the earlier fighting--a pile of empty cartridge-cases,
a leather cap with a bullet-hole in it, and a red flag, obviously one of
our own. I took it back to the position, where it was unsentimentally
torn up for cleaning-rags.
I had been made a corporal, or _cabo_, as it was called, as soon as we
reached the front, and was in command of a guard of twelve men. It was
no sinecure, especially at first. The _centuria_ was an untrained mob
composed mostly of boys in their teens. Here and there in the militia
you came across children as young as eleven or twelve, usually refugees
from Fascist territory who had been enlisted as militiamen as the
easiest way of providing for them. As a rule they were employed on light
work in the rear, but sometimes they managed to worm their way to the
front line, where they were a public menace. I remember one little brute
throwing a hand-grenade into the dug-out fire 'for a joke'. At Monte
Pocero I do not think there was anyone younger than fifteen, but the
average age must have been well under twenty. Boys of this age ought
never to be used in the front line, because they cannot stand the lack
of sleep which is inseparable from trench warfare. At the beginning it
was almost impossible to keep our position properly guarded at night.
The wretched children of my section could only be roused by dragging
them out of their dug-outs feet foremost, and as soon as your back was
turned they left their posts and slipped into shelter; or they would
even, in spite of the frightful cold, lean up against the wall of the
trench and fall fast asleep. Luckily the enemy were very unenterprising.
There were nights when it seemed to me that our position could be
stormed by twenty Boy Scouts armed with airguns, or twenty Girl Guides
armed with battledores, for that matter.
At this time and until much later the Catalan militias were still on the
same basis as they had been at the beginning of the war. In the early
days of Franco's revolt the militias had been hurriedly raised by the
various trade unions and political parties; each was essentially a
political organization, owing allegiance to its party as much as to the
central Government. When the Popular Army, which was a 'non-political'
army organized on more or less ordinary lines, was raised at the
beginning of 1937, the party militias were theoretically incorporated in
it. But for a long time the only changes that occurred were on paper;
the new Popular Army troops did not reach the Aragón front in any
numbers till June, and until that time the militia-system remained
unchanged. The essential point of the system was social equality between
officers and men. Everyone from general to private drew the same pay,
ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of
complete equality. If you wanted to slap the general commanding the
division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and
no one thought it curious. In theory at any rate each militia was a
democracy and not a hierarchy. It was understood that orders had to be
obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave
it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were
officers and N.C.O.s but there was no military rank in the ordinary
sense; no titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had
attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working
model of the classless society. Of course there was no perfect equality,
but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or than I
would have thought conceivable in time of war.
But I admit that at first sight the state of affairs at the front
horrified me. How on earth could the war be won by an army of this type?
It was what everyone was saying at the time, and though it was true it
was also unreasonable. For in the circumstances the militias could not
have been much better than they were. A modern mechanized army does not
spring up out of the ground, and if the Government had waited until it
had trained troops at its disposal, Franco would never have been
resisted. Later it became the fashion to decry the militias, and
therefore to pretend that the faults which were due to lack of training
and weapons were the result of the equalitarian system. Actually, a newly
raised draft of militia was an undisciplined mob not because the
officers called the private 'Comrade' but because raw troops are
_always_ an undisciplined mob. In practice the democratic
'revolutionary' type of discipline is more reliable than might be
expected. In a workers' army discipline is theoretically voluntary. It
is based on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of a bourgeois
conscript army is based ultimately on fear. (The Popular Army that
replaced the militias was midway between the two types.) In the militias
the bullying and abuse that go on in an ordinary army would never have
been tolerated for a moment. The normal military punishments existed,
but they were only invoked for very serious offences. When a man refused
to obey an order you did not immediately get him punished; you first
appealed to him in the name of comradeship. Cynical people with no
experience of handling men will say instantly that this would never
'work', but as a matter of fact it does 'work' in the long run. The
discipline of even the worst drafts of militia visibly improved as time
went on. In January the job of keeping a dozen raw recruits up to the
mark almost turned my hair grey. In May for a short while I was
acting-lieutenant in command of about thirty men, English and Spanish.
We had all been under fire for months, and I never had the slightest
difficulty in getting an order obeyed or in getting men to volunteer for
a dangerous job. 'Revolutionary' discipline depends on political
consciousness--on an understanding of _why_ orders must be obeyed; it
takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into
an automaton on the barrack-square. The journalists who sneered at the
militia-system seldom remembered that the militias had to hold the line
while the Popular Army was training in the rear. And it is a tribute to
the strength of 'revolutionary' discipline that the militias stayed in
the field at all. For until about June 1937 there was nothing to keep
them there, except class loyalty. Individual deserters could be
shot--were shot, occasionally--but if a thousand men had decided to walk
out of the line together there was no force to stop them. A conscript
army in the same circumstances--with its battle-police removed--would
have melted away. Yet the militias held the line, though God knows they
won very few victories, and even individual desertions were not common.
In four or five months in the P.O.U.M. militia I only heard of four men
deserting, and two of those were fairly certainly spies who had enlisted
to obtain information. At the beginning the apparent chaos, the general
lack of training, the fact that you often had to argue for five minutes
before you could get an order obeyed, appalled and infuriated me. I had
British Army ideas, and certainly the Spanish militias were very unlike
the British Army. But considering the circumstances they were better
troops than one had any right to expect.
Meanwhile, firewood--always firewood. Throughout that period there is
probably no entry in my diary that does not mention firewood, or rather
the lack of it. We were between two and three thousand feet above
sea-level, it was mid winter and the cold was unspeakable. The
temperature was not exceptionally low, on many nights it did not even
freeze, and the wintry sun often shone for an hour in the middle of the
day; but even if it was not really cold, I assure you that it seemed so.
Sometimes there were shrieking winds that tore your cap off and twisted
your hair in all directions, sometimes there were mists that poured into
the trench like a liquid and seemed to penetrate your bones; frequently
it rained, and even a quarter of an hour's rain was enough to make
conditions intolerable. The thin skin of earth over the limestone turned
promptly into a slippery grease, and as you were always walking on a
slope it was impossible to keep your footing. On dark nights I have
often fallen half a dozen times in twenty yards; and this was dangerous,
because it meant that the lock of one's rifle became jammed with mud.
For days together clothes, boots, blankets, and rifles were more or less
coated with mud. I had brought as many thick clothes as I could carry,
but many of the men were terribly underclad. For the whole garrison,
about a hundred men, there were only twelve great-coats, which had to be
handed from sentry to sentry, and most of the men had only one blanket.
One icy night I made a list in my diary of the clothes I was wearing. It
is of some interest as showing the amount of clothes the human body can
carry. I was wearing a thick vest and pants, a flannel shirt, two
pull-overs, a woollen jacket, a pigskin jacket, corduroy breeches,
puttees, thick socks, boots, a stout trench-coat, a muffler, lined
leather gloves, and a woollen cap. Nevertheless I was shivering like a
jelly. But I admit I am unusually sensitive to cold.
Firewood was the one thing that really mattered. The point about the
firewood was that there was practically no firewood to be had. Our
miserable mountain had not even at its best much vegetation, and for
months it had been ranged over by freezing militiamen, with the result
that everything thicker than one's finger had long since been burnt.
When we were not eating, sleeping, on guard, or on fatigue-duty we were
in the valley behind the position, scrounging for fuel. All my memories
of that time are memories of scrambling up and down the almost
perpendicular slopes, over the jagged limestone that knocked one's boots
to pieces, pouncing eagerly on tiny twigs of wood. Three people
searching for a couple of hours could collect enough fuel to keep the
dug-out fire alight for about an hour. The eagerness of our search for
firewood turned us all into botanists. We classified according to their
burning qualities every plant that grew on the mountainside; the various
heaths and grasses that were good to start a fire with but burnt out in
a few minutes, the wild rosemary and the tiny whin bushes that would
burn when the fire was well alight, the stunted oak tree, smaller than a
gooseberry bush, that was practically unburnable. There was a kind of
dried-up reed that was very good for starting fires with, but these grew
only on the hill-top to the left of the position, and you had to go
under fire to get them. If the Fascist machine-gunners saw you they gave
you a drum of ammunition all to yourself. Generally their aim was high
and the bullets sang overhead like birds, but sometime they crackled and
chipped the limestone uncomfortably close, whereupon you flung yourself
on your face. You went on gathering reeds, however; nothing mattered in
comparison with firewood.
Beside the cold the other discomforts seemed petty. Of course all of us
were permanently dirty. Our water, like our food, came on mule-back from
Alcubierre, and each man's share worked out at about a quart a day. It
was beastly water, hardly more transparent than milk. Theoretically it
was for drinking only, but I always stole a pannikinful for washing in
the mornings. I used to wash one day and shave the next; there was never
enough water for both. The position stank abominably, and outside the
little enclosure of the barricade there was excrement everywhere. Some
of the militiamen habitually defecated in the trench, a disgusting thing
when one had to walk round it in the darkness. But the dirt never
worried me. Dirt is a thing people make too much fuss about.
It is astonishing how quickly you get used to doing without a
handkerchief and to eating out of the tin pannikin in which you also
wash. Nor was sleeping in one's clothes any hardship after a day or two.
It was of course impossible to take one's clothes and especially one's
boots off at night; one had to be ready to turn out instantly in case of
an attack. In eighty nights I only took my clothes off three times,
though I did occasionally manage to get them off in the daytime. It was
too cold for lice as yet, but rats and mice abounded. It is often said
that you don't find rats and mice in the same place, but you do when
there is enough food for them.
In other ways we were not badly off. The food was good enough and there
was plenty of wine. Cigarettes were still being issued at the rate of a
packet a day, matches were issued every other day, and there was even an
issue of candles. They were very thin candles, like those on a Christmas
cake, and were popularly supposed to have been looted from churches.
Every dug-out was issued daily with three inches of candle, which would
bum for about twenty minutes. At that time it was still possible to buy
candles, and I had brought several pounds of them with me. Later on the
famine of matches and candles made life a misery. You do not realize the
importance of these things until you lack them. In a night-alarm, for
instance, when everyone in the dug-out is scrambling for his rifle and
treading on everybody else's face, being able to strike a light may make
the difference between life and death. Every militiaman possessed a
tinder-lighter and several yards of yellow wick. Next to his rifle it
was his most important possession. The tinder-lighters had the great
advantage that they could be struck in a wind, but they would only
smoulder, so that they were no use for lighting a fire. When the match
famine was at its worst our only way of producing a flame was to pull
the bullet out of a cartridge and touch the cordite off with a
tinder-lighter.
It was an extraordinary life that we were living--an extraordinary way
to be at war, if you could call it war. The whole militia chafed against
the inaction and clamoured constantly to know why we were not allowed to
attack. But it was perfectly obvious that there would be no battle for a
long while yet, unless the enemy started it. Georges Kopp, on his
periodical tours of inspection, was quite frank with us. 'This is not a
war,' he used to say, 'it is a comic opera with an occasional death.' As
a matter of fact the stagnation on the Aragón front had political causes
of which I knew nothing at that time; but the purely military
difficulties--quite apart from the lack of reserves of men--were obvious
to anybody.
