The letter is dated “Barcelona, 31 May 1937,” and begins “Eric was wounded on 20 May at 5 a.m.” Kopp provides a carefully drawn frontal sketch of the patient’s head, neck, and shoulder. Spanish Civil War poster (UC San Diego Library) It is very interesting to reread George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) after a gap of about forty years or more. The Communists’ protests precipitated a government crisis in Madrid, resulting in a shift further to the right, and the further consolidation of Communist power. The gunfight was interpreted by the city’s workers as a clear opening move against union control, something that seemed inevitable amid the city’s rising political tensions. He lays out a litany of libelous coverage after the May Days in the Daily Worker, the News Chronicle, and even one particularly flagrant reference from the New Republic that on the Aragon front, his comrades were “playing football with the Fascists in no man’s land.” This, Orwell contents, ”[a]t a time when, as a matter of fact, the POUM troops were suffering heavy casualties and a number of my personal friends were killed and wounded.”, Orwell claimed he could fill half a dozen books with such quotations. “Barcelona, the so-called revolutionary city, was probably the only city in non-Fascist Europe that had no celebrations that day.”. But resist they did, confronting better-armed and better-trained army garrisons in many Spanish towns. It was only once he’d left the front that he began to understand just how valuable his time there had been. Get our print magazine for just $20 a year. Opposing Franco, a “Popular Front” bound the liberal elements of the loyal remnants of the middle class into an alliance with Spain’s radical left — an assortment of labor unions and affiliated socialist, anarchist, and Communist parties — which had risen to oppose the right-wing coup. While he was fighting in Spain, Orwell’s comrades would have known him as Eric Blair. Dressed in civilian clothing, a white shirt rolled up above the elbows, the soldier is shown collapsing backward, his rifle falling from his right hand, having been fatally shot in the head. After almost four months on the front lines, Orwell was granted leave to Barcelona. Kropp closes his letter expressing his favorable opinion of Doctors Grau and Barraquer. George Orwell was there to bear witness. Having made his assessment, Orwell explains his decision to “fight Fascism” by enlisting: All this was queer and moving. The revolution not only posed an alternative vision to address these concerns — it actually achieved alternative modes of self-managed and democratic organization, and began sorting out the kinks of a new system aimed at the old unquenchable idea: a more egalitarian, more libertarian society. Behind the lines, the government gradually asserted control over industry and trade in what was labeled a “policy of pin-pricks.” Every move, whether to break up a militia into the Popular Army, or to put some vital collectivized industry under central control, was carried out ostensibly in the name of the war effort. The only treatment he had received was an external dressing and he was without a fever. From the outset of Russian aid, Communist policy in Spain, answerable to Moscow, called for the elimination of rivals to Stalin’s own authoritarian brand of communism. It was the first town he had ever been in where the “working class was in the saddle.” It was a town “in which the wealth classes had practically ceased to exist.” Practically everyone “wore rough working-class clothes.”. On May 20, 1937, at the first light of day, Orwell left his dugout and “was talking to the sentries preparatory to changing the guard.”, “It was five o’clock in the morning. By the time Orwell left Spain almost six months later, the harsh time he spent on the front, his near fatal brush with death and recovery in a series of Spanish hospitals, and the Stalinist betrayal of the POUM by the Communist-dominated Barcelona government served as an “arduous finishing school” for his political education.13 Recovering on the French Mediterranean coast he began preparing a series of articles to “spill the beans” about the Stalinist treachery in Catalonia. 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