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Proverbs xxvi 4–5

Chapter I

In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined thein front of the officers’ table

He was a tough-looking youth of twenty-five or -six, with reddish-yellow hair and powerful shoulders His peaked leather cap was pulled fiercely over one eye He was standing in profile towith a puzzled frown at ain his face deeply moved me It was the face of a man ould commit murder and throay his life for a friend – the kind of face you would expect in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist There were both candour and ferocity in it; also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors Obviously he could not ardedas a stupendous intellectual feat I hardly knohy, but I have seldom seen anyone – anyWhile they were talking round the table soner The Italian raised his head and said quickly:

‘Italiano?’

I answered in lés Y tú?’

‘Italiano’

As ent out he stepped across the rooripped my hand very hard Queer, the affection you can feel for a stranger! It was as though his spirit and e and tradition andin utter intimacy I hoped he liked me as well as I liked him But I also knew that to retain ain; and needless to say I never did see hi contacts of that kind in Spain

I mention this Italian militiaman because he has stuck vividly in my memory With his shabby uniform and fierce pathetic face he typifies for me the special atmosphere of that time He is bound up with all s in Barcelona, the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers creeping to the front, the grey war-stricken towns further up the line, the muddy, ice-cold trenches in the mountains

This was in late Deceo as I write, and yet it is a period that has already receded into enormous distance Later events have obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or 1905, for thatnewspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that ti to do The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in Dece; but when one ca startling and overwhel It was the first ti class was in the saddle Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every as scraith the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; ales burnt Churches here and there were being systes of work that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared Nobody said ‘Señor’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos días’ Al a lecture fro to tip a lift-boy There were no private motor cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black The revolutionary posters were everywhere, fla from the walls in clean reds and blues thatadvertisements look like daubs of mud Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the tohere crowds of people strea revolutionary songs all day and far into the night And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist Except for a sners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of theThere was much in it that I did not understand, in sonized it i for Also I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily coreat nuuising the