Homage To Catalonia
First published 1938 · English · 196 pages
- Fantasy
- Biography and memoir
This is Orwell's first-hand account of the Spanish Civil War. In late 1936 he travelled to Barcelona, where he found a city shaped by revolutionary hopes, and joined a militia fighting on the Republican side on the Aragon front. He describes the cold, the boredom, the poor equipment and the occasional danger of life in the trenches. He then describes the political tensions and infighting among the forces opposed to Franco, which turned dangerous for him and his companions. The book is both a personal memoir and a political witness statement. It is valued for its honesty, its vivid detail and its warning about how easily truth is distorted in wartime.
Quotes
Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.
[G]oodness knows how many times the Spanish standard of marksmanship has saved my life.
Everyone always did miss everyone else in this war, whenever it was humanly possible to do so.
It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle ... There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.