Homage to Catalonia FAQs

Mr. Orwell has kindly granted me an interview regarding his book,
Homage to Catalonia.


B: There has been some talk about the Spanish Civil War lately,
perhaps inspired by the recent movie El Laberinto del Fauno. This war
was a labyrinth as well: sorting out the various factions and who did
what to whom certainly is quite a chore. But first things first. Could
you describe your ensemble - you are wearing some unusual clothing. Is
it a uniform?

O: Of a sort. It is not exactly a uniform - perhaps a 'multiform'
would be the proper name for it. I am 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.

B: !!! That is a lot of ensemble - you must be very hot.

O: I heard that Canada is quite cold. I dressed in what I wore on
cold nights at the front.

B: Now, is this typical clothing for the militia?

O: Practically everyone in the army wore corduroy knee-
breeches....some wore puttees, others corduroy gaiters, others leather
leggings or high boots. Everyone wore a zipper jacket, but some of the
jackets were of leather, others of wool and of every conceivable
colour. The kinds of cap were about as numerous as their wearers. It
was usual to adorn the front of your cap with a party badge, and in
addition nearly every man wore a red or red and black handkerchief
round his throat.

B: Very dashing. And red goes particularly well with dark hair. You
guys gave those clothes-horse fascists something to think about.

O: I believe we did, in our own way.

B: Let's discuss the puttees. For the benefit of those who do not
know it, could you give a brief etymology of this word?

O: It's from the Hindi and Urdu, their word for a strip of cloth,
which in turn originated from Sanskrit. It is usually a woolen strip
of cloth and it's wrapped around the leg from the ankle to knee. This
prevents your trousers from being torn or soiled.

B: Ah, practical *and* chic. Surely a real chore to remove, though?

O: One rarely removed one's clothing. You see, 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.

B: I won't ask you about *that*. Sleeping in your clothes must have
been a hardship?

O: No, not after a day or two. But there was a worse problem. For
sheer beastliness the louse beats everything I have encountered....he
lives chiefly in your trousers. Short of burning all your clothes
there is no known way of getting rid of him. Down the seams of your
trousers he lays his glittering white eggs, like tiny grains of rice,
which hatch out and breed families of their own at horrible speed. I
think the pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate their
pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war, indeed! In
war all soldiers are lousy...

B: Surely not - they are usually brave, I understand.

O: No, not lousy. 'Lousy.' The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo,
at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae - every one of them had lice
crawling over his testicles.

B: Ok, enough of that! Ha-ha, I'm confident no one wants to discuss
your testicles, lousy or otherwise.

O: ???

B: So there you were, an Englishman thrown in with the Spaniards. How
is your Spanish?

O: Villainous. All this time I was having the usual struggles with
the Spanish language. Apart from myself there was only one Englishman
at the barracks, and nobody even among the officers spoke a word of
French...

B: Impossible!

O: Things were not made easier for me by the fact that when my
companions spoke to one another they generally spoke in Catalan. The
only way I could get along was to carry everywhere a small dictionary
which I whipped out of my pocket in moments of crisis. But I would
sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is
to make friends in Spain!

B: You joined the P.O.U.M. militia, and you have been criticized for
not criticizing the way they ran the war.

O: They didn't 'run' the war, they were muddling through like
everyone else. The whole militia-system had serious faults, and the
men themselves were a mixed lot, for by this time voluntary
recruitment was falling off and many of the best men were already at
the front or dead. There was always among us a certain percentage who
were completely useless. Boys of fifteen were being brought up for
enlistment by their parents, quite openly for the sake of the ten
pesetas a day which was the militiaman's wage; also for the sake of
the bread which the militia received in plenty and could smuggle home
to their parents.

B: You wrote Homage to Catalonia with a certain detachment and regard
for form?

O: Yes, I tried to tell the whole truth without violating my literary
instincts.

B: What sort of action did you see?

O: All the time I was in Spain I saw very little fighting. I was on
the Aragon 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.

B: That wound turned out to be quite lucky. You had been promoted to
second lieutenant, and then on May 20, 1937 you caught a sniper's
bullet in the throat. Please describe it.

O: It was a 7mm bore, copper-plated, Spanish Mauser bullet, shot
from a distance of about 175 yards, at a velocity of 600 feet per
second...

B: I mean, describe your experience.

O: Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an
explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of
light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock - no pain, only a
violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a
sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up
to nothing....All this happened in a space of time much less than a
second. The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my
head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did
not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very
badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense.

B: Did your life flash before your eyes, as they say?

O: I felt a vague satisfaction. This ought to please my wife, I
thought; she had always wanted me to be wounded, which would save me
from being killed when the great battle came.

B: She must have felt a vague sorrow for your pain. But I understand
Eileen was working in Barcelona as a secretary in the IPL office, very
rare for a foreign woman to come to Spain at that time.

O: Yes, and in mid-March she visited me for three days in the front
line trenches. The fascists threw in a small bombardment and quite a
lot of machine-gun fire while she was there.

B: She must have hated it.

O: No, she wasn't frightened and found it quite interesting. She
never enjoyed anything more.

B: Come on.

O: That's what she said, really.

B: She certainly wasn't mousey like she was once called.

O: She wasn't a bad old stick, at any rate. My commanding officer
George Kopp rather admired her too, and thought her awfully brave and
heroical. But that's another story.

B: You and Eileen barely escaped out of Spain, with the Soviet Police
hunting down P.O.U.M. members.

O: We started off by being heroic defenders of democracy and ended by
slipping over the border with the police panting on our heels.

B: C'est la vie, hein!

O: ...




B.

georgeorwell RemoveThis @email.com wrote:
> Mr. Orwell has kindly granted me an interview regarding his book,
> Homage to Catalonia.
>
>
> B: There has been some talk about the Spanish Civil War lately,
> perhaps inspired by the recent movie El Laberinto del Fauno. This war
> was a labyrinth as well: sorting out the various factions and who did
> what to whom certainly is quite a chore. But first things first. Could
> you describe your ensemble - you are wearing some unusual clothing. Is
> it a uniform?
>
> O: Of a sort. It is not exactly a uniform - perhaps a 'multiform'
> would be the proper name for it. I am 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.
>
> B: !!! That is a lot of ensemble - you must be very hot.
>
> O: I heard that Canada is quite cold. I dressed in what I wore on
> cold nights at the front.
>
> B: Now, is this typical clothing for the militia?
>
> O: Practically everyone in the army wore corduroy knee-
> breeches....some wore puttees, others corduroy gaiters, others leather
> leggings or high boots. Everyone wore a zipper jacket, but some of the
> jackets were of leather, others of wool and of every conceivable
> colour. The kinds of cap were about as numerous as their wearers. It
> was usual to adorn the front of your cap with a party badge, and in
> addition nearly every man wore a red or red and black handkerchief
> round his throat.
>
> B: Very dashing. And red goes particularly well with dark hair. You
> guys gave those clothes-horse fascists something to think about.
>
> O: I believe we did, in our own way.
>
> B: Let's discuss the puttees. For the benefit of those who do not
> know it, could you give a brief etymology of this word?
>
> O: It's from the Hindi and Urdu, their word for a strip of cloth,
> which in turn originated from Sanskrit. It is usually a woolen strip
> of cloth and it's wrapped around the leg from the ankle to knee. This
> prevents your trousers from being torn or soiled.
>
> B: Ah, practical *and* chic. Surely a real chore to remove, though?
>
> O: One rarely removed one's clothing. You see, 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.
>
> B: I won't ask you about *that*. Sleeping in your clothes must have
> been a hardship?
>
> O: No, not after a day or two. But there was a worse problem. For
> sheer beastliness the louse beats everything I have encountered....he
> lives chiefly in your trousers. Short of burning all your clothes
> there is no known way of getting rid of him. Down the seams of your
> trousers he lays his glittering white eggs, like tiny grains of rice,
> which hatch out and breed families of their own at horrible speed. I
> think the pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate their
> pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war, indeed! In
> war all soldiers are lousy...
>
> B: Surely not - they are usually brave, I understand.
>
> O: No, not lousy. 'Lousy.' The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo,
> at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae - every one of them had lice
> crawling over his testicles.
>
> B: Ok, enough of that! Ha-ha, I'm confident no one wants to discuss
> your testicles, lousy or otherwise.
>
> O: ???
>
> B: So there you were, an Englishman thrown in with the Spaniards. How
> is your Spanish?
>
> O: Villainous. All this time I was having the usual struggles with
> the Spanish language. Apart from myself there was only one Englishman
> at the barracks, and nobody even among the officers spoke a word of
> French...
>
> B: Impossible!
>
> O: Things were not made easier for me by the fact that when my
> companions spoke to one another they generally spoke in Catalan. The
> only way I could get along was to carry everywhere a small dictionary
> which I whipped out of my pocket in moments of crisis. But I would
> sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is
> to make friends in Spain!
>
> B: You joined the P.O.U.M. militia, and you have been criticized for
> not criticizing the way they ran the war.
>
> O: They didn't 'run' the war, they were muddling through like
> everyone else. The whole militia-system had serious faults, and the
> men themselves were a mixed lot, for by this time voluntary
> recruitment was falling off and many of the best men were already at
> the front or dead. There was always among us a certain percentage who
> were completely useless. Boys of fifteen were being brought up for
> enlistment by their parents, quite openly for the sake of the ten
> pesetas a day which was the militiaman's wage; also for the sake of
> the bread which the militia received in plenty and could smuggle home
> to their parents.
>
> B: You wrote Homage to Catalonia with a certain detachment and regard
> for form?
>
> O: Yes, I tried to tell the whole truth without violating my literary
> instincts.
>
> B: What sort of action did you see?
>
> O: All the time I was in Spain I saw very little fighting. I was on
> the Aragon 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.
>
> B: That wound turned out to be quite lucky. You had been promoted to
> second lieutenant, and then on May 20, 1937 you caught a sniper's
> bullet in the throat. Please describe it.
>
> O: It was a 7mm bore, copper-plated, Spanish Mauser bullet, shot
> from a distance of about 175 yards, at a velocity of 600 feet per
> second...
>
> B: I mean, describe your experience.
>
> O: Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an
> explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of
> light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock - no pain, only a
> violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a
> sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up
> to nothing....All this happened in a space of time much less than a
> second. The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my
> head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did
> not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very
> badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense.
>
> B: Did your life flash before your eyes, as they say?
>
> O: I felt a vague satisfaction. This ought to please my wife, I
> thought; she had always wanted me to be wounded, which would save me
> from being killed when the great battle came.
>
> B: She must have felt a vague sorrow for your pain. But I understand
> Eileen was working in Barcelona as a secretary in the IPL office, very
> rare for a foreign woman to come to Spain at that time.
>
> O: Yes, and in mid-March she visited me for three days in the front
> line trenches. The fascists threw in a small bombardment and quite a
> lot of machine-gun fire while she was there.
>
> B: She must have hated it.
>
> O: No, she wasn't frightened and found it quite interesting. She
> never enjoyed anything more.
>
> B: Come on.
>
> O: That's what she said, really.
>
> B: She certainly wasn't mousey like she was once called.
>
> O: She wasn't a bad old stick, at any rate. My commanding officer
> George Kopp rather admired her too, and thought her awfully brave and
> heroical. But that's another story.
>
> B: You and Eileen barely escaped out of Spain, with the Soviet Police
> hunting down P.O.U.M. members.
>
> O: We started off by being heroic defenders of democracy and ended by
> slipping over the border with the police panting on our heels.
>
> B: C'est la vie, hein!
>
> O: ...
>
>
>
>
> B.
>

LOL. But, wot, no relative merits of straw and chaff?

/M