Barcelona, 1936

from Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell.

This was in late December 1936, less than seven months ago 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 that matter.  I had come to Spain with some notion of writing
newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at
that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing 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 December or January that the revolutionary period was
ending;  but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was
something startling and overwhelming.  It was the first time that I had ever 
been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.  Practically every
building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red
flags ow with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled 
with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties;
almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt.  Churches here and
there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workman.  Every shop and 
cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; 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 'Sen~or' or 'Don' ort even 'Usted';  everyone called everyone else 
'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias'.  Tipping
had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first
experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a
lift-boy.   There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered,
and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and
black.  The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in
clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like
daubs of mud.  Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where
crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were 
bellowing 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 small number of women and foreigners there were
no 'well-dressed' people at all.  Practically everyone wore rough working-class
clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform.   All this was
queer and moving.  There was much in this that I did not understand, in some
ways I did not not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of 
affairs worth fighting 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 come over to the workers' side; I did not
realise that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and
disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.

Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war.  The
town had a gaunt untidy look,  roads and buildings were in poor repair, the 
streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air-raids, the shops were mostly
shabby and half-empty.  Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable,
there was a shortage of coal, sugar and petrol, and a really serious shortage
of bread.  Even at this period the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards
long.  Yet so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful.
There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low;
you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the
gypsies.  #Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future,
a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom.
Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the 
capitalist machine.  In the barbers' shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers
were mostly Anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves.
In the streets were coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being
prostitutes.  To anyone from the hard-boiled, sneering civilization of the
English-speaking races there was something rather pathetic in the literalness
with which these idealistic Spaniards took the hackneyed phrase of revolution.
At that time revolutionary ballads of the naivest kind, all about the
proletarian brotherhood and the wickedness of Mussolini, were being sold on
the streets for a few centimes each.  I have often seen an illiterate
militiaman buy one of these ballads, laboriously spell out the words, and
then, when he had got the hang of it, begin singing it to an appropriate
tune.





