14 May 1938
Sir, – I know it is not usual to answer reviews, but as your review of my book Homage to Catalonia in The Times Literary Supplement of April 30 amounts to misrepresentation I should be greatly obliged if you would allow me space to answer it.
Your reviewer1 begins:–
[George Orwell] enlisted in the Militia, took part in the trench warfare round Huesca, was wounded, and after some disheartening experiences in the internal rising in Barcelona in May, 1937, was compelled to flee the country.
The implication here is, (a) that I had been wounded before the fighting in Barcelona, and (b) that I had to flee the country as a direct result of my ‘disheartening experiences’. As was made perfectly clear in my book, I was wounded some little time after the fighting in Barcelona, and I had to leave the country as a result of events which I set out at considerable length and which, so far as I know, had no direct connexion with my ‘disheartening experiences’.
The rest of his review is mainly an attempt to throw discredit upon the Spanish Militias who were holding the Aragón front with inadequate weapons and other equipment during the first year of war. He has distorted various things that I said in order to make it appear that I agree with him. For example:–
Discipline did not exist in the Militia: ‘if a man disliked an order he would step out of the ranks and argue fiercely with the officer’.
I never said that discipline ‘did not exist in the Militia’. What your reviewer failed to mention is that in the passage quoted (‘if a man disliked an order’, &c.) I was describing the behaviour of raw recruits their first day at the barracks, when they behaved as raw recruits always behave, as anyone with military experience would expect.
Yours truly,
George Orwell
Mr. Orwell is unduly sensitive. I stated that he was wounded in the trench warfare round Huesca and that he was compelled to flee the country after some disheartening experiences in the internal rising in Barcelona – all facts recorded at length in his book. If my necessarily brief sentence implied that he was wounded before the rising this was unintentional and does not seem to reflect on him or anyone else. I did not say he was compelled to flee because of his part in the May rising, or that there was any direct connexion between the two events. Actually, however, it seems clear that it was because Mr. Orwell was then, and subsequently, associated with the POUM organization, which was officially blamed for the rising, that he was obliged to leave the country.
Of the May rising and the subsequent period Mr. Orwell uses the words ‘concentrated disgust’, ‘fury’, ‘miserable internecine scrap’, ‘cesspool’, ‘disillusionment’ and ‘a depressing outlook’. If that is not disheartenment, what is?
Finally, as to indiscipline, it is a question of point of view. Mr. Orwell speaks of ‘a mob of ragged children in the front line’, one of whom threw a hand grenade into a dugout fire ‘for a joke’; of slapping generals on the back, of how when men refused to obey orders it was necessary to appeal to them in the name of comradeship, and of how ‘You often had to argue for five minutes before you got an order obeyed.’ He says further:– ‘Actually a newly raised draft of militia was an indisciplined mob… In a workers’ army discipline is theoretically voluntary,’ &c. He adds that ‘it is a tribute to the strength of revolutionary discipline that the Militias stayed in the field at all’.
On 28 May 1938, The Times Literary Supplement published a second letter from Orwell:
Sir, – I am very sorry to trouble you with this correspondence, but your reviewer has again resorted to misquotation. For example: ‘Actually a newly raised draft of militia was an undisciplined mob.’ In my book the sentence ran as follows: ‘Actually, a newly raised draft of militia was an undisciplined mob not because the officers called the privates “Comrade” but because new troops are always an undisciplined mob.’
By suppressing the second half of the sentence he has given it a totally different meaning; and similarly with various other statements which he has picked out of their contexts. As for his rearrangement of the order of events in the book, he pleads that his account was ‘necessarily brief’, this does not seem any reason for altering the chronology.
Yours truly,
George Orwell
1. Reviews in The Times Literary Supplement were then customarily unsigned. Records show that the reviewer was Maurice Percy Ashley (1907–94; CBE, 1978), journalist, author and historian. He was Winston Churchill’s research assistant in 1929, served in the Intelligence Corps, 1940–45, was Deputy Editor of The Listener, 1946–58 and Editor, 1958–67.