Homage To Catalonia Quotes
"Queer, the affection you can feel for a stranger!"
"Obviously he could not make head or tail of the map; obviously he regarded map-reading as a stupendous intellectual feat."
"It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend."
"I hardly know why, but I have seldom seen anyone—any man, I mean—to whom I have taken such an immediate liking."
"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."
"It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle."
"Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine."
"I hate to think of what the militiamen must have gone through in the earlier months before anything was organised."
"A Spaniard's generosity, in the ordinary sense of the word, is at times almost embarrassing."
"A broken ploughshare, for instance, was patched, and then patched again, till sometimes it was mainly patches."
"I remember my feeling almost of horror when I first came upon one of these things in a derelict hut in no-man's-land."
"It made me sick to think of the work that must go into the making of such a thing, and the poverty that was obliged to use flint in place of steel."
"But in the village there were two up-to-date farm tractors, no doubt seized from some big landowner's estate."
"No reverence for the dead here! Everything overgrown with bushes and coarse grass, human bones littered everywhere."
"Most of the inscriptions were purely secular, with ludicrous poems about the virtues of the deceased."
"Obviously the Spanish Church will come back (as the saying goes, night and the Jesuits always return)."
"To the Spanish people, at any rate in Catalonia and Aragón, the Church was a racket pure and simple."
"The whole move was beautifully planned. In seven hours six hundred men constructed twelve hundred metres of trench."
"If they came too near the Fascists had a habit of shelling them—justifiably, for in modern war no one scruples to use an ambulance for carrying ammunition."
"We were sixty or seventy hours without sleep, and my memories go down into a sort of blur, or rather a series of pictures."
"Only a hundred yards behind us the working-parties were hard at it, but there was utter silence except for the chorus of the frogs."
"Listening-duty in no-man's-land, a hundred yards from the Casa Francesa, a fortified farm-house which was part of the Fascist line."
"Even now they could have massacred us if they had had the initiative to bring up a few mortars."
"It was an awkward job getting the wounded down the narrow, crowded trench."
"By degrees the firing would spread all round the lines that encircled Huesca, and we would stumble out into the trench to lean sleepily against the parapet while a ragged meaningless fire swept overhead."
"I remember saying in an oracular manner: 'We can hold this place for half an hour, not more.'"
"One shell beyond it, one shell short of it, then whizz—BOOM! Burst rafters leaping upwards and a sheet of uralite skimming down the air like a nicked playing-card."
"When an aeroplane swoops down and uses its machine-gun the sound, from below, is like the fluttering of wings."
"In my memory I live over incidents that might seem too petty to be worth recalling."
"I used to sit on the roof marveling at the folly of it all."
"The whole huge town of a million people was locked in a sort of violent inertia, a nightmare of noise without movement."
"The devilish racket of firing went on and on."
"The people of Barcelona are so used to street-fighting and so familiar with the local geography that they know by a kind of instinct which political party will hold which streets and which buildings."
"It was a queer feeling sitting on that roof."
"Sometimes I was merely bored with the whole affair, paid no attention to the hellish noise, and spent hours reading."
"Only once, however, did trouble look like starting."
"I was in a ghastly frame of mind and dog-tired after about sixty hours without much sleep."
"All I felt was a profound relief that the devilish din of firing was over."
"The prospect revolted me. In spite of the innumerable arrests, it was almost impossible for me to believe that I was in any danger."
"It did not matter what I had done or not done. This was not a round-up of criminals; it was merely a reign of terror."
"Practically the law was what the police chose to make it."
"The thing we had got to think of now was getting out of Spain."
"There was no sense in staying here with the certainty of imprisonment sooner or later."
"I foresaw that Spanish prisons would be lousy places."
"It seemed queer, in the barber's shop, to see the Anarchist notice still on the wall, explaining that tips were prohibited."
"The fight against Franco had to continue, but the simultaneous aim of the Government was to recover such power as remained in the hands of the trade unions."
"The only real alternative to Fascism is workers' control."
"If the workers do not control the armed forces, the armed forces will control the workers."
"The POUM was for immediate revolution, the Communists not."
"The worst of being wanted by the police in a town like Barcelona is that everything opens so late."
"We must have a strong central government in place of local committees, and we must have a properly trained and fully militarised army under a unified command."
"There was no general and obvious counter-revolutionary move."
"It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes."
"Afterwards I can see the significance of events, but while they are happening I merely want to be out of them."
"There is very little doubt that arms were deliberately withheld lest too many of them should get into the hands of the Anarchists."
"The revolutionary purism of the POUM, though I saw its logic, seemed to me rather futile."
"The whole thing is a gamble, but it is a gamble every revolutionary has got to make."
"There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all."
"One is practically obliged to take sides, and it must be clear enough which side I am on."
"The real question is whether the CNT workers who came into the street gained or lost by showing fight on this occasion."
"My own opinion is that the fighting was only preconcerted in the sense that everyone expected it."
"The only people who even talked in a revolutionary strain were the Friends of Durruti, a small extremist group within the FAI, and the POUM."
"But what one has got to remember is that these things were happening in Spain and not in England."
"I warn everyone against my bias, and I warn everyone against my mistakes."
"The trouble sprang naturally out of the Government's order to the Anarchists to surrender their arms."
"One's opinion here will be governed by one's attitude on the question of centralised government and working-class control."
"The accusation of espionage against the POUM rested solely upon articles in the Communist press and the activities of the Communist-controlled secret police."
"The nature of the accusation implied that ordinary members, militiamen, and so forth, were all in the plot together."