Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia is Orwell's account of his experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War. It tells of life in the trenches with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and others supporting the democratic government in Spain. This last noble ideological war pitted idealist liberals against a Nazi assault which has been called a "warm up" for World War II. The idealists, among them the American writer Jon Dos Passos, realized a change of heart when their movement yielded to leftist extremism: many of the volunteers were lucky to escape Spain and the firing squads of their own side.

Lionel Trilling said, "This book is one of the important documents of our time. . . It is a testimony to the nature of modern political life. It is also a demonstration on the part of its author of one of the right ways of confronting that life." The Library Journal said, "A Classic in its interpretation of totalitarianism—left or right." The Chicago Sunday Tribune said, "A wise book, one that once read will never be forgotten."

The first chapter of Homage to Catalonia begins,
In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers' table.
He was a tough-looking youth of twenty-five or six, with reddish-yellow hair and powerful shoulders. His peaked leather cap was pulled fiercely over one eye. He was standing in profile to me, his chin on his breast, gazing with a puzzled frown at a map which one of the officers had open on the table. Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend—the kind of face you would expect in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist. There were both candour and ferocity in it; also the apathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors. Obviously he could not make head or tail of the map; obviously he regarded map-reading as a stupendous intellectual feat. I hardly know why, but I have seldom seen anyone—any man, I mean—to whom I have taken such an immediate liking.

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