Her choice of the word ‘malaise’, and her stress upon regimentation, are both oddly paradoxical. To many supporters of the Spanish Republic, especially to foreigners who did not wish to impose themselves (as well as to those who did), it seemed axiomatic that one should first win the war against a fascist mutiny supported by Hitler and Mussolini, and only then discuss the shape of the future. Orwell, the old Etonian and former colonial policeman, and lifetime foe of affectations and posturings, might have been expected to be highly susceptible to this no-nonsense approach. In fact, in his ‘Notes on the Spanish Militia’, discussing a POUM attack on Huesca, he writes: ‘I was not in this show, but heard from others who were that the POUM troops behaved well.’ It sounds amazingly like a stiff-upper-lip staff officer (‘this show’) of the generation before.

Yet when it came to it, this rather insular and reserved Englishman – renowned in his own detachment as a bit of a stickler for discipline, whose wife when at the Aragon front wrote yearningly of Crosse & Blackwell pickles and Lea & Perrins sauce and good old English marmalade – brought himself to see that a conventional military victory was an illusion, and that what the place really needed was a thoroughgoing social and political revolution. Moreover, he came to understand that much of the talk about ‘discipline’ and ‘unity’ was a rhetorical shield for the covert Stalinization of the Spanish Republic. Undoubtedly, he was assisted to this conclusion by the calibre of the revolutionaries he met, both Catalan and international (he often finds occasion in these pages to speak well of the German comrades). And of course, he could tell in his bones and from experience that the Stalinists were lying. As a consequence, the honour of many decent and brave people was upheld, through his fragmentary but consistent writings, against a positive downpour of calumny and malice. This can sometimes make one feel better about the supposedly hopeless pragmatism, the sheer want of theoretical capacity, of the island race.

Integrity, though, is not just a matter of dogged adherence. It is most striking to see, in these pages, how Orwell continues to fight with the weapons of patience and politeness. Whether it is in combating an anonymous reviewer in The Listener (a stolid adherent of the commonsense school, this one, see page 295) or debating with other leftists like Raymond Postgate, he maintains the rules of rational argument and never – except in taking the odd pot-shot at an occasional fascist – descends into mere invective. He monitors reports of the trial of the POUM (page 311), keeps up the search for news of his missing or imprisoned friends and steadily answers all his correspondence. Every now and then, we glimpse another ‘flash-forward’ to the raw material of Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four, as when we read, on page 325, of his old comrade Georges Kopp being tortured by confinement with rats, or when Orwell drily notes that Antonov-Ovseenko, the Soviet commissar in Barcelona charged with the extirpation of Trotskyism, has himself been indicted in Moscow for Trotskyist deviations, or when in Orwell’s papers we find Bertram Wolfe’s eulogy to Andrés Nin, with its evident influence on the world of Goldstein and Big Brother. The only lacuna – and it is an odd one, given Orwell’s sensitivity to colonial questions – concerns the subject of Morocco. It was from this base, and with a heavily Moorish army, that Franco’s aggression had been launched. The demand of the Trotskyist Left was that Spanish Morocco should be immediately given its independence, first as a matter of principle and second because it might undermine Franco’s imperial rearguard. The Communist line was to oppose this, because such a policy would alienate Britain and France, the other two colonial powers in North Africa. Meanwhile, they used chauvinist propaganda against the employment of dark-skinned infidels by a Catholic crusade. The argument was a very intense one at the time; it is disappointing to find Orwell having so little to say about it.

The intellectuals and writers of enlightened Europe generated shelf upon shelf of prose and poetry during the Spanish Civil War, but it is absolutely safe to say that most of this stuff would not bear reprinting except as a textbook in credulity and/or bad faith. There is barely a sentence, however, in this collection which causes a wince or a shudder. Orwell, who did not share the febrile enthusiasm of the clenched-fist cheerleaders and propagandists (see page 248), none the less had a deeper belief than they did in the capacities of the Spanish people. His work also acts as a prophylactic against the efforts of a certain revisionist school, which now likes to argue that the victory of Franco was preferable after all, because the alternative would have been a prototype ‘Peoples’ Democracy’ of the order of Czechoslovakia in 1948. Orwell, who had grasped the nature of ‘Peoples’ Democracy’ more acutely than most, argued to the contrary. An awful tyranny was possible in either case, he granted, but:

Given a Government victory, it seems much likelier that Spain will develop into a capitalist Republic of the type of France than into a socialist state. What seems certain, however, is that no regression to a semi-feudal, priest-ridden régime of the kind that existed up to 1931 or, indeed, up to 1936 is now possible. Such régimes, by their nature, depend upon a general apathy and ignorance which no longer exist in Spain. The people have seen and learned too much. At the lowest estimate, there are several million people who have become impregnated with ideas which make them bad material for an authoritarian state.

In the event of a Franco victory, as Orwell also noted, ‘the desire for liberty, for knowledge and for a decent standard of living has spread far too widely to be killed by obscurantism or persecution’. Those who assert that Spain would have become Stalinized in the event of a Franco defeat are also fond of arguing that Franco’s regime was relatively benign, as against Hitler’s, say, and that it gave way in the end to democratic evolution from below. Why could not this be true in the opposing case, and for much the same reasons? The missing element in the calculation is the ability of people to make their own history, an ability which Orwell did not doubt since he had seen it demonstrated.