In Europe

fighting. The local anarchists were enraged, ‘they pulled out their pistols and shot the radio to pieces,’ an eyewitness said. ‘They were absolutely furious, but they obeyed nonetheless.’
    According to the most widely held view, this civil war in miniature was little more than the police's way of getting even with the anarchists.Those who fought alongside the anarchists, however, said it was more than that: it was the clash between those who wanted the revolution to continue, and those who wanted to control it and slow it down. The communist press granted the affair even greater import. They claimed it had been part of a plan to bring down the government, a conspiracy cooked up by the POUM. Even worse: it was a fascist plot to sow discord and ultimately cripple the republic. The POUM was denounced as ‘Franco's fifth column’, a ‘Trotskyite’ organisation of infiltrators and turncoats in close contact with the fascists.
    Eyewitnesses from the Telephone Building tell a different story. There was nothing like a planned conspiracy, they say. No backup troops were brought into the city beforehand, no supplies stockpiled. There were no preparations whatsoever, and there was no plan. It was nothing more than a street brawl, said Orwell, who had been in the thick of it, ‘a very bloody riot, because both sides had firearms in their hands and were willing to use them’.
    For the communists, however, this ‘plot’ remained a good excuse to stamp out their anti-Stalinist rivals. A few weeks later, the whole POUM leadership was arrested. The POUM itself was declared an illegal organisation, all of the POUM's offices, hospitals, assistance centres and bookshops were seized and its militias disbanded. A general manhunt began for former POUM supporters, who were often militia members just back from the front. Hundreds if not thousands of POUM members, including at least a dozen foreign volunteers, disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
    Orwell escaped this witch-hunt by the skin of his teeth. His commander and comrade, the Belgian engineer George Kopp, was less fortunate. Kopp had given up everything to fight against the fascists in Spain, he had spent the whole winter at the front, during the brawl in Barcelona he had acted as a mediator and saved dozens of lives; his reward was to be thrown into prison by the Spanish and Russian communists, with no charges brought and no trial held. Orwell and his wife moved heaven and earth to have Kopp released. During the first few months they received a few letters from him, smuggled out of prison by others who had been released. Those letters always had the same refrain: dark and filthy cells, too little to eat, chronic illness, no medical care. At last, the letters stopped arriving, and the Orwellsassumed that Kopp had disappeared forever into one of the secret prisons. As by miracle, however, he survived the ‘international solidarity’.
    At the end of his
Homage to Catalonia
, George Orwell does something unique: he issues a warning to the reader:‘Beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events.’ Such honesty is a rare thing.
    No other war has ever had as many lies told about it as the Spanish Civil War. Everything, but everything, is covered in a thick layer of propaganda, and even today historians have the greatest difficulty coming close to something like the truth. We know almost nothing about how all those people like Kopp, those 130,000 victims of terror from the left and from the right, met their end, or why, or where their tormented bodies were buried.
    The only concrete evidence we possess are the eyewitness reports. The only former foreign volunteer I knew well lived in California, in Oakland. He drove around in a cream sports car, he wore an oriental shawl and he talked all the time about Betsy, Betsy, his new love. His name was Milton Wolff, he was in his late seventies, and he had been the last commander of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of American volunteers. He was twenty-three at the time.
    In two years’ time his battalion had gone through eight commanders – four were killed, four were badly wounded – and Milton was number nine. In 1938, Ernest Hemingway wrote of him that he was only still alive by virtue of ‘the same hazard that leaves one tall palm tree standing where a hurricane has passed.’ Milton had remained standing through the fiery bloodbath at