Fifty Orwell Essays

'working loyally' beside the Communists. Then the Anarcho-Syndicalists

  were levered out of the Government; then it appeared that they were not

  working so loyally; now they are in the process of becoming traitors.

  After that will come the turn of the left-wing Socialists. Caballero, the

  left-wing Socialist ex-premier, until May 1937 the idol of the Communist

  press, is already in outer darkness, a Trotskyist and 'enemy of the

  people'. And so the game continues. The logical end is a r?gime in which

  every opposition party and newspaper is suppressed and every dissentient

  of any importance is in jail. Of course, such a r?gime will be Fascism.

  It will not be the same as the fascism Franco would impose, it will even

  be better than Franco's fascism to the extent of being worth fighting

  for, but it will be Fascism. Only, being operated by Communists and

  Liberals, it will be called something different.

  Meanwhile, can the war be won? The Communist influence has been against

  revolutionary chaos and has therefore, apart from the Russian aid, tended

  to produce greater military efficiency. If the Anarchists saved the

  Government from August to October 1936, the Communists have saved it from

  October onwards. But in organizing the defence they have succeeded in

  killing enthusiasm (inside Spain, not outside). They made a militarized

  conscript army possible, but they also made it necessary. It is

  significant that as early as January of this year voluntary recruiting

  had practically ceased. A revolutionary army can sometimes win by

  enthusiasm, but a conscript army has got to win with weapons, and it is

  unlikely that the Government will ever have a large preponderance of arms

  unless France intervenes or unless Germany and Italy decide to make off

  with the Spanish colonies and leave Franco in the lurch. On the whole, a

  deadlock seems the likeliest thing.

  And does the Government seriously intend to win? It does not intend to

  lose, that is certain. On the other hand, an outright victory, with

  Franco in flight and the Germans and Italians driven into the sea, would

  raise difficult problems, some of them too obvious to need mentioning.

  There is no real evidence and one can only judge by the event, but I

  suspect that what the Government is playing for is a compromise that

  would leave the war situation essentially in being. All prophecies are

  wrong, therefore this one will be wrong, but I will take a chance and say

  that though the war may end quite soon or may drag on for years, it will

  end with Spain divided up, either by actual frontiers or into economic

  zones. Of course, such a compromise might be claimed as a victory by

  either side, or by both.

  All that I have said in this article would seem entirely commonplace in

  Spain, or even in France. Yet in England, in spite of the intense

  interest the Spanish war has aroused, there are very few people who have

  even heard of the enormous struggle that is going on behind the

  Government lines. Of course, this is no accident. There has been a quite

  deliberate conspiracy (I could give detailed instances) to prevent the

  Spanish situation from being understood. People who ought to know better

  have lent themselves to the deception on the ground that if you tell the

  truth about Spain it will be used as Fascist propaganda.

  It is easy to see where such cowardice leads. If the British public had

  been given a truthful account of the Spanish war they would have had an

  opportunity of learning what Fascism is and how it can be combated. As it

  is, the News Chronicle version of Fascism as a kind of homicidal mania

  peculiar to Colonel Blimps bombinating in the economic void has been

  established more firmly than ever. And thus we are one step nearer to the

  great war 'against Fascism' (cf. 1914, 'against militarism') which will

  allow Fascism, British variety, to be slipped over our necks during the

  first week.

  MARRAKECH (1939)

  As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud

  and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later.

  The little crowd of mourners-all men and boys, no women--threaded

  their way across the market-place between the piles of pomegranates

  and the taxis and the camels, wailing a short chant over and over

  again. What really appeals to the flies is that the corpses here

  are never put into coffins, they are merely wrapped in a piece of

  rag and carried on a rough wooden bier on the shoulders of four friends.

  When the friends get to the burying-ground they hack an oblong hole a

  foot or two deep, dump the body in it and fling over it a little of the

  dried-up, lumpy earth, which is like broken brick. No gravestone, no

  name, no identifying mark of any kind. The burying-ground is merely a

  huge waste of hummocky earth, like a derelict building-lot. After a month

  or two no one can even be certain where his own relatives are buried.

  When you walk through a town like this--two hundred thousand inhabitants,

  of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags

  they stand up in--when you see how the people live, and still more how

  easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking

  among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon

  that fact. The people have brown faces--besides, there are so many of

  them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have

  names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about

  as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth, they

  sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the

  nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone.

  And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil. Sometimes,

  out for a walk, as you break your way through the prickly pear, you

  notice that it is rather bumpy underfoot, and only a certain regularity

  in the bumps tells you that you are walking over skeletons.

  I was feeding one of the gazelles in the public gardens.

  Gazelles are almost the only animals that look good to eat when they are

  still alive, in fact, one can hardly look at their hindquarters without

  thinking of mint sauce. The gazelle I was feeding seemed to know that

  this thought was in my mind, for though it took the piece of bread I was

  holding out it obviously did not like me. It nibbled rapidly at the

  bread, then lowered its head and tried to butt me, then took another

  nibble and then butted again. Probably its idea was that if it could

  drive me away the bread would somehow remain hanging in mid-air.

  An Arab navvy working on the path nearby lowered his heavy hoe and

  sidled towards us. He looked from the gazelle to the bread and from the

  bread to the gazelle, with a sort of quiet amazement, as though he had

  never seen anything quite like this before. Finally he said shyly in

  French:

  "_I_ could eat some of that bread."

  I tore off a piece and he stowed it gratefully in some secret place

  under his rags. This man is an employee of the Municipality.

  When you go through the Jewish quarters you gathe
r some idea of what the

  medieval ghettoes were probably like. Under their Moorish rulers the

  Jews were only allowed to own land in certain restricted areas, and

  after centuries of this kind of treatment they have ceased to bother

  about overcrowding. Many of the streets are a good deal less than six

  feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children

  cluster everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies. Down

  the centre of the street there is generally running a little river of

  urine.

  In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe

  and little black skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infested booths that

  look like caves. A carpenter sits cross-legged at a prehistoric lathe,

  turning chair-legs at lightning speed. He works the lathe with a bow in

  his right hand and guides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a

  lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of

  shape. At his side his grandson, aged six, is already starting on the

  simpler parts of the job.

  I was just passing the coppersmiths' booths when somebody noticed that I

  was lighting a cigarette. Instantly, from the dark holes all round,

  there was a frenzied rush of Jews, many of them old grandfathers with

  flowing grey beards, all clamouring for a cigarette. Even a blind man

  somewhere at the back of one of the booths heard a rumour of cigarettes

  and came crawling out, groping in the air with his hand. In about a

  minute I had used up the whole packet. None of these people, I suppose,

  works less than twelve hours a day, and every one of them looks on a

  cigarette as a more or less impossible luxury.

  As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow the same

  trades as the Arabs, except for agriculture. Fruit-sellers, potters,

  silversmiths, blacksmiths, butchers, leather-workers, tailors,

  water-carriers, beggars, porters--whichever way you look you see nothing

  but Jews. As a matter of fact there are thirteen thousand of them, all

  living in the space of a few acres. A good job Hitler isn't here.

  Perhaps he is on his way, however. You hear the usual dark rumours about

  the Jews, not only from the Arabs but from the poorer Europeans.

  "Yes, MON VIEUX, they took my job away from me and gave it to a Jew. The

  Jews! They're the real rulers of this country, you know. They've got all

  the money. They control the banks, finance--everything."

  "But," I said, "isn't it a fact that the average Jew is a labourer

  working for about a penny an hour?"

  "Ah, that's only for show! They're all money-lenders really. They're

  cunning, the Jews."

  In just the same way, a couple of hundred years ago, poor old women used

  to be burned for witchcraft when they could not even work enough magic

  to get themselves a square meal.

  All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more

  important the work they do, the less visible they are. Still, a white

  skin is always fairly conspicuous. In northern Europe, when you see a

  labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a second glance. In a

  hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances

  are that you don't even see him. I have noticed this again and again. In

  a tropical landscape one's eye takes in everything except the human

  beings. It takes in the dried-up soil, the prickly pear, the palm-tree

  and the distant mountain, but it always misses the peasant hoeing at his

  patch. He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less

  interesting to look at.

  It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia and Africa

  are accepted as tourist resorts. No one would think of running cheap

  trips to the Distressed Areas. But where the human beings have brown

  skins their poverty is simply not noticed. What does Morocco mean to a

  Frenchman? An orange-grove or a job in government service. Or to an

  Englishman? Camels, castles, palm-trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass

  trays and bandits. One could probably live here for years without

  noticing that for nine-tenths of the people the reality of life is an

  endless, back-breaking struggle to wring a little food out of an eroded

  soil.

  Most of Morocco is so desolate that no wild animal bigger than a hare

  can live on it. Huge areas which were once covered with forest have

  turned into a treeless waste where the soil is exactly like broken-up

  brick. Nevertheless a good deal of it is cultivated, with frightful

  labour. Everything is done by hand. Long lines of women, bent double

  like inverted capital Ls, work their way slowly across the fields,

  tearing up the prickly weeds with their hands, and the peasant gathering

  lucerne for fodder pulls it up stalk by stalk instead of reaping it,

  thus saving an inch or two on each stalk. The plough is a wretched

  wooden thing, so frail that one can easily carry it on one's shoulder,

  and fitted underneath with a rough iron spike which stirs the soil to a

  depth of about four inches. This is as much as the strength of the

  animals is equal to. It is usual to plough with a cow and a donkey yoked

  together. Two donkeys would not be quite strong enough, but on the other

  hand two cows would cost a little more to feed. The peasants possess no

  harrows, they merely plough the soil several times over in different

  directions, finally leaving it in rough furrows, after which the whole

  field has to be shaped with hoes into small oblong patches, to conserve

  water. Except for a day or two after the rare rainstorms there is never

  enough water. Along the edges of the fields channels are hacked out to a

  depth of thirty or forty feet to get at the tiny trickles which run

  through the subsoil.

  Every afternoon a file of very old women passes down the road outside my

  house, each carrying a load of firewood. All of them are mummified with

  age and the sun, and all of them are tiny. It seems to be generally the

  case in primitive communities that the women, when they get beyond a

  certain age, shrink to the size of children. One day a poor old creature

  who could not have been more than four feet tall crept past me under a

  vast load of wood. I stopped her and put a five-sou piece (a little more

  than a farthing) into her hand. She answered with a shrill wail, almost

  a scream, which was partly gratitude but mainly surprise. I suppose that

  from her point of view, by taking any notice of her, I seemed almost to

  be violating a law of nature. She accepted her status as an old woman,

  that is to say as a beast of burden. When a family is travelling it is

  quite usual to see a father and a grown-up son riding ahead on donkeys,

  and an old woman following on foot, carrying the baggage.

  But what is strange about these people is their invisibility. For

  several weeks, always at about the same time of day, the file of old

  women had hobbled past the house with their firewood, and though they

  had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say that I had

  seen them. Firewood was passing--that was how I saw it. It was only that

  one day I happen
ed to be walking behind them, and the curious up-and-down

  motion of a load of wood drew my attention to the human being underneath

  it. Then for the first time I noticed the poor old earth-coloured

  bodies, bodies reduced to bones and leathery skin, bent double under the

  crushing weight. Yet I suppose I had not been five minutes on Moroccan

  soil before I noticed the overloading of the donkeys and was infuriated

  by it. There is no question that the donkeys are damnably treated. The

  Moroccan donkey is hardly bigger than a St Bernard dog, it carries a

  load which in the British army would be considered too much for a

  fifteen-hands mule, and very often its pack-saddle is not taken off its

  back for weeks together. But what is peculiarly pitiful is that it is

  the most willing creature on earth, it follows its master like a dog and

  does not need either bridle or halter. After a dozen years of devoted

  work it suddenly drops dead, whereupon its master tips it into the ditch

  and the village dogs have torn its guts out before it is cold.

  This kind of thing makes one's blood boil, whereas--on the whole--the

  plight of the human beings does not. I am not commenting, merely

  pointing to a fact. People with brown skins are next door to invisible.

  Anyone can be sorry for the donkey with its galled back, but it is

  generally owing to some kind of accident if one even notices the old

  woman under her load of sticks.

  As the storks flew northward the Negroes were marching southward--a

  long, dusty column, infantry, screw-gun batteries and then more

  infantry, four or five thousand men in all, winding up the road with a

  clumping of boots and a clatter of iron wheels.

  They were Senegalese, the blackest Negroes in Africa, so black that

  sometimes it is difficult to see whereabouts on their necks the hair

  begins. Their splendid bodies were hidden in reach-me-down khaki

  uniforms, their feet squashed into boots that looked like blocks of

  wood, and every tin hat seemed to be a couple of sizes too small. It was

  very hot and the men had marched a long way. They slumped under the

  weight of their packs and the curiously sensitive black faces were

  glistening with sweat.

  As they went past a tall, very young Negro turned and caught my eye. But

  the look he gave me was not in the least the kind of look you might

  expect. Not hostile, not contemptuous, not sullen, not even inquisitive.

  It was the shy, wide-eyed Negro look, which actually is a look of

  profound respect. I saw how it was. This wretched boy, who is a French

  citizen and has therefore been dragged from the forest to scrub floors

  and catch syphilis in garrison towns, actually has feelings of reverence

  before a white skin. He has been taught that the white race are his

  masters, and he still believes it.

  But there is one thought which every white man (and in this connection

  it doesn't matter twopence if he calls himself a Socialist) thinks when

  he sees a black army marching past. "How much longer can we go on

  kidding these people? How long before they turn their guns in the other

  direction?"

  It was curious, really. Every white man there has this thought stowed

  somewhere or other in his mind. I had it, so had the other onlookers, so

  had the officers on their sweating chargers and the white NCOs marching

  in the ranks. It was a kind of secret which we all knew and were too

  clever to tell; only the Negroes didn't know it. And really it was

  almost like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or

  two miles of armed men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great

  white birds drifted over them in the opposite direction, glittering like

  scraps of paper.

  BOYS' WEEKLIES AND FRANK RICHARDS'S REPLY (1940)

  You never walk far through any poor quarter in any big town without