This is Orwell’s account of his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War. It’s mostly fun to read – I got a good sense of the life of a (motley) soldier. As they say, it’s long stretches of uncomfortable boredom punctuated by brief bursts of terror. Orwell gives us a mix of petty complaints and gossip, analysis of battle tactics, conspiracy theories (some true), politics and much more. He writes with increasing weariness and disillusionment about the political infighting on the anti-fascist side. You can tell it’s not going to end well, even without taking into account the fact that we actually know it didn’t end well.
I said this book is mostly fun to read. The least fun part was the description of the various factions on the anti-fascist side. There are too many acronyms designating the various groups. It was only one chapter but I found it heavy going and couldn’t tell you much about it now.
The narrative finishes when he and his wife Eileen manage to get out of the country in 1937. They were lucky to get out when they did – they were tried in absentia by a Communist kangaroo court, not too long after they had managed to escape the country. He definitely wasn’t optimistic about his side’s prospects of victory. It would have been interesting if he had added a postscript a couple of years later, after the fascists had won. And we all know what happened next!