TOW #7- Homage to Catalonia PT2

In George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, he describes his experience of the Spanish civil war in which the was much turmoil. Written during WWII, Spain was in a great divide. There was both a Fascist government and a Republic government attempting to reign over the people of Spain. Orwell is a highly renound writer and journalist, for his works are still being appreciated today. At the time, Orwell’s troops are facing shortages of many essential supplies such as clothing, He is writing for an audience at home, which in this case is the civilian population in America. The reader can tell because Orwell goes into depth explaining military diction because his audience is not expected to understand it. and In Orwell is personally dealing with an outbreak of lice. He remarks, “I think the pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate their pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war, indeed!” (Orwell 54). Here, Orwell shows some of his dissatisfaction at the war. however it is for the same purpose as when he previously described the conditions the men were facing: to build up the image of the Communists. For example, he later says “Everything was running short - boots, clothes, tobacco, soap, candles, matches, olive oil. Our uniforms were dropping to pieces, and many of the men had no boots, only rope-soled sandals. You came on piles of worn-out boots everywhere. Once we kept a dug-out fire burning for two days mainly with boots, which are not bad fuel.” (Orwell 54).  Here Orwell aims to show just how poorly the Spanish were faring, and that despite that they were still attempting to fight on. This shows Orwell's general purpose of attempting to show the fighters as being good people, with good characteristics who were poorly armed but still fought on, believing in their cause - making them far more sympathetic to the reader. He is trying to show to the reader that soldiers that live and die in war have no fault in the conflict itself, for they are only puppets in the grand scheme. Orwell effectively achieves his purpose by illustrating the good, the bad, and everything in the war.