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Always preferred Orwell as a writer of nonfiction, and Homage to Catalonia is most certainly up there with the best of it. Didn't think much of Animal Farm, and haven't even bothered to read 1984 yet, which, to be honest, doesn't really interest me anyway. What does interest me, a lot more, is his voice in the real world. I think now, having read this, Down & out in Paris & London, and some of his brilliant essays, he's simply a great writer. Didn't think I'd be saying that after Animal Farm. When he suddenly got shot here, I feared for his life, even though, of course, I knew he was to survive. He was told by a doctor he would lose his voice, permanently, but thankfully it did come back within a few months, having previously been reduced to a whisper. He was a lucky boy though, and on any other day the wound could have been fatal, thus, there would have been no book, or any others after for that matter. Orwell had joined the POUM militia, after simply serving as a journalist, because of his loose ties with the Independent Labour Party back home, but the poumistas were anti-Stalinists, and in the era of Moscow show-trials, they soon found themselves accused of being Trotskyist-fascists and enemy agents by the Moscow-run Spanish Communist Party, but like with many other conflicts there's lots of finger-pointing and accusations made by all sides. What I loved about this work is that Orwell never romanticizes about war, and is crisp and as clear as possible in regards to his intellectual honesty and capacity for observation. In between his reports of being on the frontline, he gives a really detailed account to the political side of things, and all those involved, which for someone like me, who is not well knowledged on the Spanish Civil War, provided much needed information, to at least make certain things that little bit clearer. Orwell, who produced this work fresh in his mind only a few months after returning to England, was not writing for effect. He recorded what he had seen out of a compelling need to testify. His prose has none of the mannerisms of modern cynical equivalents, who can tend to glamorise the horror and the futility of war. For Orwell, the characteristic smell and taste of war was that of excrement and decaying food, while also being pestered by rats and lice, he paints a vivid picture of the squalid trenches of the Aragón front in the early months of the war, while also describing the naive idealisms, his fellow comrades, the inability to use their rusty rifles properly (some of the weapons were decades old), and, to my surprise, there appeared to be more casualties (at least during Orwell's time) caused by simple accidents than by enemy fire, and he points out often, while on the front, that nothing really appears to be happening. So the battles overall are scarce, but when something does kick in, you bloody well know it. His descriptions in may of 1937 are a fascinating portrayal of mounting suspicion and much uncertainty, of which, he may have been wrong about certain events, but then so were other journalists and later historians, even more so, yet the immediacy of Orwell's account conveys the terrible fear and utter confusion caused by everything that was going on around him, which was, pardon my french, a bit of a clusterfuck at times, mitigated only by incompetence and many unpredictable flashes of humanity. As this was pretty much my first book to do with the Spanish Civil War, I'd be lying if I suddenly said everything now becomes crystal, because it doesn't. But at least it's a stepping stone toward likely future reading on the subject.