Trench Warfare
Orwell makes horrific conditions of trench warfare come to life through the use of metaphorical language. What is notable is that he very rarely goes for the poetic flight of fancy, preferring to eshew academic allusion for the simple and relatable image:
“I was wearing a thick vest and pants, a flannel shirt, two pull-overs, a woollen jacket, a pigskin jacket, corduroy breeches, puttees, thick socks, boots, a stout trench-coat, a muffler, lined leather gloves, and a woollen cap. Nevertheless I was shivering like a jelly.”
‘This war is a racket the same as any other.’
The idealistic view with which Orwell arrived to take up arms against the fascists in Spain was punctured on his very first day in in the country when he met a journalist who had already been covering the proceedings. The journalist put the idealism of fighting for a cause into economic perspective with his metaphor of the cause being little more than another money-making scam.
“she was being used as a decoy duck”
Orwell’s wife had been detained by the police while in the meantime they had taken the opportunity to search their hotel room. Orwell downplays this potentially frightening situation by suggesting in metaphorical terms that things were not always what they appeared to be under the oppression of the fascists. After all, while they had detailed her, they had yet to arrest her.
‘The atmosphere of this place — it’s horrible. Like being in a lunatic asylum.’
Orwell’s description of his final weeks in Barcelona is positively…Orwellian. What he is describing here is the reality of a situation that would over time become memories which informed the work of fiction for which he would become famous. What is most interesting is that he asserts that nearly everyone he talked to about the ambiance in the city at that moment of collapse of into full-fledged fascistic totalitarian is used the same metaphorical language.
“Whichever way we turned a fresh stream of bullets swept past; we were driven this way and that in the darkness like a flock of sheep.”
One of the most chilling similes in the entire text is this one. The idea of being herded like sheep in a story about fighting authoritarian regimes is hardly original; but Orwell takes the thematic issue of being portrayed as mindless subjects in a different and wholly frightening new direction. The very image of he and his comrades being twisted this way and that like a sheep herded by a dog under the circumstances of being targeted by rifle-bearing troops is quite powerful.
