I never saw the Italian militiaman again, nor did I ever learn his name. It can be taken as quite certain that he is dead. Nearly two years later, when the war was visibly lost, I wrote these verses in his memory:

The Italian soldier shook my hand
Beside the guard-room table;
The strong hand and the subtle hand
Whose palms are only able

To meet within the sound of guns,
But oh! what peace I knew then
In gazing on his battered face
Purer than any woman’s!

For the fly-blown words that make me spew
Still in his ears were holy,
And he was born knowing what I had learned
Out of books and slowly.

The treacherous guns had told their tale
And we both had bought it,
But my gold brick was made of gold –
Oh! who ever would have thought it?

Good luck go with you, Italian soldier!
But luck is not for the brave;
What would the world give back to you?
Always less than you gave.

Between the shadow and the ghost,
Between the white and the red,
Between the bullet and the lie,
Where would you hide your head?

For where is Manuel González,
And where is Pedro Aguilar,

And where is Ramón Fenellosa?
The earthworms know where they are.

Your name and your deeds were forgotten
Before your bones were dry,
And the lie that slew you is buried
Under a deeper lie;

But the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.

1. New Road: New Directions in English Arts and Letters was published 1943–49. Vols. I and II (1943–44) were edited by Alex Comfort (1920–2000, who later gained a certain fame as author of The Joy of Sex, 1972) and John Bayliss.

2. Dwight Macdonald (1906–82), libertarian critic, pamphleteer and scholar. He was for a time associate editor of Partisan Review, for which journal Orwell wrote his London Letters. He later founded Politics, which he edited 1944–49, and to which Orwell also contributed.

3. All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel based on the experiences of front-line German troops in the First World War trenches, was written by Erich Maria Remarque and published as Im Westen nichts Neue in 1929. It was immediately translated into English by A. W. Wheen and published in the same year. It is still in print, in a new translation. A film of the novel was made in 1930 (featuring Lew Ayres and Louis Wolheim). It was censored in Britain because regarded as too horrific (in particular a scene featuring a rat; if Orwell had seen it, he would have been particularly impressed, given his antipathy to rats).

4. US weekly journal devoted to proletarian literature. It ran from 1926 to 1948.

5. The Oxford Union’s motion in 1935 supporting the refusal to fight ‘for King and Country’ initiated a series of alternating demands that Britain abstain from and engage in military action.

6. Jesus said: “for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword”, Matthew, 26: 52.

7. See War-time Diary, 1218, 11.6.42.