This chapter describes his and his wife's visit to Georges Kopp, unit commander of the ILP Contingent while Kopp was held in a Spanish makeshift jail, - " really the ground floor of a shop." Having done all he could to free Kopp, ineffectively and at great personal risk, Orwell decides to leave Spain. Crossing the Pyrenees frontier, he and his wife arrived in France "without incident."

The broader political context in Spain and the revolutionary situation in Barcelona at the time is discussed. The political differences among the PSUC (the Socialist Party of Catalonia—entirely under Communist control and affiliated to the Third International), the anarchists, and the POUM, are considered.

An attempt to dispel some of the myths in the foreign press at the time (mostly the pro-Communist press) about the street fighting that took place in Catalonia in early May 1937. This was between anarchists and POUM members, against Communist/government forces which sparked off when local police forces occupied the Telephone Exchange, which had until then been under the control of CNT workers. He relates the suppression of the P.O.U.M. on 15-16 June 1937 , gives examples of the Communist Press of the world - (Daily Worker , 21 June, SPANISH TROTSKYISTS PLOT WITH FRANCO), indicates that Indalecio Prieto hinted, "fairly broadly..that the government could not afford to offend the Communist Party while the Russians were supplying arms." He quotes Julián Zugazagoitia, the Minister of the Interior; " We have received aid from Russia and have had to permit certain actions which we did not like."

(In a letter he wrote in August 1938, protesting against the treatment of a number of members of the Executive Committee of the POUM, shortly to be put on trial on the charge of espionage in the Fascist cause, Orwell repeats these words of Zugazagoitia. An editorial note on the letter adds: " During a cabinet meeting, 'Zugazagoitia demanded if his jurisdiction as Minister of the Interior were to be limited by Russian policemen', according to Thomas. ( Hugh Thomas The Spanish Civil War 704) 'Had they been able to purchase and transport good arms from US, British, and French manufacturers, the socialist and republican members of the Spanish government might have tried to cut themselves loose from Stalin.')

Contemporary reviews of the book were mixed. Notably positive reviews came from Geoffrey Gorer in Time and Tide , and from Philip Mairet in the New English Weekly. Geoffrey Gorer concluded, 'Politically and as literature it is a work of first-class importance.' Philip Mairet observed , 'It shows us the heart of innocence that lies in revolution; also the miasma of lying that, far more than the cruelty, takes the heart out of it.' Hostile notices came from the Tablet, where a Catholic critic wondered why Orwell had not troubled to get to know Fascist fighters and enquire about their motivations, and from the Times Literary Supplement and The Listener, from obvious Communists, the first misrepresenting what Orwell had said and the latter attacking the POUM but never mentioning the book. A mixed review was supplied by V.S. Pritchett who called Orwell naïve about Spain but added that, 'no one excels him in bringing to the eyes, ears and nostrils the nasty ingredients of fevered situations; and I would recommend him warmly to all who are concerned about the realities of personal experience in a muddled cause.'

According to Raymond Carr :"The Spanish Civil war produced a spate of bad literature. Homage to Catalonia is one of the few exceptions and the reason is simple. Orwell was determined to set down the truth as he saw it. This was something that many writers of the Left in 1936-39 could not bring themselves to do. Orwell comes back time and time again in his writings on Spain to those political conditions in the late thirties which fostered intellectual dishonesty: the subservience of the intellectuals of the European Left to the Communist 'line', especially in the case of the Popular Front in Spain where, in his view, the party line could not conceivably be supported by an honest man. Only a few strong souls, Victor Serge and Orwell among them, could summon up the courage to fight the whole tone of the literary establishment and the influence of Communists within it..Arthur Koestler quoted to an audience of Communist sympathizers Thomas Mann's phrase, 'In the long run a harmful truth is better than a useful lie'. The non-Communists applauded; the Communists and their sympathizers remained icily silent....It is precisely the immediacy of Orwell's reaction that gives the early sections of Homage its value for the historian. Kaminski, Borkenau, Koestler came with a fixed framework, the ready-made contacts of journalist intellectuals. Orwell came with his eyes alone;"

Barcelona under the Anarchists would remain with Orwell. "No one who was in Spain during the months when people still believed in the revolution will ever forget that strange and moving experience. It has left something behind that no dictatorship, not even Franco's, will be able to efface." In the words of a recent biographer, Gordon Bowker, " the people that had effaced that reality, the Soviet Communists, now had an implacable enemy they would come to regret having made." On 26 April 1937 when Orwell and his ILP comrades had returned to Barcelona on their leave they had been shocked to see how things had changed. The revolutionary atmosphere of four months earlier had all but evaporated, and old class divisions been reasserted. Similarly, as he had headed for the French border on the train to Port Bou Orwell noticed another symptom of the change since his arrival—the train on which classes had been abolished now had both first-class compartments and a dining car. "Orwell mused that coming into Spain the previous year, bourgeois-looking people would be turned back at the border by Anarchist guards; now looking bourgeois gave one easy passage." A simple hostility to Stalinist Communism became a " deep-dyed loathing of it". Animal Farm, " his scintillating 1944 satire on Stalinism" would be part of his response to the Spanish betrayal. " He had learned a hard lesson,especially about the new political Europe. Totalitarianism, the new creed of 'the streamlined men' of Fascism and Communism, was a new manifestation of Orwell's old Catholic enemy, the doctrine of Absolutism" - the ghost of Torquemada had arisen, imprisonment without trial, confessions extracted under torture with summary executions to follow. " The essential fact about a totalitarian regime is that it has no laws. People are not punished for specific offences, but because they are considered to be politically or intellectually undesirable. What they have done or not done is irrelevant." Apart from the betrayal of the POUMists, the terror and the murder of Nin and Smillie, Orwell had been depressed by the attitude of the British press. "In Spain..I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts..I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various party lines." " He was appalled at the treatment of the May days as a 'Trotskyist Revolt' in papers like the News Chronicle which simply swallowed uncritically the Communist line; or Ralph Bates report in The New Republic that POUM militiamen were playing football with Fascist troops...Given this supresio vero by interested parties, how could true history be written? Propaganda would pass as truth; 'facts' could be manipulated. Those who monopolized communication could create their own history after the event—the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four."

Yet Orwell "had felt what socialism could be like" and unlike the writer John Dos Passos for example, "who also had a friend killed in custody by the SIM (Spanish Secret Police) in Spain, and reacted by deserting the Communists and shifting decidedly to the right, Orwell never did abandon his socialism: if anything, his Spanish experience strengthened it. " "At last I really believe in Socialism which I never did before." (George Orwell, Letter to Cyril Connolly, 8 June 1937).