George Orwell travelled to Spain in 1936 to report on the civil war but instead joined the P.O.U.M. militia to fight the Fascists. He portrays both the harsh and hilarious aspects of trench warfare on the Aragon front, the Barcelona uprising in May 1937, his nearly fatal wounds two weeks later, and his escape from Barcelona into France after the P.O.U.M. was suppressed in this now justly famous account of his ordeal. Orwell's analysis of why the Communist Party hindered the workers' revolution and labelled the P.O.U.M. as Trotskyist, which gives a fundamental key to understanding the war's outcome and an ironic sidelight on international Communism, is as important as the account of the conflict itself.