Jaime Domenech

Jaime Domenech was a young Spaniard serving in the same volunteer column as George Orwell on the Aragón front, the line of trenches in north-eastern Spain, in the winter of 1936 to 1937. Orwell describes him in four words, as a moonfaced peasant lad, and gives him one short scene. It comes in a passage about how much more dangerous the volunteers were to each other than the enemy was to them: the first five men Orwell saw wounded in Spain had all been hit by their own side's weapons.

Part of the trouble was the password system. The army was using double passwords, in which a sentry calls out one word and you have to answer with the matching second word. The pairs were usually improving and revolutionary. Orwell gives two examples: Cultura—progreso, culture answered by progress, and Seremos—invencibles, we shall be invincible. A good many of the sentries could not read, and Orwell says it was often impossible to get them to remember words of that kind at all.

One night the password was Cataluña—heroica, Catalonia answered by heroic. Domenech came to Orwell thoroughly puzzled and asked him what heroica meant. Orwell told him it meant the same as valiente, the everyday Spanish word for brave. A little later Domenech was stumbling up the trench in the dark when the sentry challenged him with the first half of the pair, and he shouted back the word he had just been taught, certain that he was giving the right answer. The sentry fired at him. He missed, which Orwell puts down to the general standard of Spanish marksmanship: in that war, he writes, everyone always did miss everyone else when it was humanly possible.