Jorge Roca

Jorge Roca commanded the battalion George Orwell served in on the Aragón front in the spring of 1937, about four hundred men in the militia of the P.O.U.M., the small revolutionary party Orwell had joined in Barcelona more or less by accident. He was a personal friend of Georges Kopp, the Belgian who commanded Orwell's own unit, and one of Kopp's best officers. The book puts him at the head of a single action, and then loses him.

The action was a night raid on a Fascist redoubt outside Huesca. Kopp explained the plan in a farmyard at Torre Fabian in pelting rain: thirty men, half English and half Spanish, under Roca and a Spanish captain named Benjamin, were to creep up and cut the Fascist wire, and Roca would throw the first bomb as the signal for the rest. There were no white armlets to tell friend from enemy in the dark, and out of the darkness a voice suggested arranging for the Fascists to wear them instead.

Roca waited on the grass outside the militia's own parapet until all thirty men had come through the gap, then bent almost double and started creeping forward. The Fascist parapet was about a hundred and fifty yards off across beet fields turned to mud, and the whole chance of the raid was moving without noise. He carried the party's only pair of wire-cutters in his pocket. At the outer wire he knelt, fumbled, snipped, and lifted the trailing stuff delicately aside; at the inner wire, twenty yards from the parapet, he did it again, and there was no way of cutting it silently.

The sentry heard them as the men behind were filing through the gap. There was a flash and a bang, and Roca went down on one knee and swung his arm like a bowler. His bomb burst somewhere over the parapet, and ten or twenty rifles opened up at once. He was hit at that first volley and was out of sight for the rest of the night.

When the raiding party got back over its own parapet, every wounded man had been brought in except Roca and an Englishman named Hiddlestone. Kopp was pacing up and down inside the parapet, very pale — pale even in the fat folds at the back of his neck — paying no attention to the bullets cracking past his head, and muttering the name over and over. He asked for five volunteers to go out and look. Orwell and Douglas Moyle went with three Spaniards into a sky that was already turning blue, were fired on, and found nothing. Roca had in fact been carried to the dressing-station early, lightly wounded through the shoulder.

The book never says what he looked like, how old he was or how he spoke. It records what he did on one night in the dark, at the head of thirty men, and nothing else about him.