Williams
The other English militiaman at the Lenin Barracks, and Orwell's companion for the first months in the line. His Spanish wife had fought in the July street battles and taught Orwell how to put his cartridge boxes on.
In Orwell's account, nothing he ever puts into words; the book gives him a wife who fought in July, a brother-in-law in the same dug-out, and a place in the line, and records what he did rather than what he was after.
The book
At a glance
- The other English militiaman in Orwell's unit
- Surname only; no first name is given
- A Spanish wife who fought in the July 1936 street battles, and her brother Ramon
- Invalided to the Sanatorium Maurin with a damaged leg
- Chapters 1, 2, 4, 8 and 13
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeApart from George Orwell, Williams was the only Englishman at the Lenin Barracks in December 1936. They went up to the Aragón front together, dived for the same dug-out on the first afternoon at Monte Pocero, and were transferred together to Monte Oscuro three weeks later so that the English could be kept in one place when the Independent Labour Party contingent arrived. The book gives him no first name.
His wife supplies the most vivid page he appears on. On the night the column left for the front the barracks filled with women helping to roll blankets and pack kit-bags, and Orwell records his embarrassment at having to be shown how to put on his new leather cartridge-boxes by a Spanish girl — gentle, dark-eyed and intensely feminine, he writes, who looked as though her life's work was rocking a cradle, and who had in fact fought in the street battles of the previous July. She was carrying a child that was born ten months after the war began. As the train pulled out she came running down the platform with a bottle of wine and a foot of bright red sausage that tasted of soap.
Her brother Ramon went with them. He was one of the thirty-odd men at Monte Oscuro and the only Spaniard among the English, and he turns up again in Orwell's list of the things that stayed with him: the limestone ledge that served as a bed in the dug-out at Monte Pocero, and young Ramon snoring with his nose flattened between Orwell's shoulder-blades.
How the book draws them
- The other EnglishmanThe only one at the Lenin Barracks besides Orwell, at a time when nobody there spoke a word of French either. They went to the front together and shared the first dug-out with Williams's Spanish brother-in-law.
- His wifeShe showed Orwell how to put on his cartridge-boxes, which he found humiliating, and had fought in the Barcelona street battles of July 1936. She was pregnant with a child born ten months after the outbreak of war.
- The wine and the sausageShe caught the train at the last moment and handed them a bottle of wine and a foot of bright red sausage, which Orwell says tasted of soap and gave you diarrhoea.
- RamonHer brother, the one Spaniard among the thirty English at Monte Oscuro. In Chapter 8 Orwell places him among the memories that stayed sharpest: asleep on the limestone ledge, nose flattened against Orwell's shoulder-blades.
- AfterwardsHe turns up in the last chapters at the Sanatorium Maurin near Tibidabo with a damaged leg, and escapes arrest when the police raid it in June, going into hiding somewhere in the city.