It’s a platitude that war kills not only people but truth. And as all platitudes, the statement is true, boring, and misleading. Because it omits the real murderers: “War” does not, actually, kill truth; people kill truth. War just tempts them to do so as few other things – such as job applications or marriage – can. The flipside of that fact is that it is perfectly possible to stick to the truth – or at least make an honest effort to do so – in war, too.

That effort is different from “getting it right.” Think of, for example, George Orwell’s 'Homage to Catalonia', his unabashedly personal account of the Spanish Civil War. It was not even meant to be neutral because he sided with – indeed fought for – the underdog Trotskyists; historians, as always, feel they know better about the context and details; and – notwithstanding the sad mainstream sanctification Orwell has suffered posthumously at the hands of conformist mediocrities – 'Homage to Catalonia' is, of course, flawed. Saint Orwell was fallible. Duh.

But 'Homage to Catalonia' was an honest effort to find out and tell true things about a war and, importantly, from a war. How do we know that? Most of all by reading it, of course. But apart from that, there is another test: the manner in which it was received when it came out, namely badly.

Making no concessions to what his audience might want to read, Orwell had trouble getting 'Homage to Catalonia' published and rightly suspected that was due to its politics, which antagonized everyone: Orwell’s own tribe, the Left, no less than the Right. In the end – with the work, in Orwell’s words, “boycotted by the British press” – barely over a third of its modest first edition of 1,500 copies were sold. Homage to Catalonia is a modern classic now. But........

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