ever, if soldiers come to feel abandoned or misused.
The remainder of this essay considers two nearly contemporary experiences of commitment in war, or its absence or collapse: that of the Spanish Civil War, as recounted in George Orwell's memoir, Homage to Catalonia, and Vichy France during the Second World War, as examined in Robert O. Paxton's study, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944. These works differ in approach as well as subject matter and circumstances. The former is a personal memoir, by the author of 1984 and Animal Farm, combining the features of a soldier's memoir--Orwell fought as a volunteer in the anti-Franco Republican army till he was gravely wounded--and first-hand reporter's notebook. The latter is a scholarly study of national conditions, not a first-hand account or even a survey of first-hand accounts.
Moreover, Paxton's book does not strictly speaking deal with a nation at war, at least not in active war on the battlefield. He begins with the military defeat of France in 1940 as a given, with only the briefest discussion of the Battle of France itself. Technically, it is true, France remained at war with Germany throughout the whole period; the armistice was only a cease-fire, and the Vichy government never signed a formal peace treaty with Nazi Germany.
More fundamentally, Vichy France was a country and society still gripped in a paralysis of war even after the battlefield shooting ended. The collapse of the French Army had been shockingly sudden and proportionately demoralizing. Yet France was not wholly without means to fight on. Its navy was intact, as were its substantial colonial armies. Even at home, in the face of German occupation of two-thirds of France and
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