Barcelona is portrayed not as a stable revolutionary center but as a city whose political life has become theatrical and compromised. In Karkov’s account, the city’s successive poses—from romantic revolution to the swagger of men who enjoy war’s uniforms but avoid its fighting—make it a pointed counterimage to the discipline and confidence associated with Madrid.

Karkov’s View of the City

Karkov describes Barcelona as a place that provokes laughter rather than the physical revulsion he associates with Valencia. He calls it “the paradise of the fake soldier”: a setting for men who strut in uniforms and red-and-black scarves and relish the appearance of war while avoiding combat. The phrase makes dress and display political evidence; the city’s militarism appears as a performance detached from the risk and labor of the front.

That judgment follows Karkov’s contrast between Madrid, where he says one feels clean and certain of victory, and Valencia, which he associates with government by people who fled Madrid and now weaken the war commissariat. Barcelona extends his criticism of the Republican rear, but its particular failing is comic self-dramatization rather than Valencia’s bureaucracy. These are Karkov’s polemical impressions, not an impersonal account of the city.

Barcelona and the P.O.U.M. Uprising

The conversation turns to the P.O.U.M. uprising in Barcelona. Karkov calls the movement an infantilism, describing it as a mixture of romantic revolutionaries, misguided people, and a small amount of fascist money. His ridicule is emphatic: he treats the organization as too disorganized and unserious to constitute a meaningful political danger, though he acknowledges that some people in Barcelona were killed.

Karkov also says the P.O.U.M. had plotted to kill him, Walter, Modesto, and Prieto, presenting the alleged targets as evidence of the plotters’ confusion because those men were not alike. He claims that Nin was the organization’s only substantial figure, that his side had captured him, and that Nin escaped. Karkov reports sending a cable denouncing the P.O.U.M. as Trotskyite murderers and alleging fascist machinations, while privately minimizing its seriousness. The gap between public denunciation and private dismissal reveals the political rhetoric surrounding the uprising without resolving the truth of every accusation.

Political Violence and Moral Contrast

Barcelona’s uprising enters a wider novelistic argument about revolutionary violence and its consequences. Anselmo says he has killed several times but regards killing a person, even an enemy who must be killed in war, as a sin. He would have defeated enemies made to work as peasants rather than be killed, because he believes killing teaches nothing and breeds further hatred. His position places moral resistance to killing beside the practical demand to fight.

The village killings narrated by Pilar offer a contrasting example of violence justified as necessity. She had accepted the killing of the Civil Guard as ugly but necessary to preserve the Republic; when the execution process became degrading and the crowd’s conduct repelled her, she withdrew from the lines. The contrast does not equate these episodes with the Barcelona uprising. It shows instead how the novel measures political action against its human costs, and how claims of necessity can become compromised by the conduct they authorize.

A Contested Political Landscape

Barcelona’s significance lies in the instability of the political language used to describe it. Karkov’s comic contempt for false soldiers sits beside grave allegations of conspiracy, killings, and executions after the uprising. Elsewhere, Robert Jordan’s reflections on Spanish cruelty resist easy division between good and evil, while recognizing that people on both sides have committed dreadful acts. Together, these perspectives make Barcelona part of a larger portrait of a Republic under pressure, where political loyalties and condemnations are entangled with violence and the difficulty of judging it.