196

It seems good enough for you because it reinforces your previous beliefs. Keep calling yourself a leftist while you ignore material understanding of history and reality.

From the citation you quoted:

Orwell was also able to refute, from firsthand observation, many of the other absurdities that were appearing in the liberal press about the Aragon front, for example, the statement by Ralph Bates in the New Republic that the POUM troops were “playing football with the Fascists in no man’s land.”

It's a well-known historical fact that the Aragón front was mostly limp and that there was no pushing by either side for the longest time. From "González-Ruibal, A. (2020). The Archaeology of the Spanish Civil War (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429260131":

In the winter of 1938, the fate of the war was being decided in the southern part of Aragón, in the province of Teruel which, as we saw, was the scenario of one of the largest battles of the Spanish Civil War. While the Battle of Teruel was raging, most of the Aragón frontline, however, remained calm— perhaps precisely because of that. This was the case in the lands of the province of Zaragoza that had experienced the ravages of war during the summer of 1937. In the previous chapter, we saw how the Popular Army managed to stop the Nationalist units in Mediana de Aragón that came to the rescue of Belchite. After September 1937 the front did not move and the soldiers of both armies dug in and waited.

Orwell continues to be an unreliable source. It's incredible to me that you still quote him as an authority figure when he's patently lying.

On that very source, the author performs archaeological excavations and, what do you know, what he finds the most from Republicans are Soviet munitions and Polish grenades!

Our work in the area began with an advanced Republican post that had a large amount of ammunition on the surface. The excavation revealed a dugout for a machine gun, which yielded a rather homogeneous assemblage: one hundred Soviet 7.62 mm shell casings and a stack of empty ammunition boxes. In all likelihood, this was the position of a Maxim machine gun. [...] first, Republicans appear by surprise and attack with grenades. The sentinel is forced to crouch while the attackers cut the barbed wire with pliers. After the explosions come the shots. The Breda replies to the Mosin’s fire. But the Republicans keep coming closer and closer. They throw grenades, they advance. The sentinel throws his Lafittes, which explode at a close range, but he is unable to stop the attackers, who fall upon him and shoot from the top of the parapet. How does the story end? We do not know. But several Mosin shell casings around the foxhole and the trench indicate that Republicans made it that far.