Occasionally the boredom was relieved by moments of fleeting action, even bathos. Once, Orwell found himself in much the position he had in Burma faced with a peaceful elephant to shoot. This time it was a Fascist soldier, no threat because, as he ran across his sights he was holding up his trousers. Unlike Burma, there was no crowd to urge him to shoot and he resisted pulling the trigger. ‘I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers,’ he wrote. ‘I had come here to shoot at “Fascists”; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a “Fascist”, he is visibly a fellow
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