At the front, Orwell was shot through the throat by a sniper on 20 May 1937 and nearly killed. He wrote in "Homage to Catalonia" that people frequently told him a man who is hit through the neck and survives is the luckiest creature alive, but that he personally thought "it would be even luckier not to be hit at all." After having his wounds dressed at a first aid post about half a mile from the front line, he was transferred to Barbastro and then to Lleida, where he received only an external treatment of his wound. On the 27th he was transferred to Tarragona, and on the 29th from there to Barcelona. On 23 June 1937, Orwell and Eileen, with John McNair and Stafford Cottman, a young English POUM militiaman, boarded the morning train from Barcelona to Paris. They safely crossed into France. Sir Richard Rees later wrote that the strain of her experience in Barcelona showed clearly on Eileen's face: "In Eileen Blair I had seen for the first time the symptoms of a human being living under a political terror." On 13 July 1937, a deposition was presented to the Tribunal for Espionage & High Treason, Valencia, charging the Orwells with 'rabid Trotskyism' and being agents of the POUM.