On 26 April 1937 when Orwell and his ILP comrades had returned to Barcelona on their leave they had been shocked to see how things had changed. The revolutionary atmosphere of four months earlier had all but evaporated, and old class divisions been reasserted. Similarly, as he headed for the French border on the train to Port Bou, Orwell noticed another symptom of the change since his arrival—the train on which classes had been abolished now had both first-class compartments and a dining car. Bowker reports that "Orwell mused that coming into Spain the previous year, bourgeois-looking people would be turned back at the border by Anarchist guards; now looking bourgeois gave one easy passage". A simple hostility to Stalinist Communism became a "deep-dyed loathing of it". After reviewing Koestler's best-selling "Darkness at Noon", Orwell decided that fiction was the best way to describe totalitarianism. "Animal Farm", "his scintillating 1944 satire on Stalinism", would be part of his response to the Spanish betrayal. "He had learned a hard lesson, especially about the new political Europe. Totalitarianism, the new creed of 'the streamlined men' of Fascism and Communism, was a new manifestation of Orwell's old Catholic enemy, the doctrine of Absolutism ... the ghost of Torquemada had arisen, imprisonment without trial, confessions extracted under torture with summary executions to follow." "The essential fact about a totalitarian regime is that it has no laws. People are not punished for specific offences, but because they are considered to be politically or intellectually undesirable. What they have done or not done is irrelevant."