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The Spanish Farm trilogy #1
The Spanish Farm
Life in the war-zone in Flanders during WWI, through the eyes of a peasant girl living on a farm.
248 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1924
About the author
Ralph Hale Mottram
38 books1 followerRalph Hale Mottram FRSL was an English writer. A lifelong resident of Norfolk, he was well known as a novelist, in particular for his Spanish Farm Trilogy, and as a poet of World War I.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
August 13, 2023
"The Spanish Farm" provides a remarkable portrait of the life of civilians living in French Flanders the during WWI. The protagonist is Madeleine Vanderlynden a resourceful and determined Flemish peasant who at the age of 20 is thrust in the role of family head. Madeleine is hardworking, determined, quick-witted and a natural leader. Due to a convent school education, she can cope very well with paper work and is able to negotiate effectively both with the local French bureaucrats and the British military authorities who billet soldiers on her property. Without being dishonest Madeleine shows a great flare for manipulating people to her advantage.
Madeleine's one weakness is falling in love with men that she can never have which she fully understands. Thus Madeleine becomes adept at concealing her romantic adventures. Predictably at the end of the war, the farm is still intact with Madeleine firmly in control. There is however no man in her life. Her triumph is to have survived.
The Vanderlynden farm is referred to as the "Spanish Farm" because its principal buildings were erected by the Spaniards several centuries earlier when the region was ruled by Spain. The author chooses to use this name to reinforce one of his main points which is that Flanders is a borderland and that occupation by foreign armies is a constant feature of life.
Stylistically, the novel is quite Balzacian; that-is-to-say the principal characters are all very well developed, their motivations are clearly explained and their actions are highly logical given their circumstances.
However well written it is, the prime strength of "The Spanish Firm" is the remarkable description that in contains of civilian life near the front during WWI. It is thus more likely to interest history buffs than literature lovers.
Madeleine's one weakness is falling in love with men that she can never have which she fully understands. Thus Madeleine becomes adept at concealing her romantic adventures. Predictably at the end of the war, the farm is still intact with Madeleine firmly in control. There is however no man in her life. Her triumph is to have survived.
The Vanderlynden farm is referred to as the "Spanish Farm" because its principal buildings were erected by the Spaniards several centuries earlier when the region was ruled by Spain. The author chooses to use this name to reinforce one of his main points which is that Flanders is a borderland and that occupation by foreign armies is a constant feature of life.
Stylistically, the novel is quite Balzacian; that-is-to-say the principal characters are all very well developed, their motivations are clearly explained and their actions are highly logical given their circumstances.
However well written it is, the prime strength of "The Spanish Firm" is the remarkable description that in contains of civilian life near the front during WWI. It is thus more likely to interest history buffs than literature lovers.
third-in-line
June 25, 2014R H Mottram served in France from 1914 to 1919. The Spanish Farm was first published in 1924 and won the Hawthornden Prize. Mottram wrote some sixty books altogether and in 1966 he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of East Anglia. He died in 1971.
August 5, 2026
We’re so conditioned to understanding the horror and pity of the First World War through the trauma of the War Poets that it comes as quite a surprise to realise that even with all the carnage of total warfare, ordinary life mostly still managed to trundle on as usual.
We think of the mud and the trenches and the slaughter of mechanised warfare. And yet Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves also wrote about other, fundamentally human, aspects of war: the boredom, the camaraderie, the everyday trivial vexations of human existence.
And so, just as the very much better known Sassoon and Graves leavened their accounts of life on the Front with moments of quirkiness, delight and dark humour, so the undeservedly lesser-known RH Mottram finds relief from the horror of war in recording the weirdness of official bureaucracy: “the immense weight of paper, by which a government, in sore straits, discharged its expedients upon its humbler representatives” (p184).
While Mottram, like Sassoon and Graves, led men in the trenches and over the top, he also had an administrative day job as a Claims Officer, liaising with local civilians to assess and award compensation for expenses, costs and damage.
Now, I had absolutely no idea that we paid out for our soldiers’ bed and board when they were billeted in France and Belgium fighting the Germans. And I had no idea either that we also paid redress, as set out in official scales, if British soldiers damaged civilian French and Belgian property as a consequence of war.
It’s this claims system that our feisty heroine, Madeleine Vanderlynden, “manages” so adroitly (p15), bringing her into close contact with the military authorities. Her single-minded implacable obsession is “to get back, sou by sou, everything that had been lost or destroyed, plundered or shattered, by friend or foe, and pay herself for everything she had suffered and dared” (p234).
And it’s mostly through Madeleine’s perspective that we experience “the story of what war really is like”, as John Galsworthy describes it in his foreword.
And if I was astonished to learn about the system of financial redress for out-of-pocket civilians impacted by war, I was equally surprised that the main character of a war story written a hundred years ago should be female. And what a woman too: tenacious, decisive, efficient, hardworking warm-bloodied - a survivor at all cost. Just like her farm, in fact.
And that’s not just our contemporary feminist take. That was clearly also the view of Madeleine Vanderlynden’s own family and friends, her fellow farmers and village neighbours. And increasingly, the view of the military authorities in general, and of the ever-obliging liaison officer, gentle Lieutenant Geoffrey Skene, in particular.
Madeleine, however, regrettably only has eyes for the spoilt and feckless Georges d’Archeville who she pursues throughout the novel with her usual grim tenacity.
Other things that came as a surprise to me reading the novel - or perhaps not - included:
- Just how the Vanderlynden farmstead has managed to survive at all, situated as it is in border territory fought over for centuries by the French, Dutch, German, Italians, English as well as the Spanish (p14) who originally named it.
- That while basics like coal and bread are rationed (p75), fine food and wine flow freely for those who can pay - including the senior military who patronise Madeleine’s successful little restaurant, the Lion of Flanders (p88).
- Men home on leave from the Front, “whether English, French, German or Italian”, want only to talk “about food, railways, jokes, old acquaintances - never about the cosmic murder in which they were engaged, or their daily decreasing belief that they might escape alive” (p46).
- How easily the unmarried Madeleine and Geoffrey Skene are able to bribe Madeleine’s seemingly prim and respectable landlady into turning a blind eye to their sleeping together in her boarding house.
- The cynicism of the self-publicising French politician, Dantrigues, with his election stunt that focuses on suburban Parisians rather than “the real fighting soldiers, nearer the Front, who would mostly be killed and never vote at all” (p158).
And yet even though the Front is often only half a mile away, with all its horror and carnage, there’s still a lot of humour in the book, mostly of a wry and ironic kind. For example:
- Madeleine’s dismissive attitude towards men in general - stupid vexing “men who were always doing things like this war” - that had been reinforced “by the teaching of the convent school, where the nuns seemed to be perpetually clearing up the mess men made of things” (p25).
- Madeleine sturdily seeing off unwanted male attention with a heavy water jug, “slung forward with the force of muscles accustomed to tossing swedes to feed the mashing-machine” (p31).
- The comic fury of the officious little booking-office clerk, refusing to issue a railway ticket because the reams of required forms and permits hadn’t been properly completed (p54).
- Madeleine’s landlady in Amiens, “one of those widows of the small official class who seemed to have disappeared from England since Dickens. She was poorer, prouder, more impossibly ugly and mean than anything surviving to us” (p102).
- Sir Montague Fryern, the eccentric aristocratic head of “army salvage”, who hoards at the Spanish Farm “the most miscellaneous collection of objects ever seen together since Rabelais compiled his immortal lists of omnium gatherum” (p74).
Other sentences on the novel that struck me as especially wise or beautiful included these:
- “Like all other incidents of the War, there it was. Shells fell, something was destroyed. One went on as well as one could” (p77).
- “The tops of the elms towered above the mist-line into that wide blue vault that the old painters loved, nowhere wider than in the Flemish plain” (p8).
- “In the queer gauche Flemish springtime, buds and shoots hung stiffly in the still air like heraldic emblems” (p85).
- “He was more solicitous than ever, gentle, kind, with a mid-Victorian kindness she had never known - the manners of one whose boyhood has been unspoiled by bitter thoughts about money” (p145).
- “Such tenderness as life had not already rubbed out of her, showed itself in her solicitude as to his sandwiches and half-bottle of wine” (p152).
- “What will become of it all?” she cried aloud. It, undefined, being the old happy easy life of pre-war” (p187).
- “Gas they knew, and shells and machine-gun fire, but to be Drowned was the last refinement of a war that had already surpassed all notions of possible evil” (p188).
Rather fittingly, as I was finishing “The Spanish Farm” I happened to visit Norwich, the city where RH Mottram grew up. The local memorial to him seems particularly appropriate: a viewpoint in a hilly park overlooking the handsome city with its rooftops, towers and spires. I went in the early evening and was bowled over by the magnificent skies over the city skyline.
It seemed a million miles from the mud, gas and slaughter of the trenches that he, along with hundreds of fellow Norfolk men, and millions of other men from all round the world, lived through and never forgot …
PS. My copy of this book has a very attractive front cover which I took to be an illustration based perhaps on a seventeenth-century Delft tile. It’s a picture of a milk-maid in traditional dress and cap, wearing a yoke to carry pails across a very Dutch-looking courtyard. Using a magnifying glass, I managed to decipher the microscopic block letters in the bottom right-hand corner as Vivian Gribble. I was surprised to discover that this engraver wasn’t seventeenth-century Dutch but an English artist from the early twentieth-century. She was very well-connected and did wood-engravings for expensive limited editions of books by the most famous writers of the time. Sadly I’d never heard of her but I’m pleased to see that my local museum has work by her that I’d love to be able to see.
We think of the mud and the trenches and the slaughter of mechanised warfare. And yet Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves also wrote about other, fundamentally human, aspects of war: the boredom, the camaraderie, the everyday trivial vexations of human existence.
And so, just as the very much better known Sassoon and Graves leavened their accounts of life on the Front with moments of quirkiness, delight and dark humour, so the undeservedly lesser-known RH Mottram finds relief from the horror of war in recording the weirdness of official bureaucracy: “the immense weight of paper, by which a government, in sore straits, discharged its expedients upon its humbler representatives” (p184).
While Mottram, like Sassoon and Graves, led men in the trenches and over the top, he also had an administrative day job as a Claims Officer, liaising with local civilians to assess and award compensation for expenses, costs and damage.
Now, I had absolutely no idea that we paid out for our soldiers’ bed and board when they were billeted in France and Belgium fighting the Germans. And I had no idea either that we also paid redress, as set out in official scales, if British soldiers damaged civilian French and Belgian property as a consequence of war.
It’s this claims system that our feisty heroine, Madeleine Vanderlynden, “manages” so adroitly (p15), bringing her into close contact with the military authorities. Her single-minded implacable obsession is “to get back, sou by sou, everything that had been lost or destroyed, plundered or shattered, by friend or foe, and pay herself for everything she had suffered and dared” (p234).
And it’s mostly through Madeleine’s perspective that we experience “the story of what war really is like”, as John Galsworthy describes it in his foreword.
And if I was astonished to learn about the system of financial redress for out-of-pocket civilians impacted by war, I was equally surprised that the main character of a war story written a hundred years ago should be female. And what a woman too: tenacious, decisive, efficient, hardworking warm-bloodied - a survivor at all cost. Just like her farm, in fact.
And that’s not just our contemporary feminist take. That was clearly also the view of Madeleine Vanderlynden’s own family and friends, her fellow farmers and village neighbours. And increasingly, the view of the military authorities in general, and of the ever-obliging liaison officer, gentle Lieutenant Geoffrey Skene, in particular.
Madeleine, however, regrettably only has eyes for the spoilt and feckless Georges d’Archeville who she pursues throughout the novel with her usual grim tenacity.
Other things that came as a surprise to me reading the novel - or perhaps not - included:
- Just how the Vanderlynden farmstead has managed to survive at all, situated as it is in border territory fought over for centuries by the French, Dutch, German, Italians, English as well as the Spanish (p14) who originally named it.
- That while basics like coal and bread are rationed (p75), fine food and wine flow freely for those who can pay - including the senior military who patronise Madeleine’s successful little restaurant, the Lion of Flanders (p88).
- Men home on leave from the Front, “whether English, French, German or Italian”, want only to talk “about food, railways, jokes, old acquaintances - never about the cosmic murder in which they were engaged, or their daily decreasing belief that they might escape alive” (p46).
- How easily the unmarried Madeleine and Geoffrey Skene are able to bribe Madeleine’s seemingly prim and respectable landlady into turning a blind eye to their sleeping together in her boarding house.
- The cynicism of the self-publicising French politician, Dantrigues, with his election stunt that focuses on suburban Parisians rather than “the real fighting soldiers, nearer the Front, who would mostly be killed and never vote at all” (p158).
And yet even though the Front is often only half a mile away, with all its horror and carnage, there’s still a lot of humour in the book, mostly of a wry and ironic kind. For example:
- Madeleine’s dismissive attitude towards men in general - stupid vexing “men who were always doing things like this war” - that had been reinforced “by the teaching of the convent school, where the nuns seemed to be perpetually clearing up the mess men made of things” (p25).
- Madeleine sturdily seeing off unwanted male attention with a heavy water jug, “slung forward with the force of muscles accustomed to tossing swedes to feed the mashing-machine” (p31).
- The comic fury of the officious little booking-office clerk, refusing to issue a railway ticket because the reams of required forms and permits hadn’t been properly completed (p54).
- Madeleine’s landlady in Amiens, “one of those widows of the small official class who seemed to have disappeared from England since Dickens. She was poorer, prouder, more impossibly ugly and mean than anything surviving to us” (p102).
- Sir Montague Fryern, the eccentric aristocratic head of “army salvage”, who hoards at the Spanish Farm “the most miscellaneous collection of objects ever seen together since Rabelais compiled his immortal lists of omnium gatherum” (p74).
Other sentences on the novel that struck me as especially wise or beautiful included these:
- “Like all other incidents of the War, there it was. Shells fell, something was destroyed. One went on as well as one could” (p77).
- “The tops of the elms towered above the mist-line into that wide blue vault that the old painters loved, nowhere wider than in the Flemish plain” (p8).
- “In the queer gauche Flemish springtime, buds and shoots hung stiffly in the still air like heraldic emblems” (p85).
- “He was more solicitous than ever, gentle, kind, with a mid-Victorian kindness she had never known - the manners of one whose boyhood has been unspoiled by bitter thoughts about money” (p145).
- “Such tenderness as life had not already rubbed out of her, showed itself in her solicitude as to his sandwiches and half-bottle of wine” (p152).
- “What will become of it all?” she cried aloud. It, undefined, being the old happy easy life of pre-war” (p187).
- “Gas they knew, and shells and machine-gun fire, but to be Drowned was the last refinement of a war that had already surpassed all notions of possible evil” (p188).
Rather fittingly, as I was finishing “The Spanish Farm” I happened to visit Norwich, the city where RH Mottram grew up. The local memorial to him seems particularly appropriate: a viewpoint in a hilly park overlooking the handsome city with its rooftops, towers and spires. I went in the early evening and was bowled over by the magnificent skies over the city skyline.
It seemed a million miles from the mud, gas and slaughter of the trenches that he, along with hundreds of fellow Norfolk men, and millions of other men from all round the world, lived through and never forgot …
PS. My copy of this book has a very attractive front cover which I took to be an illustration based perhaps on a seventeenth-century Delft tile. It’s a picture of a milk-maid in traditional dress and cap, wearing a yoke to carry pails across a very Dutch-looking courtyard. Using a magnifying glass, I managed to decipher the microscopic block letters in the bottom right-hand corner as Vivian Gribble. I was surprised to discover that this engraver wasn’t seventeenth-century Dutch but an English artist from the early twentieth-century. She was very well-connected and did wood-engravings for expensive limited editions of books by the most famous writers of the time. Sadly I’d never heard of her but I’m pleased to see that my local museum has work by her that I’d love to be able to see.
November 19, 2012
fantastic short novel of flemish farmer girl turned hardnosed international holtelier and modern woman on the sexual front. detailed, believable really good novel.
July 3, 2021
This is not a World War I history, at least it is not an account of the horrors of war in great detail. It tries to tell the story of one young woman surrounded by everchanging events over which she has little control. You might like her, you might not. You might feel sorry for her, you might consider her actions foolish. Other people in the story cope in their own ways, but her story is tied to the place where she was born and became mistress of when her mother died. She and the Spanish Farm are one.
As you read, remember that this was first published in 1921 and the writing is different from what you will usually see. Some extremely long sentences which at times confused me, requiring a reread of a section. Very descriptive at times and perhaps a little boring. Much as life must have been between the insanity of WWI's advances and retreats and hopelessness.
Well worth your time.
As you read, remember that this was first published in 1921 and the writing is different from what you will usually see. Some extremely long sentences which at times confused me, requiring a reread of a section. Very descriptive at times and perhaps a little boring. Much as life must have been between the insanity of WWI's advances and retreats and hopelessness.
Well worth your time.
September 11, 2026
An exceptional novel. Published 102 years ago, so the style and writing is dated but very readable nonetheless. The story itself is very compelling and really draws the reader in. You're not hanging on every word and it's no pager turner but you want to know how this storyline is going to work out. I liked how it's about the War yet it's not. It's a glimpse into that aspect of the First World War that is likely so much more commonplace than any trench fighting - life in the the communications zone from a French point-of-view. Commonplace yet only mentioned obliquely in other novels I've read. I will absolutely have a look at the other two stories in this series, even though they seemed to not measure up this this first effort of Mottram.
March 20, 2019
The civilians’ WW1
told from the point of view of a farm woman who manages to survive it, in body if not in spirit. The tone is somber and dispassionate. She is neither starved nor raped nor wounded, and is perhaps spared from greater suffering by a lack of imagination. She recognizes, albeit slowly, the coming of a main chance and takes advantage of it. She experiences little joy, but like her farm, she endures.
told from the point of view of a farm woman who manages to survive it, in body if not in spirit. The tone is somber and dispassionate. She is neither starved nor raped nor wounded, and is perhaps spared from greater suffering by a lack of imagination. She recognizes, albeit slowly, the coming of a main chance and takes advantage of it. She experiences little joy, but like her farm, she endures.
January 10, 2021
An account of the Great War with a difference, told from the point of view of the French civilians just behind the frontline in Flanders and their encounters with the Tommies who billeted in their villages, and cleverly reflecting on identities, the impact of conflict and survival in hard circumstances.
September 29, 2022
Read directly after Billy Budd in a collection and oh my god this is so much better. Beautifully written.
July 9, 2015
This is a book from a particular place and time about a particular place and time. Although Madeleine is the main character, it is not character driven. Neither she nor any of the other people in the story are more than types. Madeleine is portrayed as being more intelligent than most of the others in her neighborhood and class, but she is neither reflective nor introspective. (And the author remarks on that time and again.) The primary characters are the Spanish Farm itself and World War I. The people in the story live, act, and feel (almost) entirely in response to those greater, impersonal elements. Madeleine is also prompted to act by her passion for Georges, the young nobleman with whom she has been having an affair, but that serves more as a way of broadening the canvas on which the war is portrayed rather than by deepening her character.
Because of that, I had a difficult time becoming involved in the story, but eventually I relaxed into it -- as opposed to getting caught up in it. Once I accepted it on its own terms it became more interesting. It's a war story, but it's not exciting. There are illicit intimate relationships, but no romance or titillation. There are cultures and ways of life running up against each other, but no drama, only transactions. And yet the writing is strong enough that I was able to accept these as choices of style (and, again, probably characteristic of the time in which it was written) rather than weakness.
This isn't a novel for everyone, and I don't know who I would recommend it to, but if the description catches your attention it's worth sampling. Just don't push modern expectations onto it.
Because of that, I had a difficult time becoming involved in the story, but eventually I relaxed into it -- as opposed to getting caught up in it. Once I accepted it on its own terms it became more interesting. It's a war story, but it's not exciting. There are illicit intimate relationships, but no romance or titillation. There are cultures and ways of life running up against each other, but no drama, only transactions. And yet the writing is strong enough that I was able to accept these as choices of style (and, again, probably characteristic of the time in which it was written) rather than weakness.
This isn't a novel for everyone, and I don't know who I would recommend it to, but if the description catches your attention it's worth sampling. Just don't push modern expectations onto it.
July 6, 2015
A very well written book. A lot of descriptive words of 1924 when the original book was written. R.H. Mottram served in WW1. I wonder if he came across or was billet at a "Spanish Farm" during the War.
July 12, 2015
I was thoroughly uninterested in this character, in her activities, and in the events happening around her. When I saw it was set during WW1, I thought I'd get more of a flavor for life during this time period, but I was let down on all counts.
August 13, 2015
I was totally uninterested in this character and all that surrounded her. When I saw it was set during WW1, I thought I'd get more of a flavor for life during this time period, but I was let down. I hoped for less of a 'story' and more history, oddly enough.
December 16, 2015
It was interesting to get a somewhat different insight into WW1, namely that of a young French woman trying to get on with her life. However, the woman in question was quite irritating and sometimes ridiculous, which spoiled the story for me a bit.
July 21, 2015
Completely different
A different perspective of war, that I found very enjoyable and entertaining. A style of story telling that was captivating.
A different perspective of war, that I found very enjoyable and entertaining. A style of story telling that was captivating.
Read
August 3, 2015doesn't translate well from 1924
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