As hundreds of thousands of young men enlist to fight on the Western Front, the Spanish Farm, standing amongst the undisturbed pastures of Flanders and built to withstand the wars of an earlier century, faces the horrors of the First World War with the same imperturbable stolidity.
Billeted out as accommodation for the thousands of young soldiers heading to and from the trenches, the farm becomes an oasis of enduring sanity for those who pass through its doors.
It is run by the notoriously tenacious farmer’s daughter, Madeleine Vanderlynden, a woman with the determination and business skill to rival any man’s.
The war may have brought her a profitable business, but it has also taken Madeleine’s lover from her - the young and inexperienced Baron Georges, who rode off to the conflict on an impulse.
And Madeline is not content to sit and wait for the war to be over.
Her Spanish Farm becomes a home to the wounded and damaged troops who have experienced the horrors of the Western Front - and a refuge from a world that appears to have gone mad.
The Spanish Farm is both an intricate portrait of the First World War from a civilian perspective – of life lived against a background of bombardment and machine guns - and a stark portrayal of the intricacies and reality of love and romance during wartime.
'The Spanish Farm' is widely acknowledged as one of the great classics of World War One fiction, ranked alongside 'Goodbye To All That' and 'The Secret Battle'.
‘The most significant work of its kind’ - The Times Literary Supplement
R 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.
Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent digital publisher.
Billeted out as accommodation for the thousands of young soldiers heading to and from the trenches, the farm becomes an oasis of enduring sanity for those who pass through its doors.
It is run by the notoriously tenacious farmer’s daughter, Madeleine Vanderlynden, a woman with the determination and business skill to rival any man’s.
The war may have brought her a profitable business, but it has also taken Madeleine’s lover from her - the young and inexperienced Baron Georges, who rode off to the conflict on an impulse.
And Madeline is not content to sit and wait for the war to be over.
Her Spanish Farm becomes a home to the wounded and damaged troops who have experienced the horrors of the Western Front - and a refuge from a world that appears to have gone mad.
The Spanish Farm is both an intricate portrait of the First World War from a civilian perspective – of life lived against a background of bombardment and machine guns - and a stark portrayal of the intricacies and reality of love and romance during wartime.
'The Spanish Farm' is widely acknowledged as one of the great classics of World War One fiction, ranked alongside 'Goodbye To All That' and 'The Secret Battle'.
‘The most significant work of its kind’ - The Times Literary Supplement
R 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.
Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent digital publisher.
