In Survivors of a Kind, Brian Bond, one of our most distinguished modern military historians, has written an absorbing and affectionate study of the military memoirs of the first world war, bearing all the authority of a life- time’s work on the British Army. With some of the 20-odd names in this book the reader will be familiar: Siegfried Sassoon’s and Robert Graves’ sworks have stayed in print, and it is fair to say that most British people’s views of the Great War today are largely shaped by Goodbye to All That and, if not by Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man or Siegfried’s Journey, at least by poems like ‘Base Details’. Bond draws readers’ attention to John (later Lord) Reith’s Wearing Spurs, less well known than his public career — as is Anthony Eden’s Another World, describing his first 20 years of life, to 1917. Because of Frank Richards’s regimental connection with Sassoon and Graves (the latter helped him with writing), his memoir of life in the ranks, Old Soldiers Never Die, is also still remembered, as is the more often read Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden.
Less famed now, save among air-war buffs, are Winged Warfare (the memoirs of Billy Bishop, the fabled Canadian flying ace) and Sagittarius Rising (reprinted in the 1970s) by Cecil Lewis, who entered the Royal Flying Corps at 16. Recently singled out (in Stephen Walker’s Forgotten Soldiers) as a bloodthirsty martinet who executed an Irish soldier for desertion, the egregious General Frank Crozier, after the war a leading pacifist, was the author of three volumes of recollections examined in this book.
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E. David Litvak
December 14th, 2008 9:20pmI’ve just been rereading one of the best books written about World War One is ‘The Spanish Farm,’ by R.H. Mottram published in 1924 and never out of print since (my current copy is dated 2001).
Its subjects are not the soldiers in the trenches but the lives of civilians just behind the lines.
The action takes place in north-eastern France from October 1915 (when the carnage in the trenches had been going on for 14 months) till the spring of 1919, just 12 miles behind the front line in the British sector on a farm called Ferme l’Espagnole for it had been originally build as a stronghold for the Spanish occupation forces under Duke Alva (around late 1500s), when that part of Flanders belonged to the Spanish crown.
The Spanish Farm was well within the sounds of the ‘heavies,’ the field guns and, when the wind blew in the right direction the whip-lash crack of rifles and machine guns, and the flatter squashed-out reports of mortars and grenades.
The main character is Madeleine Vanderlynden, aged 19, the farmer’s daughter (Flemish on her father’s side, French on her mother’s) the baby of the family. This is the way H.R. Mottram described Madeleine: ‘Large boned but so close-knit that she did not look disproportionately broad, her figure, kept in check by hard work and frugal feeding, promised to grow thick only in middle age. Her skin had the glow of youth and health. Anyone looking at her face, with its straight nose, grey eyes, dark lustrous hair and fair complexion would have said: “what a handsome woman,” rather than “what a pretty girl.” Indeed, M. Vanderlynden referred to his daughter as “ma demoiselle” (my young lady) rather than “ma fille,” (my little girl).
Since there was no question of Madeleine inheriting the farm which would be go to the oldest son, as a daughter of a prosperous farmer she could expect a handsome dowry. To enhance her marriage prospect, her father had her educated in a convent school where she had learned, amongst other things, English, albeit as a dead language, that is she could read it but could neither speak nor understand it when it was spoken to her.
This was soon to change for the Spanish Farm was taken over by the British forces as a rest center and Madeleine met and learned how to handle the English, the Scotts, the Welsh, the Irish, the Canadians, the Australians (it was an Australian battalion which, in March 1918, when the German spring offensive burst through the British lines, who turned the Spanish Farm into a stronghold it had originally been and stopped the Hun cold), Belgian refugees, Chinese laborers and German prisoners-of-war.
With her brothers in the trenches, Madeleine took over the management of the farm with a firm hand. She soon learned to cope with the British military authorities for unlike the French (and the Germans) the British paid promptly for the billeting of their troops. The officers paid her liberally and treated her respectfully. They had money—officers and men wanted to supplement their rations. Madeleine had eggs, coffee, soft bread, beer, fried potatoes. She also did a brisk trade in chocolate, cigarettes and candles. She could and did wash collars and shirts better than the average soldier servant. It took her some time to understand that every English officer required many gallons of hot water to wash in at least once a day. But once she had grasped that too, she attended to it at a small charge.
(As an aside, candles were the only means by which the dank dugouts in the trenches could be lighted. Anyone in the rear echelon being sent to the trenches soon learned to bring some candles along for on arrival they would be greeted with a wistful: “got a candle to spare chum?)
By October 1915 Madeleine had her routine down pat. As each British unit arrived she met the quartermaster, usually a commissioned ranker; gave him the rules of the farm: no smoking in the barns – no unsanitary practices – all gates must be kept closed – no movables removed. Finally she handed him her price list and withdrew to her own duties.
When each unit moved out Madeleine went around with the quartermaster to ensure that everything was as it should be and should there be any damages she would claim compensation from the military authorities. And should there be a disagreement on the damages incurred, Madeleine was able to argue her case directly for by that time her English had become fluent albeit a curious blend of upper-class English, the English spoken by the rank-and-file, Americanism gleaned from the Canadians liberally sprinkled with Indian words and phrases which the British Army had made its own
Knowing that each quartermaster was entitled to pay 40 francs ($8.00 in gold) on his own authority somehow all the damages seems to equate exactly 40 francs.
At the end of the war Madeleine Vanderlynden now aged 22 inherited the Spanish Farm by default for her two brothers and her fiancé had been killed in the war and her father had sunk into idiocy.
This is how R.H. Mottram took his leave of her.
So Madeleine remained in the Spanish Farm, and saw no more English, for the Labour Corps soon broke up and went, and she did not care. She was engrossed in one thing only; 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. And as there was a Madeleine more or less, widowed and childless, bereaved and soured, in every farm in north-eastern France, she became a portent. Statesmen feared or wondered at her, schemers and the new business men served her and themselves through her, while philosophers shuddered. For she was the Spanish Farm, the implacable spirit of that borderland so often fought over, never really conquered. She was that spirit that forgets nothing and forgives nothing, but maintains itself, amid all disasters, and necessarily. For she was perhaps the most concrete expression of humanity’s instinctive survival in spite of its own perversity and ignorance. There must she stand, slow-burning, revenge incarnate, until a better, gentler time.
E. David Litvak
(www.edl-musings.blogspot.com)
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