Hailed as a classic of war literature, The Spanish Farm trilogy was the product of a self-confessed ‘misfit’ who owed his survival not to any military skill but to his talent as a French linguist. Steve Snelling charts the remarkable First World War career of citizen soldier turned best-selling author Ralph Hale Mottram.
LITERATURE FROM THE BATTLEFIELDS
Hope had not yet given way to hopelessness but there were no longer any illusions about the war’s likely duration as Second Lieutenant Ralph Mottram led a trickle of men across
Flanders’ tortured fields. The fraught journey followed the line of a shell-pitted riverbank, through “an indescribably ruined town” and beyond a straggle of “evil-smelling… extemporary cemeteries and disused dugouts”, all churned by artillery fire. They were headed for “a heap of charred brick” which marked the “skeleton of a village” where they faced the thankless task of adding a few more yards to the miles of subterranean fortifications which now criss-crossed a swathe of France and Belgium.
A conflict which many had naively imagined would be over before its first Christmas had just passed its second cheerless yuletide and for all their depressing familiarity such scenes stil…
