Status
Available
Call number
Collections
Publication
Penguin Classic (2014), 288 pages
Description
Biography & Autobiography. Nonfiction. HTML: Robert Graves relates his time in the trenches. Robert Graves's writing is versatile and intense. Famous as a war poet, his prose works are on a stage of their own, especially this piece, which is an autobiographical account of Grave's school days and life as a soldier in the trenches in World War 1. Political as well as personal, the piece is important historically, as it offers a rare insight into the lives of ordinary soldiers in the most extraordinary, and often horrific, circumstances. A necessary and absorbing listen, which not without its moments of humour, is enlightening and unsettling and undoubtedly importantly necessary for everybody. (Recommended 14+ age)..
Media reviews
Writing "Good-bye to All That," Graves seized numerous opportunities to render the literal truth of the trenches in theatrical terms. And Graves was by no means alone in this: Just before the attack at Loos, a typical officer is recorded as experiencing "a feeling of unreality, as if I were acting
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on a stage." Seeking theatrical metaphors for the trench war, some journalists invoked the idea of tragedy. Graves will have none of such pretentiousness: To him, events at the front are more likely to resemble melodrama, comedy, farce or music hall. Or even that once-stylish English dramatic form, the Comedy of Humors, in which stock eccentric characters ("Humors") reveal their crazy obsessions and generally muddle things up.
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The Guardian
Robert Graves's superbly sardonic account of his childhood, schooling, the great war and his first marriage was written in just four months in 1929, when he was 33. It was his attempt at "a formal good-bye to you and to you and to you and to me and to all that". By then he had separated from his
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wife and was living with the American poet Laura Riding. The idea of a farewell to the past was hers. Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member ChocolateMuse
Both as an autobiography and as a personal account of WWI, I found this a fascinating read. Graves makes it perfectly clear that he found the war pointless and corrupt, but he avoids the hysteria of many of his contemporaries. But this is no dry, objective account; it's personal, and its narrative
Graves met Siegfried Sassoon in (I think) 1916, and they became friends. An interesting insight is given at the early stages of their friendship, before Sassoon had actually gone to the trenches: Graves had written a number of war poems ready for publication, and he showed some of them to Sassoon. "[Sassoon] frowned, and said that war should not be written about in such a realistic way."
This from the poet who later wrote The place was rotten with dead... naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair...! Graves says of himself that he was less brilliant, but more stable, than his friend Sassoon.
He meets quite a lot of other famous poets and novelists during his life, and I was fascinated by his brief but vivid accounts of them. I could easily quote extensively, but will limit myself to a few:
H.G. Wells: talked without listening. He had just been taken for a 'Cook's Tour' to France, and staff-conductors had shown him the usual sights that royalty, prominent men of letters, and influential neutrals were allowed to see. He described his experience at length, and seemed unaware that I and Siegfried, who was with me, had also seen the sights. (Note that Graves and Sassoon would have been in well-worn military uniform at the time.)
Joh Galsworthy: listened without talking; which is, apparently, his usual practice.
I liked Arnold Bennett for his kindly unpretentiousness.
Graves begins the book with an account of his life in a public school, which is almost as horrendous as the war itself in some ways. Similar accounts are found in Roald Dahl's book Boy, but I see now that Dahl's account is more theatrical; Graves simply states things as they happened, neither exaggerating, nor sparing us anything.
My only complaint about the book is that it didn't finish soon enough. Some years after the war, Graves' life disintigrates into nothing but dependants, divorce, and disappointments; much like any other sordid and uninteresting life. I felt it would have worked better as an autobiographical account of Graves' boyhood and war experience only.
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is always interesting, often compelling. The interest is in the detail - he doesn't swamp us with minute descriptions of the trenches, or long paragraphs describing a wounded soldier or dead body. His accounts are detailed in a personal, clear way, drawing personalities and situations with what I might call a professional hand. We're left with what feels like a genuine picture of the war as Graves saw it. Graves met Siegfried Sassoon in (I think) 1916, and they became friends. An interesting insight is given at the early stages of their friendship, before Sassoon had actually gone to the trenches: Graves had written a number of war poems ready for publication, and he showed some of them to Sassoon. "[Sassoon] frowned, and said that war should not be written about in such a realistic way."
This from the poet who later wrote The place was rotten with dead... naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair...! Graves says of himself that he was less brilliant, but more stable, than his friend Sassoon.
He meets quite a lot of other famous poets and novelists during his life, and I was fascinated by his brief but vivid accounts of them. I could easily quote extensively, but will limit myself to a few:
H.G. Wells: talked without listening. He had just been taken for a 'Cook's Tour' to France, and staff-conductors had shown him the usual sights that royalty, prominent men of letters, and influential neutrals were allowed to see. He described his experience at length, and seemed unaware that I and Siegfried, who was with me, had also seen the sights. (Note that Graves and Sassoon would have been in well-worn military uniform at the time.)
Joh Galsworthy: listened without talking; which is, apparently, his usual practice.
I liked Arnold Bennett for his kindly unpretentiousness.
Graves begins the book with an account of his life in a public school, which is almost as horrendous as the war itself in some ways. Similar accounts are found in Roald Dahl's book Boy, but I see now that Dahl's account is more theatrical; Graves simply states things as they happened, neither exaggerating, nor sparing us anything.
My only complaint about the book is that it didn't finish soon enough. Some years after the war, Graves' life disintigrates into nothing but dependants, divorce, and disappointments; much like any other sordid and uninteresting life. I felt it would have worked better as an autobiographical account of Graves' boyhood and war experience only.
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LibraryThing member MeditationesMartini
It's not the most evocative record of the horrors of the trenches that I've ever read, but the cold-blooded restraint in Graves's account--of a bourgeois British upbringing, public schooling, and commmanding a regiment of smarter and tougher men at 19 or whatever it was in France--carries another
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kind of meaning, cleverly encapsulated in the All That of the title, which binds school days and unimaginable human anguish together and ties a bow aroundthem, like no matter how inadequate the author realizes the general spirit is upon which war used to be metaphorized like a rugby match against a team for whom our lads had an especial grudge, he can't quite see his way through to doing it any other way. Which is of course the story of the Great War writ small--all those privates in their private hearts, and probably even most of their officers, could see that their model not only of warfare but of masculine virtue had become maladaptive, but just couldn't bring themselves to change it--to defect, to sue for peace--any more than they could let go of the dregs of religious faith, or than I could bring myself to abort a fetus (luckily, that's not likely to come up). So in short this is restrained to the point of bunged-up on the actual war experience, but nonpareil on the mindset that led to that war--which of course wasn't jingoism or fear of Spenglerian decline, but the human desire to do one's part and not be loathed and the Northern European need to treat one's life with contempt because it is a far far greater thing. And then, you come home and the greater thing doesn't bring anyone back or get rid of the bugs in your head and, although once again in an understated way, the story of Twenties careerflailment and modernist anomie and divorce and always landing on your feet really but not being able to feel that good about it is the story of a class of imperial worldbeaters who had discovered that beating the world is always a pyrrhic victory anyway and had no idea what the fuck next. As cultural time capsules go, though, I should say, this one is immensely well written and astute. Show Less
LibraryThing member gbill
This memoir from Robert Graves, written in 1929 when he was 34, covers his life to up to that point, and most notably has some of the best writing about the WWI experience for British soldiers I’ve read. Graves immediately enlisted in 1914 at just 19, remained patriotic throughout the war yet
Graves’ childhood was in an environment that was not only anti-German but anti-Semitic, and it was an awkward one. He writes honestly of things like wetting himself when forced to do arithmetic to a metronome, as well as being sexually attracted to boys, something that would lead to a small scandal. Years later after having been to war, he admits “I felt difficulty in adjusting myself to the experience of woman love.”
The war is where the book really shines tough, and there are many memorable bits:
…the Welsh company he was in often breaking out into Welsh hymns.
…the ineffectiveness of the gas helmets, and their evolution over time. He also recalls a time when the release of the gas cylinders was in a way that the thick cloud gradually just returned back to their own lines.
…unashamedly saying that many men, including himself, wanted to survive the war by getting wounded, which he ultimately was, and almost died from it.
…his accounts of the various horrifying ways men died, and sometimes by their own hand (including the first and last dead soldiers he saw in the war, which were suicides). He also describes the swelling and stinking of the corpses in a sober way.
…the popularity of the brothels behind the lines (“I had seen a queue of a hundred and fifty men waiting outside the door”), explaining that many got venereal diseases but that “they did not want to die virgins.”
…personally crawling through No Man’s Land on a reconnaissance mission. He doesn’t make himself out to be a hero at all, despite continuing to volunteer after being wounded and suffering from shell shock (neurasthenia as he calls it). He does describe the misery though, e.g. squatting in the trenches and trying to get an hour or two of sleep before battle, after having marched twenty miles in the rain that day.
…the idiocy of officers who were far too concerned about the men keeping the buttons polished and their uniform clean, and how one complained bitterly of cold when he had “only two blankets” and was behind the lines. He also describes the cruelty of policies such as cowardice being “punished with death alone, and no medical excuses could be accepted.”
…commenting on how good a fighting force the Germans were, and how both sides would sometimes not shoot at one another when they were collecting their dead. He also debunks the more outrageous of the propaganda reports of atrocities, as well as pointing out instances he knew of when the Allies had committed atrocities.
…how the French townspeople gouged the soldiers, raising prices without a shred of shame.
In general it seems like an honest, believable account, but he does sometimes seem to stretch the truth a bit for the purpose of making the story interesting, such as saying he saw the ghost of a man who had been killed earlier in the war.
As for his disillusionment and view of the war which evolved over time, it reminded me a great deal of what returning Vietnam vets like John Kerry would say after having served valorously with honor:
“We could no longer see the War as one between trade-rivals: its continuance seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder.”
It’s notable that his friend Siegfried Sassoon actually tossed his medals into the sea, similar to how Vietnam vets protested by throwing their medals at the Capitol Building. In stark contrast to this, he publishes the ridiculous letter to the editor of a paper supposedly from a woman claiming to be a mother, which hit back at pacifists and arguing for more war until victory had been achieved in her “message to the pacifists/bereaved/trenches.”
What’s remarkable to me is that he continued to do his duty to the fullest all the way through to the Armistice. He was also certainly wise in understanding the dynamic of the war and its outcome (“The Treaty of Versailles shocked me; it seemed destined to cause another war some day, yet nobody cared,” he writes, and remember, this was 1929).
As for his other views, it’s also interesting to read of the evolution of his consciousness of his family’s aristocratic class and how servants were to be treated as a child growing up, to becoming socialistic, aided by the views of his first wife Nancy Nicholson, who was a staunch feminist as well, and ahead of her time. “God is a man, so it must all be rot,” she says about religion, and reading about her from Graves made me wish that she had written a book as well. I have to say though, that while his chapters after the war ended are of some interest, they drag on a bit, and moreover are disingenuous in that they don’t describe at all his affair with the tempestuous Laura Riding, or that she was with him and his wife when they went to Egypt, and that he left his wife for her. A lot of that salacious material can be found in a new biography of him by Jean Moorcroft Wilson though.
As part of the wealthy class with connections, Graves also name drops quite a bit which held some interest, including being in the public baths with the future Edward VIII (the one who would abdicate the throne in 1936), meeting Lloyd George (“when I looked closely at his eyes they seemed like those of a sleep-walker”), T.E. Lawrence (his “eyes immediately held me. They were startlingly blue, even by artificial light”), Thomas Hardy (who told him that to avoid forgetting a story or thought that occurred to a writer, “always carry a pencil and paper”), and various others, e.g. Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, A.A. Milne et al. Perhaps the most poignant of these was his account of mountain climbing with George Mallory before the war, who would go on to die near the summit of Mount Everest in 1924. This was something that I found all the more fascinating because his body was discovered and written about in 1999, and there still is great speculation as to what happened to him.
The book may sprawl a bit, possibly a result of it having been hurriedly written in Mallorca as Graves needed to generate income, but it’s still a solid, interesting read.
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recognized the senselessness of it, and wrote about his experience with great candor, making him a valuable source of information. It was highly ironic that Graves would fight the Germans on the other side of the trenches, since his mother’s side was German and he still had family there, which he covers in his family history and childhood in the first part of the book.Graves’ childhood was in an environment that was not only anti-German but anti-Semitic, and it was an awkward one. He writes honestly of things like wetting himself when forced to do arithmetic to a metronome, as well as being sexually attracted to boys, something that would lead to a small scandal. Years later after having been to war, he admits “I felt difficulty in adjusting myself to the experience of woman love.”
The war is where the book really shines tough, and there are many memorable bits:
…the Welsh company he was in often breaking out into Welsh hymns.
…the ineffectiveness of the gas helmets, and their evolution over time. He also recalls a time when the release of the gas cylinders was in a way that the thick cloud gradually just returned back to their own lines.
…unashamedly saying that many men, including himself, wanted to survive the war by getting wounded, which he ultimately was, and almost died from it.
…his accounts of the various horrifying ways men died, and sometimes by their own hand (including the first and last dead soldiers he saw in the war, which were suicides). He also describes the swelling and stinking of the corpses in a sober way.
…the popularity of the brothels behind the lines (“I had seen a queue of a hundred and fifty men waiting outside the door”), explaining that many got venereal diseases but that “they did not want to die virgins.”
…personally crawling through No Man’s Land on a reconnaissance mission. He doesn’t make himself out to be a hero at all, despite continuing to volunteer after being wounded and suffering from shell shock (neurasthenia as he calls it). He does describe the misery though, e.g. squatting in the trenches and trying to get an hour or two of sleep before battle, after having marched twenty miles in the rain that day.
…the idiocy of officers who were far too concerned about the men keeping the buttons polished and their uniform clean, and how one complained bitterly of cold when he had “only two blankets” and was behind the lines. He also describes the cruelty of policies such as cowardice being “punished with death alone, and no medical excuses could be accepted.”
…commenting on how good a fighting force the Germans were, and how both sides would sometimes not shoot at one another when they were collecting their dead. He also debunks the more outrageous of the propaganda reports of atrocities, as well as pointing out instances he knew of when the Allies had committed atrocities.
…how the French townspeople gouged the soldiers, raising prices without a shred of shame.
In general it seems like an honest, believable account, but he does sometimes seem to stretch the truth a bit for the purpose of making the story interesting, such as saying he saw the ghost of a man who had been killed earlier in the war.
As for his disillusionment and view of the war which evolved over time, it reminded me a great deal of what returning Vietnam vets like John Kerry would say after having served valorously with honor:
“We could no longer see the War as one between trade-rivals: its continuance seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder.”
It’s notable that his friend Siegfried Sassoon actually tossed his medals into the sea, similar to how Vietnam vets protested by throwing their medals at the Capitol Building. In stark contrast to this, he publishes the ridiculous letter to the editor of a paper supposedly from a woman claiming to be a mother, which hit back at pacifists and arguing for more war until victory had been achieved in her “message to the pacifists/bereaved/trenches.”
What’s remarkable to me is that he continued to do his duty to the fullest all the way through to the Armistice. He was also certainly wise in understanding the dynamic of the war and its outcome (“The Treaty of Versailles shocked me; it seemed destined to cause another war some day, yet nobody cared,” he writes, and remember, this was 1929).
As for his other views, it’s also interesting to read of the evolution of his consciousness of his family’s aristocratic class and how servants were to be treated as a child growing up, to becoming socialistic, aided by the views of his first wife Nancy Nicholson, who was a staunch feminist as well, and ahead of her time. “God is a man, so it must all be rot,” she says about religion, and reading about her from Graves made me wish that she had written a book as well. I have to say though, that while his chapters after the war ended are of some interest, they drag on a bit, and moreover are disingenuous in that they don’t describe at all his affair with the tempestuous Laura Riding, or that she was with him and his wife when they went to Egypt, and that he left his wife for her. A lot of that salacious material can be found in a new biography of him by Jean Moorcroft Wilson though.
As part of the wealthy class with connections, Graves also name drops quite a bit which held some interest, including being in the public baths with the future Edward VIII (the one who would abdicate the throne in 1936), meeting Lloyd George (“when I looked closely at his eyes they seemed like those of a sleep-walker”), T.E. Lawrence (his “eyes immediately held me. They were startlingly blue, even by artificial light”), Thomas Hardy (who told him that to avoid forgetting a story or thought that occurred to a writer, “always carry a pencil and paper”), and various others, e.g. Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, A.A. Milne et al. Perhaps the most poignant of these was his account of mountain climbing with George Mallory before the war, who would go on to die near the summit of Mount Everest in 1924. This was something that I found all the more fascinating because his body was discovered and written about in 1999, and there still is great speculation as to what happened to him.
The book may sprawl a bit, possibly a result of it having been hurriedly written in Mallorca as Graves needed to generate income, but it’s still a solid, interesting read.
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LibraryThing member TheAmpersand
Robert Graves is known for his love poems and had an almost comically distinguished pedigree, but you wouldn't know it from reading "Goodbye to All That," his wry, bitter, plainspoken, and ultimately moving memoir of his early life and experiences in the Great War. He hated the prestigious boarding
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school he was sent to, abandoned organized religion, married a committed feminist, and, most importantly, found himself in the middle of one of the twentieth century's greatest, most senseless tragedies. It's surprising how Graves's very personal account of the war gives a reader some of idea of the scope of the war's tragedy: his unit seems to have been re-staffed half-a-dozen times as the soldiers in it kept dying off, men prayed to be seriously wounded instead of killed, and the natural world, which Graves obviously felt a great deal of affection for, was reduced to ruin. Being from an upper-class background and having had a subtle, understated sense of humor, Graves also has a keen eye for the war's absurdities, or, as Paul Fussell would have it, its irony: we hear a lot about the social conventions of the British officer class, riding lessons, and valuable public-school connections, which provides a weird contrast with the war's endless bloodshed, as does the bucolic, nearly unscathed French countryside that the soldiers could find just a few miles from the front lines. "Goodbye to All That" is often as funny as it is terrible, and it has, as Fussell notes, a rather theatrical sensibility, but there's an unmissable undercurrent of anger running through it, too. Graves's critique of Britons on the home front, who felt themselves a part of the conflict without bothering to experience its conflict or comprehend its illogical premises, is scathing, as is his contempt for the army brass, who hardly seem to have seen a trench as they sent hundreds of thousands of men to unbearably painful deaths. He's also careful about noting that Britain's class divisions became more, not less, visible as the war dragged on. At one point, he wonders whether if the women who worked at officer's brothers (adorned with blue lights) were any different than the one who worked at establishments that serviced enlisted men, which had red lights by the door. There's a lot here for students of twentieth-century letters: Graves seems to have had the opportunity to know a lot of famous literary types, and he provides vivid, funny portraits of them. Still, it's the indifference of the army staff and the public that really powers the book: the contrast between their hidebound ideas and outmoded manners and the horror that Graves experienced first-hand gives the reader a good idea why the Great War transformed European society so completely. It plays out, at times, like some awful absurdist theater piece, but it was all too real. Though the author claims that the book's title comes from his decision to emigrate after the war wound up, one can't help wondering if he intended some larger meaning. Anyway, it's not hard to spot: between public school niceties, knee-jerk patriotism, and endless, mechanized, often pitiably unheroic deaths, it seems pretty clear that an entire worldview died on the fields of France. This one is sad, informative, and recommended. Show Less
LibraryThing member eleanor_eader
War poet and novelist Robert Graves’ autobiography was something I approached with trepidation. I knew the conditions of the fighting trenches in WWI were abominable, and Graves’ dissatisfaction with his country’s political machinations, and treatment of war veterans, very great; and for some
This is an unsentimental accounting of horrific moments (school and war seem to have made equally negative impressions on him) made palatable by his readiness to take in and then move on from, everything that was thrown at him. Robert von Ranke Graves seems to have been a pragmatic man, for all his poetic prowess, and a writer with a skill for narrative that extends to accounts of his own life, career and family. The book is stuffed with humour, an eye for the absurd, satirical or wry,
I was pleased that the relationship between Siegfried Sassoon and Dr. Rivers was mentioned, as I have recently read Pat Barkers amazing Regeneration trilogy and finding them within the pages of Goodbye to all That lent another layer to that story; indeed, brought together by the war, the influential poets and writers of the time are necessarily tied through a system of acquaintanceship, comradeship or deep friendship – I loved the passage where Graves covered a visit he and his wife made to Thomas Hardy, and discovering that T. E. Lawrence resolved to make no money from his own autobiographical Seven Pillars of Wisdom and let Graves, who was then struggling to pay a debt, sell the first four chapters for publication in the states. Other names - some I've read, some I haven't - made this a fragment of writing history as well as war history.
Graves' autobiography lends a greater understanding to many of the man's poems – I’ve come with fresh sadness back to the simple ‘Not Dead’ among others. I think this is because this fantastic autobiography introduces one far more personally to the elements and people that influenced the author himself.
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reason expected a good deal of melancholy reflection and disgusted ranting. Maybe it’s the title but, as always when pre-judging a book, I was completely wrong.This is an unsentimental accounting of horrific moments (school and war seem to have made equally negative impressions on him) made palatable by his readiness to take in and then move on from, everything that was thrown at him. Robert von Ranke Graves seems to have been a pragmatic man, for all his poetic prowess, and a writer with a skill for narrative that extends to accounts of his own life, career and family. The book is stuffed with humour, an eye for the absurd, satirical or wry,
I was pleased that the relationship between Siegfried Sassoon and Dr. Rivers was mentioned, as I have recently read Pat Barkers amazing Regeneration trilogy and finding them within the pages of Goodbye to all That lent another layer to that story; indeed, brought together by the war, the influential poets and writers of the time are necessarily tied through a system of acquaintanceship, comradeship or deep friendship – I loved the passage where Graves covered a visit he and his wife made to Thomas Hardy, and discovering that T. E. Lawrence resolved to make no money from his own autobiographical Seven Pillars of Wisdom and let Graves, who was then struggling to pay a debt, sell the first four chapters for publication in the states. Other names - some I've read, some I haven't - made this a fragment of writing history as well as war history.
Graves' autobiography lends a greater understanding to many of the man's poems – I’ve come with fresh sadness back to the simple ‘Not Dead’ among others. I think this is because this fantastic autobiography introduces one far more personally to the elements and people that influenced the author himself.
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LibraryThing member john257hopper
Robert Graves is famous today mainly for two things: this memoir of his early life, focusing on his experiences in the trenches of the First World War and his published poetry; and as the author, later in life, of the renowned historical novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God. He has an easy style
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in this memoir, which covers the first 33 or so years of his life until his departure from the UK to live in Majorca in 1929. His upbringing and schooling were conventional by the middle class standards of the time ("my sisters were brought up to wish themselves boys, to be shocked at the idea of woman’s suffrage, and not to expect so expensive an education as their brothers"), though for a book written nearly 90 years ago he is quite open about the homoeroticism in his independent school, Charterhouse. His wartime experiences and those of his contemporaries at Charterhouse make up the core of the book, as he says "at least one in three of my generation at school died; because they all took commissions as soon as they could, most of them in the infantry and Royal Flying Corps". Against the backdrop of the fighting and its impact on his mental state, he describes his difficult relationship with his parents, with their conventional outlook on patriotism and duty, and the hostility he sometimes faced due to his mother being German; the bonds that were formed between soldiers in the trenches and the completely inability of he and his contemporaries to find a common language with his parents and others at home, due to their vastly different experiences and assumptions about the reality of warfare. Graves knew many of the other greats of the time, in particular Siegfried Sassoon during the war, and Thomas Hardy in his old age after it. The end of the war is described very laconically, and the last section about his life after the war, getting married to Nancy and raising their four children will be of less interest to most readers. He hints at further in his life from 1926 and abruptly says that "The remainder of this story, from 1926 until today, is dramatic but unpublishable". In 1929, on publishing this memoir, he went abroad, "resolved never to make England my home again; which explains the ‘Goodbye to All That’ of this title". In his epilogue he explains a bit why this was, but this reader is left feeling a bit puzzled at the suddenness of all this. Show Less
LibraryThing member Widsith
Robert Graves was one of those well-educated British officers who reacted to the First World War with a kind of wise, Oxford-Book-of-Verse horror and had to expunge the experience as best he could through his writing – like Edmund Blunden, or Siegfried Sassoon. The three of them indeed fought
Graves is less funny than Sassoon, more down-to-earth than Blunden – he writes with a dry, easy style which is witty but somehow also rather brittle. As in many similar memoirs, there is an awareness of the natural world which perhaps seems surprising to a modern reader (‘In March I rejoined the First Battalion on the Somme. It was the primrose season’), though the tendency here is nowhere near as pronounced as in Blunden's Undertones of War. There is a numbed sense of distance to many of the descriptions, and a sneaking suspicion that Graves may perhaps not have been the easiest person to get on with in real life. Nevertheless, the details of trench life are very fully evoked, from the boredom of waiting, to the strategy-less confusion of raids, to the desperate recreations available for men behind the line:
The Red Lamp, the army brothel, was around the corner in the main street. I had seen a queue of a hundred and fifty men waiting outside the door, each to have his short turn with one of the three women in the house […]. Each woman served nearly a battalion of men every week for as long as she lasted. According to the assistant provost-marshal, three weeks was the usual limit: ‘after which she retired on her earnings, pale but proud.’
When it comes to the gory realities of shelling and attrition, Graves adopts a chilly but effective matter-of-factness.
From the morning of September 24th to the night of October 3rd, I had in all eight hours of sleep. I kept myself awake and alive by drinking about a bottle of whisky a day. I had never drunk it before, and have seldom drunk it since; it certainly helped me then. We had no blankets, greatcoats, or waterproof sheets, nor any time or material to build new shelters. The rain poured down. Every night we went out to fetch in the dead of the other battalions. The Germans continued indulgent and we had few casualties. After the first day the corpses swelled and stank. I vomited more than once while superintending the carrying. Those we could not get in from the German wire continued to swell until the wall of the stomach collapsed, either naturally or when punctured by a bullet; a disgusting smell would float across. The colour of the dead faces changed from white to yellow-grey, to red, to purple, to green, to black, to slimy.
As with all of these First World War books, there is no animosity towards the enemy whatsoever. Graves's men shout friendly messages to the nearby Germans (reserving most of their hatred for the French) and have no concern whatever for the political currents that may be animating the conflict. Nor is religion a factor; given the old saw about how there are ‘no atheists in foxholes’, I'm surprised Graves isn't quoted more often, since he says exactly the opposite.
Hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches even if one survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home.
In part this is what creates the enormous gulf that soldiers feel between themselves and those at home, who are keyed up with patriotic and religious fervour and who see the fighting men as the embodiment of all these feelings when in fact they share none of them. After the war, Graves falls in love delightedly with Nancy Nicholson, who as a feminist and socialist finds herself as set against conventional society as he now feels himself. Her précis of Christianity – ‘God is a man, so it must be all rot’ – was a huge relief to him.
Nancy sounds, indeed, in common with many women of that generation, completely fucking amazing. She read the marriage vows for the first time on the morning of their wedding, and was so horrified that she almost refused to go through with it – Graves's memory of the service is of ‘Nancy meeting me [on the aisle] in a blue-check silk wedding-dress, utterly furious’ and ‘savagely muttering the responses’ during the ceremony.
[C]hampagne was another scarce commodity, and the guests made a rush for the dozen bottles on the table. Nancy said: ‘Well, I'm going to get something out of this wedding, at any rate,’ and grabbed a bottle. After three or four glasses, she went off and changed back into her land-girl's costume of breeches and smock.
I love Nancy. Robert Graves I'm less sure about, but he is a joy to listen to – witty, anecdotal, and determined to bear witness to the collective stupidities that left half his generation dead in France. You can see why he'd had enough of England. They were lucky to have the use of him for as long as they did.
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near each other in France and knew each other well. It's a powerful and affecting vision, but it probably needs to be set against the rather different worldview of the private soldiers, as captured in Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune or Barbusse's Le Feu.Graves is less funny than Sassoon, more down-to-earth than Blunden – he writes with a dry, easy style which is witty but somehow also rather brittle. As in many similar memoirs, there is an awareness of the natural world which perhaps seems surprising to a modern reader (‘In March I rejoined the First Battalion on the Somme. It was the primrose season’), though the tendency here is nowhere near as pronounced as in Blunden's Undertones of War. There is a numbed sense of distance to many of the descriptions, and a sneaking suspicion that Graves may perhaps not have been the easiest person to get on with in real life. Nevertheless, the details of trench life are very fully evoked, from the boredom of waiting, to the strategy-less confusion of raids, to the desperate recreations available for men behind the line:
The Red Lamp, the army brothel, was around the corner in the main street. I had seen a queue of a hundred and fifty men waiting outside the door, each to have his short turn with one of the three women in the house […]. Each woman served nearly a battalion of men every week for as long as she lasted. According to the assistant provost-marshal, three weeks was the usual limit: ‘after which she retired on her earnings, pale but proud.’
When it comes to the gory realities of shelling and attrition, Graves adopts a chilly but effective matter-of-factness.
From the morning of September 24th to the night of October 3rd, I had in all eight hours of sleep. I kept myself awake and alive by drinking about a bottle of whisky a day. I had never drunk it before, and have seldom drunk it since; it certainly helped me then. We had no blankets, greatcoats, or waterproof sheets, nor any time or material to build new shelters. The rain poured down. Every night we went out to fetch in the dead of the other battalions. The Germans continued indulgent and we had few casualties. After the first day the corpses swelled and stank. I vomited more than once while superintending the carrying. Those we could not get in from the German wire continued to swell until the wall of the stomach collapsed, either naturally or when punctured by a bullet; a disgusting smell would float across. The colour of the dead faces changed from white to yellow-grey, to red, to purple, to green, to black, to slimy.
As with all of these First World War books, there is no animosity towards the enemy whatsoever. Graves's men shout friendly messages to the nearby Germans (reserving most of their hatred for the French) and have no concern whatever for the political currents that may be animating the conflict. Nor is religion a factor; given the old saw about how there are ‘no atheists in foxholes’, I'm surprised Graves isn't quoted more often, since he says exactly the opposite.
Hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches even if one survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home.
In part this is what creates the enormous gulf that soldiers feel between themselves and those at home, who are keyed up with patriotic and religious fervour and who see the fighting men as the embodiment of all these feelings when in fact they share none of them. After the war, Graves falls in love delightedly with Nancy Nicholson, who as a feminist and socialist finds herself as set against conventional society as he now feels himself. Her précis of Christianity – ‘God is a man, so it must be all rot’ – was a huge relief to him.
Nancy sounds, indeed, in common with many women of that generation, completely fucking amazing. She read the marriage vows for the first time on the morning of their wedding, and was so horrified that she almost refused to go through with it – Graves's memory of the service is of ‘Nancy meeting me [on the aisle] in a blue-check silk wedding-dress, utterly furious’ and ‘savagely muttering the responses’ during the ceremony.
[C]hampagne was another scarce commodity, and the guests made a rush for the dozen bottles on the table. Nancy said: ‘Well, I'm going to get something out of this wedding, at any rate,’ and grabbed a bottle. After three or four glasses, she went off and changed back into her land-girl's costume of breeches and smock.
I love Nancy. Robert Graves I'm less sure about, but he is a joy to listen to – witty, anecdotal, and determined to bear witness to the collective stupidities that left half his generation dead in France. You can see why he'd had enough of England. They were lucky to have the use of him for as long as they did.
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LibraryThing member dougwood57
It strikes me as interesting and perhaps a bit sad that Robert Graves is better known today for his Augustan era historical novels (I, Claudius : From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born 10 B.C., Murdered and Deified A.D. 54 (Vintage International) and Claudius the God: And His Wife
In this volume, Graves relates the story of his life up to about to 1928. The chapters about his upbringing and life in an English public school hold the reader's interest, but the only real reason to read this book are the chapters that recount his experiences in World War One. In Graves' telling the trench warfare was every bit as horrific as you have probably read elsewhere. He provides insights into the way the class structure carried over to the army. Graves also explains (or at least demonstrates) the sense of duty that not only kept men in the trenches, but kept them willing to fight as well, when refusal and mutiny seem the only rational response.
His life after the war bears some interest for literary historians, but not much for anyone else. The book soon begins to wonder across the page before finally drifting into pointlessness. Worse, Graves' is not entirely honest because he omits to mention his extramarital relationship with the poet Laura Riding; not that I care about the affair, but if he was going to burden the reader with a description of his period in Cairo, he ought not to have omitted the interesting bits. The omission is odd inasmuch as he did not shy away from a description of the public school as a virtually mandatory course in buggery.
The Anchor edition has an introduction by Paul Fussell that adds considerable value to the volume. The tone of my review is probably more negative than strictly necessary. I certainly highly recommend the book, but the quality is uneven. If you begin to lose interest after Graves' begins to readjust to postwar life, you can safely put the book down and know that you aren't missing much. Graves wrote `Goodbye to All That' primarily to make ends meet (after first failing to write the story as a novel) and at times it is a slapdash affair. Nonetheless, the worthwhile parts make the book mandatory reading for anyone with an interest in World War One.
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Messalina) and this memoir than he is for his poetry. Not that I give two farthings for his poetry (The Complete Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)) - I don't read poetry, never have liked it, and have next to no interest in it (my loss, I'm sure), but Graves' poetry was clearly vitally important to his self perception. In this volume, Graves relates the story of his life up to about to 1928. The chapters about his upbringing and life in an English public school hold the reader's interest, but the only real reason to read this book are the chapters that recount his experiences in World War One. In Graves' telling the trench warfare was every bit as horrific as you have probably read elsewhere. He provides insights into the way the class structure carried over to the army. Graves also explains (or at least demonstrates) the sense of duty that not only kept men in the trenches, but kept them willing to fight as well, when refusal and mutiny seem the only rational response.
His life after the war bears some interest for literary historians, but not much for anyone else. The book soon begins to wonder across the page before finally drifting into pointlessness. Worse, Graves' is not entirely honest because he omits to mention his extramarital relationship with the poet Laura Riding; not that I care about the affair, but if he was going to burden the reader with a description of his period in Cairo, he ought not to have omitted the interesting bits. The omission is odd inasmuch as he did not shy away from a description of the public school as a virtually mandatory course in buggery.
The Anchor edition has an introduction by Paul Fussell that adds considerable value to the volume. The tone of my review is probably more negative than strictly necessary. I certainly highly recommend the book, but the quality is uneven. If you begin to lose interest after Graves' begins to readjust to postwar life, you can safely put the book down and know that you aren't missing much. Graves wrote `Goodbye to All That' primarily to make ends meet (after first failing to write the story as a novel) and at times it is a slapdash affair. Nonetheless, the worthwhile parts make the book mandatory reading for anyone with an interest in World War One.
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LibraryThing member LindaLoretz
Good-Bye to All That by Robert Graves is a memoir about his formative years in England and his years at war. He had a somewhat privileged upbringing at various boarding schools, and the war interfered with his attending Oxford. Nevertheless, he served in WWI and provided many gruesome details of
Some of the book's messages that will remain with me are:
1. Respirators. Graves says, "the first respirator issued in France was a gauze-pad filled with chemically treated cotton waste, for tying across the mouth and nose. Reputedly it could not keep out the German gas…a week or two later came the 'smoke helmet,' a greasy gry-felt bag with a talc window to look through, but no mouthpiece, certainly ineffective against gas." (p. 95)
2. Two young miners disliked their sergeant and reported to their Adjutant: "'We've come to report, Sir, that we're very sorry, but we've shot our company sergeant-major.'
The Adjutant said, 'Good heavens, how did that happen?'
'It was an accident, Sir.'
'What do you mean, you damn fools? Did you mistake him for a spy?'
"No, Sir, we mistook him for our platoon sergeant.'"
They were both court-martialled and shot by a firing squad of their own company. (p.109)
3. Graves was treated with reserve since he had a German name and was suspected of being a spy. Incredible!
4. Local French peasants didn't care whether the soldiers were on the German or British side of the line. They had no use for foreign soldiers. Wow!
5. Self-medication with alcohol and drugs was common—probably a survival mechanism.
6. Prose and poetry were critical during wartime and afterward.
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life in the trenches as he performed his duties. I was surprised at how little training soldiers received. However, I was not surprised at the loss of innocence due to the war and the need for people like Graves to leave his childhood behind and acknowledge the atrocities such as murder, rape, mutilation, and torture. By the way, Graves claims that the atrocities were equal on both sides.Some of the book's messages that will remain with me are:
1. Respirators. Graves says, "the first respirator issued in France was a gauze-pad filled with chemically treated cotton waste, for tying across the mouth and nose. Reputedly it could not keep out the German gas…a week or two later came the 'smoke helmet,' a greasy gry-felt bag with a talc window to look through, but no mouthpiece, certainly ineffective against gas." (p. 95)
2. Two young miners disliked their sergeant and reported to their Adjutant: "'We've come to report, Sir, that we're very sorry, but we've shot our company sergeant-major.'
The Adjutant said, 'Good heavens, how did that happen?'
'It was an accident, Sir.'
'What do you mean, you damn fools? Did you mistake him for a spy?'
"No, Sir, we mistook him for our platoon sergeant.'"
They were both court-martialled and shot by a firing squad of their own company. (p.109)
3. Graves was treated with reserve since he had a German name and was suspected of being a spy. Incredible!
4. Local French peasants didn't care whether the soldiers were on the German or British side of the line. They had no use for foreign soldiers. Wow!
5. Self-medication with alcohol and drugs was common—probably a survival mechanism.
6. Prose and poetry were critical during wartime and afterward.
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LibraryThing member neurodrew
Robert Graves writes of his life up to 1929, when he abandoned England to live in Majorca. The core of the book is his experiences in the trenches of the Western Front, as an officer of an infantry company. He describes some of his school days, and describes the dissolution of his friendship with
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Siegfried Sassoon, and his marriage after the war. The trench experience is clearly the deepest and most affecting part of the book. I read this after the novel Birdsong, a book that clearly took much of its detail from Graves' experiences. Show Less
LibraryThing member lmichet
Th particular edition I happened to read first was the heavily-edited 1957 edition-- the one with all the saucy angry bits removed. I recommend the earlier edition-- I think it is the 1929 edition-- with the angry bits left in. That's really why you should want to read this book: it's the sourest,
The book was written in a series of 'scenes'-- episodes highlighted by Graves where the most ludicrous things happen as if on a stage for our personal enjoyment. I have read an article by literary historian Paul Fussell about this, and I have to agree with him: it makes for an engrossing and highly entertaining read. Graves has a way of taking himself and those around him so unseriously, and yet with so much undiluted rage, that we understand him fully and really begin to believe that we can feel what he feels-- which, of course, we can't, because we've never been in the First World War. When Graves sits in enraged silence in a ludicrous officers' mess and tells himself in gleeful rage that he'll outlive them all, the self-absorbed upper-class bastards, we thrill along with him-- but when he returns to find that they have all actually died, it's even better. The scenes were he tangles with despicable authorities, where he faces the morbidly hilarious misreporting of his own death, where he outlines in delicate irony the absurdities of his upbringing, and even in the end of the book, where we coast along with him toward the slow conclusion in a bewilderingly odd hiatus as a professor in Egypt-- and, better yet, have a chance to read his students' term essays-- these scenes are priceless, deftly-formed treasures. The book is one enormous smouldering gem.
I, Claudius has been one of my favourite novels for many years. This book earns a place up there with it-- Graves is spectacular, and the ungentlemanly grimace with which he communicates this outrageously mauled life of his is an achievement of narrative that really shouldn't be passed up. I read it for a term paper on the presentation of authority in soldiers' narratives, and read it alongside many other classic accounts from the Great War. This one is, undoubtedly, the best-- certainly in the English language, anyway. I prefer it enormously to All Quiet on the Western Front, which, next to Graves' frankness and wit, now seems a bit silly and juvenile. Graves never goes in for melodrama and misery the way Remarque does, with his caricatured conversations and his heavyhanded messages. Graves tells you what he thinks, tells it well, and then entertains you as far as he can without letting that essential feeling go. He writes with one eye on his hated oppressors and one eye turned back sadly at himself. It's fantastic.
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bitterest, and ultimately one of the most humorous and human personal testaments the Great War that anyone can find anywhere.The book was written in a series of 'scenes'-- episodes highlighted by Graves where the most ludicrous things happen as if on a stage for our personal enjoyment. I have read an article by literary historian Paul Fussell about this, and I have to agree with him: it makes for an engrossing and highly entertaining read. Graves has a way of taking himself and those around him so unseriously, and yet with so much undiluted rage, that we understand him fully and really begin to believe that we can feel what he feels-- which, of course, we can't, because we've never been in the First World War. When Graves sits in enraged silence in a ludicrous officers' mess and tells himself in gleeful rage that he'll outlive them all, the self-absorbed upper-class bastards, we thrill along with him-- but when he returns to find that they have all actually died, it's even better. The scenes were he tangles with despicable authorities, where he faces the morbidly hilarious misreporting of his own death, where he outlines in delicate irony the absurdities of his upbringing, and even in the end of the book, where we coast along with him toward the slow conclusion in a bewilderingly odd hiatus as a professor in Egypt-- and, better yet, have a chance to read his students' term essays-- these scenes are priceless, deftly-formed treasures. The book is one enormous smouldering gem.
I, Claudius has been one of my favourite novels for many years. This book earns a place up there with it-- Graves is spectacular, and the ungentlemanly grimace with which he communicates this outrageously mauled life of his is an achievement of narrative that really shouldn't be passed up. I read it for a term paper on the presentation of authority in soldiers' narratives, and read it alongside many other classic accounts from the Great War. This one is, undoubtedly, the best-- certainly in the English language, anyway. I prefer it enormously to All Quiet on the Western Front, which, next to Graves' frankness and wit, now seems a bit silly and juvenile. Graves never goes in for melodrama and misery the way Remarque does, with his caricatured conversations and his heavyhanded messages. Graves tells you what he thinks, tells it well, and then entertains you as far as he can without letting that essential feeling go. He writes with one eye on his hated oppressors and one eye turned back sadly at himself. It's fantastic.
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LibraryThing member orchid314
A darkly funny, acid book in which Robert Graves chronicles his life up to and including his time spent as an infantry officer in the trenches at the Western Front. The best memoir of WWI imo.
LibraryThing member NaggedMan
Truthful, direct, unvarnished, beautifully written - but make sure you read the author's revised 1957 edition not the original. As well as his childhood and schooldays, Graves' account of the trenches in WWI tells of the horror, yes, but also the humour, the bravery - and the sharp differences
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there could be between infantry units - to the extent that they were or weren't well-trained and well-officered. And then the aftermath - as a poet among poets, in sophisticated Oxford and the relatively unchanged environment of a rural village. A must read. With thanks to Bill, who kindly gave me this copy. Show Less
LibraryThing member jonfaith
As Hartley noted the past is a foreign land and Graves treads lightly. I wrote a university friend last night I had not seen in 27 years. He and the woman I loved had started a relationship and the riptide of life pushed us far apart. He's now a minister. We shall see.
Graves takes the reader by the
Most folks attend to the book because of its Great War account. The attention is deserved, though early section about the tradition of his unit is rather tedious. There is a recognition throughout the book of class--and how such favored his claim from the football pitch to teaching in Cairo in the 1920s. I had entertained thoughts of devoting this next month to Graves but the impulse has been diminished.
Graves takes the reader by the
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hand from childhood through the public school and immediately t the Western Front. Each step is harrowing. Pained. Then Armistice and marriage and family. No gap years for Graves. The friendship with Sassoon appears fascinating. I will pursue that elsewhere. Graves met Ezra Pound in Oxford at the home of T.E. Lawrence who pronounced: you will dislike each other. Even more intriguing is the revenue scheme that the Graves family (Nancy Nicholson never took Graves' name for feminist reasons) started their own corner store in the lawn of a neighbor. Somehow that is more I Love Lucy than the author of The White Goddess. There's also a great encounter with Thomas Hardy. Despite these twinkling frames there's a brooding character to the overall narrative. Somehow there are subterranean vibrations of some emotional fissuring. Most folks attend to the book because of its Great War account. The attention is deserved, though early section about the tradition of his unit is rather tedious. There is a recognition throughout the book of class--and how such favored his claim from the football pitch to teaching in Cairo in the 1920s. I had entertained thoughts of devoting this next month to Graves but the impulse has been diminished.
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LibraryThing member AlexTheHunn
Graves depicts WWI as he experienced it in the trenches on the western front. Through his first-hand account we see the horrors of gas and rotting corpses along with the monotony of war.
LibraryThing member nmele
A very enjoyable memoir with a gossipy tone that adds some flavor to Graves' generally kind-hearted judgements on his contemporaries and his family.
LibraryThing member JayLivernois
Just gets WWI right, and is such a good read. Amazing he lived as long as he did and no wonder in the Mediterranean.
LibraryThing member Vivl
By and large, a fairly light (surprisingly), anecdote-filled account of Graves' early life, up to the age of 30 or so. The pre- and post-WWI passages are diverting without being ground-breaking. Sadly, for me the most disappointing section is that which deals with his experiences on the Western
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Front in WWI. Apparently he set out to write it up in the form of a novel and later changed his mind. His adaptation of that material to memoir form is dry, disjointed, confusing and uninspiring. Perhaps that's an accurate reflection of how things were in that situation, but it doesn't make for an emotionally charged reading experience. Perhaps I'm too frivolous, but I prefer Pat Barker's fictionalisation of these events in the Regeneration trilogy. Show Less
LibraryThing member fist
Robert Graves' autobiography (up to when he was 33) is a mixed bag. His recollections of boarding school and university have been described elsewhere (by Stephen Fry for instance; the conservatism of those institutions means that the 70-year gap between either author's experiences is almost
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insignificant). The core of the book is Graves' description of serving in the trenches during WWI. No hero adoration, no absolute patriotism, but a man's true impressions of useless carnage. As a man of the Edwardian era, he questions the Victorian values he was brought up with. He considers himself a socialist, somewhat of an internationalist and even a feminist. Today's reader, however, will occasionally be surprised by patronising, racist, or misogynistic phrases, and especially by the boundless sense of entitlement of an English upper class man (throughout his career from public school boy to army officer)that pervades the entire book. Yet the writing is sincere, as the man tries to make sense of old value systems in a new century and the slaughter of millions of his contemporaries. Show Less
LibraryThing member nigeyb
It is as a document of World War One that this book really shines. Robert Graves includes a wealth of little details that bring the day-to-day life of him, and his regiment, to life: the gallows humour, the values of the soldiers, the disillusionment with the war and the staff and yet the loyalty
Goodbye to All That was written in 1929, when Robert Graves was 33 years old. Although primarily known as a memoir about Robert Graves' experience of World War One, in which he served in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, the book opens with his family background, childhood, and education, before - at the outbreak of World War One - he enlists. The book also details his life for the ten years after World War One.
Goodbye to All That is an amazing memoir. For such a short volume Robert Graves packs in so much information and detail, and the book really brings alive day-to-day trench life with all its attendant horrors, boredom, pettiness, depravation, cameraderie and humour. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what life was like in the trenches.
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to their officers, the lice, the food, the other privations. It's all there in this excellent memoir. Robert Graves also captures the tragedy and waste of the conflict - friends and fellow soldiers dying or getting wounded all the time. Extraordinary luck means that Robert Graves beat the odds and managed to survive but not without injuries and many brushes with death.Goodbye to All That was written in 1929, when Robert Graves was 33 years old. Although primarily known as a memoir about Robert Graves' experience of World War One, in which he served in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, the book opens with his family background, childhood, and education, before - at the outbreak of World War One - he enlists. The book also details his life for the ten years after World War One.
Goodbye to All That is an amazing memoir. For such a short volume Robert Graves packs in so much information and detail, and the book really brings alive day-to-day trench life with all its attendant horrors, boredom, pettiness, depravation, cameraderie and humour. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what life was like in the trenches.
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LibraryThing member JVioland
Graves' experiences during World War I is engaging. The banalities of life are described and judgments made as to the values remaining after his stint.
LibraryThing member datrappert
Brilliant, seemingly honest, and very bittersweet autobiography, written when Graves was still fairly young. Famous mostly for its harrowing depiction of World War I in all its horror, but also in its day-to-day ordinariness. Lets you understand just a little bit why men like Graves and Wilfrid
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Owen went about their duty despite their perception of the pointlessness of what they were doing. At least Graves lived to tell the tale and to write some more brilliant books. Show Less
LibraryThing member Rubbah
I read this primarily for my war literature A level exam in a couple of months, and found it far more riveting and moving account of life before, during and after the war than I had anticipated. There are also fascinating accounts of the many literary names that he met in this time, such as
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Sassoon. My edition is the revised one from the fifties, so i will be looking for the original 1929 edition, which I've read from a previous reviewer is even more bitter and angry. Show Less
LibraryThing member Chris_El
War effects different people in different ways. Some it strengthens their convictions about matters of faith and some it weakens. Tolkien and Graves are two examples of such differing effects.
Some war memoirs very much focuses on the war. There is a little biography before and perhaps after to get
He talks about his love for climbing and long walks in the country. And he talks about getting in the military. He was fortunate enough to be guided into the officer corps. Talks about his time in training, adjusting to the military way of doing things, and finally being sent to France.
Naturally his experiences on the front lines are described. He was wounded on several occasions. Once seriously and he was reported dead. Which report was duly communicated to his family. He was able to communicate with them not to long afterwards and let them know he survived.
He speaks about life after the war. Going to school. Meeting and spending time with Lawrence of Arabia. Moving to Egypt for a year or so to teach. An abortive effort to open a general store. His few friends. Finally moving from England finding the politics and religion there disagreeable. He did return and was there during WWII which he mentions. One of his sons was killed in action as a British soldier.
Worth reading but the effects of his experience were not the effects on everyone who served. His faith was lost but not all responded to the war that way.
He did comment that Catholic priests on the front lines were better than the Protestant pastors. the priests pushed forward all the way into the trenches and were often there during attacks to give last rites and comfort to the dying. The Protestant pastors were rarely at the front. Some commanders noted the same issue in WII. Obviously not to the credit of the Protestants.
Some war memoirs very much focuses on the war. There is a little biography before and perhaps after to get
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the reader a basic understanding of the who the characters are in the protagonists life. This book on the other hand has quite a bit of autobiography in it. We learn about Graves' time in school. His comments about the problems with the British public school system of his youth. One critique he had was that the segregation of the boys from the girls caused quite a bit of homosexual activity, both physical and emotional. He states that for every one genuine homosexual male there were probably 9 experimenter. He was one of the 9 out of 10 though he never admits to anything graphic other than emotional attachment. He marries after the war and never mentions issues with male attraction after that point. He talks about his love for climbing and long walks in the country. And he talks about getting in the military. He was fortunate enough to be guided into the officer corps. Talks about his time in training, adjusting to the military way of doing things, and finally being sent to France.
Naturally his experiences on the front lines are described. He was wounded on several occasions. Once seriously and he was reported dead. Which report was duly communicated to his family. He was able to communicate with them not to long afterwards and let them know he survived.
He speaks about life after the war. Going to school. Meeting and spending time with Lawrence of Arabia. Moving to Egypt for a year or so to teach. An abortive effort to open a general store. His few friends. Finally moving from England finding the politics and religion there disagreeable. He did return and was there during WWII which he mentions. One of his sons was killed in action as a British soldier.
Worth reading but the effects of his experience were not the effects on everyone who served. His faith was lost but not all responded to the war that way.
He did comment that Catholic priests on the front lines were better than the Protestant pastors. the priests pushed forward all the way into the trenches and were often there during attacks to give last rites and comfort to the dying. The Protestant pastors were rarely at the front. Some commanders noted the same issue in WII. Obviously not to the credit of the Protestants.
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LibraryThing member untraveller
Last 50 pages or so were quite good....Graves knew many exceptional people.
[on T.E. Lawrence)"To him painting, sculpture, music, and poetry were parallel activities, differing only in the medium used. Lawrence told me:'When I asked Doughty why he had made that Arabian journey his answer was that he
Read March 2015
"Hardy then laughed a little. Once or twice recently he had looked up a word in the dictionary for fear of being again accused of coining, and found it there right enough-only to read on and discover that the sole authority quoted was himself in a half-forgotten novel."
[on T.E. Lawrence)"To him painting, sculpture, music, and poetry were parallel activities, differing only in the medium used. Lawrence told me:'When I asked Doughty why he had made that Arabian journey his answer was that he
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had gone there to redeem the English language from the slough into which it had fallen since the time of Spenser'".Read March 2015
"Hardy then laughed a little. Once or twice recently he had looked up a word in the dictionary for fear of being again accused of coining, and found it there right enough-only to read on and discover that the sole authority quoted was himself in a half-forgotten novel."
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Subjects
Awards
Newsweek's Top 100 Books: The Meta-List (94 — 2009)
Guardian 100 Greatest Non-Fiction (Biography)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1929
Physical description
288 p.; 4.35 inches
ISBN
0141392665 / 9780141392660
Similar in this library
DDC/MDS
| 940.48142 |