In this autobiography, first published in 1929, poet Robert Graves traces the monumental and universal loss of innocence that occurred as a result of the First World War. Written after the war and as he was leaving his birthplace, he thought, forever, Good-Bye to All That bids farewell not only to England and his English family and friends, but also to a way of life. Tracing his upbringing from … from his solidly middle-class Victorian childhood through his entry into the war at age twenty-one as a patriotic captain in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, this dramatic, poignant, often wry autobiography goes on to depict the horrors and disillusionment of the Great War, from life in the trenches and the loss of dear friends, to the stupidity of government bureaucracy and the absurdity of English class stratification. Paul Fussell has hailed it as “”the best memoir of the First World War”” and has written the introduction to this new edition that marks the eightieth anniversary of the end of the war. An enormous success when it was first issued, it continues to find new readers in the thousands each year and has earned its designation as a true classic.
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That complete immersion in a book when you’re held fast by a writer’s voice, for hours, doesn’t happen for me as a reader as much as it did when I was younger. But it still happens. This week Robert Graves’s enduringly relevant memoir ‘Goodbye to All That’ transfixed me. It seems to contain everything that matters and makes it matter.
For a time, he lived and wrote close to our home, which was my motivation for reading the book (the timing of reading this book during the Week of Remembrance and Armistice events, though, is my second strange Graves coincidence since the summer).
The great majority of the text concerns his participation in The Great War, aged 19 to 21; a period in which he went to the front three times, receiving a terrible shrapnel wound in one lung the second time out. After this near fatal chest wound, received at The Somme, he was placed amongst the fatal cases at the side of the field hospital and left to die with others whose wounds were deemed fatal.
His family were even notified of his death by wounds by the war office and his commanding officer. An aunt was the first to realise he was alive after happening across his name on a rosta in a military hospital ward, as she visited someone else (when he then realises that his belongings were stolen when wounded, I could have wept). The narrative of his being on a stretcher in a crowded hospital train while having his lungs drained of blood, made me feel shaky. By then, he was 21 and what he’d seen and experienced in three years would defy what most artists could even imagine of an actual hell.
This is one of war poems that gripped me as an undergraduate when I first came across it (he somehow wrote and published three volumes of poems during the war, this one edited by his dear friend Siegfried Sassoon).
A DEAD BOCHE
To you who’d read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I’ll say (you’ve heard it said before)
”War’s Hell!” and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:
Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.
The experience inspiring this poem is explored at greater length in the memoir and takes on a supernormal quality, set in the most wretched landscape, as Graves tries to find blankets for his troops (who would “have followed him into hell”, and did). The prose in that section is a marvel, a pinnacle of horror.
And yet, despite his and Sassoon’s incredible bravery as officers and frontline soldiers, their loathing of the war and the patriotic public – particularly Sassoon who risked everything by taking a public stand and throwing his military cross into the sea – to me seems to reach the very height of personal courage. I was left feeling that if they were representative of their generation, what mankind lost at the front remains incalculable.
Graves lived an extraordinary life but even by 1929 he counted amongst his friends, T. E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia), Thomas Hardy, T. S Eliot, Walter de la Mare, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, George Mallory (with whom he climbed), Vaughan Williams, Lytton Strachey, Arnold Bennet, A A Milne, John Galsworthy, Edith Sitwell, Edmund Gosse, John Masefield – and had met H.G. Wells (who spoke but didn’t listen). They’re all in the book.
Incidentally, his experiences with ghosts are some of the best encounters that I’ve read (there are three between the memoir and ‘Seven Days in New Crete’ – he came to think of one haunting as an “event” caused by the instability of time – but his discourse on the supernatural is terrific).
Anyway, I’ll sign off with this quote about how he and Sassoon’s views about the war had changed: “We no longer saw 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”.
I love the phrase “self-protective alarm”, a quote surely ripe for re-use in our times.
Ultimately, for me, the poets won, because whenever the Great War is remembered, I tend to think of them and I imagine the war through their senses.
A fine autobio from a favorite author. Detailing his early childhood and education, through serving in WW1 and the following decade. I enjoyed it.
Although Robert Graves’ memoir extends beyond the Great War, it’s his account of life on the Western Front that remains in your mind long after you have finished reading. He recalls his experiences, and his fellow soldiers, with warmth, humour and no trace of any lingering self-pity, while not sparing the reader from the true horrors of trench warfare in human terms.
Robert Graves graduated from high school in June 1914 and in perhaps the most egregious example in history of “be careful what you wish for,” hoped that some circumstance would intercede before he was compelled to go up to Oxford that fall. Circumstances did intercede, and instead of entering Oxford, Graves quickly found himself a junior officer in the English Army, shipped to France, and fighting in the trenches.
His memoir, Goodbye to All That, is a beautiful, poignant, and thought-provoking account of one man’s war. It is full of trench warfare, but also of idle times, of injuries and illness, and anecdotes about the French civilians who were attempting to live in the midst of the Great War. Graves also considers the politics of war, proposing at one point that perhaps only those over the age of 45 should be eligible for the draft, as they are the ones managing the country’s affairs. Graves was a published poet during the war and, as such, this book is also full of his encounters with other writers from the era, from Siegfried Sassoon to Thomas Hardy.
Most remarkably, though, Graves has written a clear-eyed account of his struggle with neurasthenia, or what we know today as shell shock (a term that does appear toward the end), or PTSD. Like many soldiers, Graves was badly affected by what he experienced in France, and his description of re-entering civilian life and the nightmares he faced for a full decade after the war are truly remarkable. There is no question that he would agree with Peter Englund’s assertion in The Beauty and the Sorrow, “Endurance is far harder than bravery.”
I was reminded regularly of Arthur Guy Empey’s Over the Top; the best-sourced work (here’s looking at you, Guns of August and The Assassination of the Archduke) simply cannot hold a candle to the first person accounts of war’s terrible toll.
(This review was originally published at https://www.thisyearinbooks.com/2016/06/goodbye-to-all-that.html)