Goodbye to all That

Synopsis: 'There has been a lot of fighting hereabouts. The trenches have made themselves rather than been made, and run inconsequently in and out of the big thirty-foot high stacks of bricks; it is most confusing. The parapet of a trench which we don't occupy is built up with ammunition boxes and corpses'. In one of the most honest and candid self-portraits ever committed to paper, Robert Graves tells the extraordinary story of his experiences as a young officer in the First World War. He describes life in the trenches in vivid, raw detail, how the dehumanizing horrors he witnessed left him shell-shocked. They were to haunt him for the rest of his life.

* warning .. this review contains some fairly disturbing quotes *

Review: I'd had this book on my shelf for a while, waiting it's turn along with the others but after reading snippets from it in Skippy Dies I found I wanted to know more. These are the writer Robert Graves's memoirs or, as he puts it, his 'bitter leave-taking of England', in particular it's an account of his time in the trenches during WW1.

The book starts with stories of his childhood and ends with him emigrating abroad but it's his wartime experiences that are absolutely riveting. No matter how many history books you read or documentaries you watch nothing prepares you for the brutal accounts of war as told by those that experienced it first hand. It's all the things you would expect it to be, raw, explicit and horrifying but it's told with candour, absolutely no frills and laced with frequent (trench) humour as in this story told to Robert by his servant ... 'bloke in the Camerons wanted a cushy, bad. Fed up and far from home he was. He puts his hand over the top and gets his trigger finger taken off, and two more beside. That done the trick. He comes laughing through our lines by the old boutillery. "See, lads" he says, "I'm off to bonny Scotland. Is it na a beauty?" But on the way down the trench to the dressing station, he forgets to stoop low where the old sniper's working. He gets it through the head, too. Finee. We laugh fit to die!' It's amazing how quickly, in war, you have to inure yourself to the sight, smell and feel of death .. it's either that or certain madness ... 'once I snatched my fingers in horror from where I had planted them on the slimy body of an old corpse'.

Robert survives although he suffers several injuries (one of which was thought to be fatal and a telegram was sent to his parents informing them that he had died) but understandably he's left traumatised, shell-shocked and afflicted with all sorts of ailments that hamper him in later life. Of great interest is Roberts friendships with fellow writers and poets Siegfried Sassoon, also serving as an officer in WW1, and Wilfred Owen. They all went on to publish war poetry (Wilfred mostly posthumously) and are commemorated on a slate plaque in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey along with thirteen other Great War Poets. I'm on the lookout now for Siegfried's book Memoirs of an Infantry Officer which is said to cover the same events but from a different viewpoint.

This is one of Roberts entries:

June 9th: I am beginning to realize how lucky I was in my gentle introduction to the Cambrin trenches. We are now in a nasty salient, a little to the south of the brick-stacks, where casualties are always heavy. The company had seventeen casualties yesterday from bombs and grenades. The front trench averages thirty yards from the Germans. Today, at one part, which is only twenty yards away from an occupied German sap, I went along whistling 'The Farmers Boy', to keep up my spirits, when suddenly I saw a group bending over a man lying at the bottom of the trench. He was making a snoring noise mixed with animal groans. At my feet lay the cap he had worn, splashed with his brains. I had never seen human brains before; I somehow regarded them as a poetical figment. One can joke with a badly wounded man and congratulate him on being out of it. One can disregard a dead man. But even a miner can't make a joke that sounds like a joke over a man who takes three hours to die after the top part of his head has been taken off by a bullet fired at twenty yards range'.

It has to be said that the book seems to lose focus once the war ends, Robert marries, tries his hand at shop keeping, goes on to have several children and eventually settles down to concentrate on his writing (one of the books he goes on to write is the great historical novel I, Claudius.) He meets and becomes friendly with T.E. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy (and many other poets and writers .. indeed the names never stop dropping) but in comparison to his war experiences, which are told so vividly, his ordinary life experiences seem a little flat.

Required reading for anyone with even half an interest in WW1.