Goodbye to All That

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.