Good-Bye To All That

Good-Bye to All That, an autobiography by Robert Graves, first appeared in 1929, when the author was thirty-four. "It was my bitter leave-taking of England," he wrote in a prologue to the revised second edition of 1957, "where I had recently broken a good many conventions". The title may also point to the passing of an old order following the cataclysm of the First World War; the inadequacies of patriotism, the rise of atheism, feminism, socialism and pacifism, the changes to traditional married life, and not least the emergence of new styles of literary expression, are all treated in the work, bearing as they did directly on Graves's life. The unsentimental and frequently comic treatment of the banalities and intensities of the life of a British army officer in the First World War gave Graves fame, notoriety and financial security, but the book's subject is also his family history, childhood, schooling and, immediately following the war, early married life; all phases bearing witness to the "particular mode of living and thinking" that constitute a poetic sensibility.

Laura Riding, Graves' lover, is credited with being a "spiritual and intellectual midwife" to the work.

A large part of the book is taken up by his experience of the First World War, in which Graves served as a lieutenant then captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, alongside his equally famous comrade Siegfried Sassoon. Goodbye to All That provides a detailed description of trench warfare, including the tragic incompetence of the Battle of Loos and the bitter fighting in the first phase of the Somme Offensive. In the latter engagement, Graves was severely wounded while leading his men through the churchyard cemetery of Bazentin-le-petit on July 20, 1916. The wound was so severe, in fact, that military authorities erroneously reported to his family that he had died. After mourning his death, Graves's family received word from him that he still lived, and put an announcement to that effect in the newspapers.

The book also contains a secondhand description of the killing of German prisoners of war by British troops; although Graves had not witnessed any incidents himself and knew of no large-scale massacres, he had been told about a number of incidents in which prisoners had been killed individually or in small groups; consequently he was prepared to believe that a proportion of Germans who surrendered never made it to prisoner-of-war camps. "Nearly every instructor in the mess" he wrote, "could quote specific instances of prisoners having been murdered on the way back. The commonest motives were, it seems, revenge for the death of friends or relatives, jealousy of the prisoner's trip to a comfortable prison camp in England".

Graves was severely traumatized by his war experience. After he was wounded in the lung by an artillery strike, he endured a five-day train journey amid squalor and unchanged bandages. During the war he received an electric shock using a trench telephone which scared him such that he did not use one again until twelve years after the event. Upon his return home, he describes being haunted by ghosts and nightmares.