Mostly WW I memories with a bit of boarding school history in the beginning. His description of homosexuality at boarding school was surprising to me given how Alan Turing was treated after WW II. ( )

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 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. ( )

Not the best memoir I've read, but not a bad one either. I really don't know too much about World War I, so that's possibly why some of this book didn't interest me, however, picked this book to read something out of my comfort zone. I like Robert Graves as a writer. Some of the stuff Graves saw during the war I'm not sure how I'd handle it mentally. ( )

There's not much to say about this book that hasn't already been said: it is an excellent account of the Great War, up there with [b:Journey to the End of the Night|12395|Journey to the End of the Night|Louis-Ferdinand Céline|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1462934409s/12395.jpg|1551463].

The entire fourth season of Black Adder seems to be based on observations made in this book: the boorish New Army recruits gradually replacing the mannered regimentals, the captains eating muck in the trenches while the colonel dines on filet mignon a few hundred yards away, the officer with a German consul for an uncle who just might be passing classified material to the enemy.

The book's weakness lay in its not clearly distinguishing between a poet's supra-logical thought processes and the supra-logical process of the common psychopath.

( )

I've probably been hearing about this book from early high school.....some 60 years ago but I've never read it. So I thought it about time that I amended my education and actually read it. My judgement, after reading, is that it is a reasonable autobiography but not much more than that. Yes he describes the horrors of the war fairly graphically.....and, I assume, accurately. (Though I can't get the Blackadder scenes of trench warfare out of my mind and the enthusiasm of the big brass....30km behind the front....to have the troops go "over the top" into certain machine-gun fire and death for a very high percentage. Graves was one of those who through pure chance it seems....survived. And he survived to write the tale. Most didn't so we don't get to hear their stories of miraculous escapes etc.
Must say, that it all sounds dreadful:....."The colour of the dead faces changed from white to yellow-grey, to red, to purple, to green, to black, to slimy". And casual heroism: "Sampson lay groaning about twenty yards beyond the front trench. Several attempts were made to rescue him. He had been very badly hit. Three men got killed in these attempts; two officers and an orderly wounded. In the end his own orderly managed to crawl out to him. Sampson waved him back saying that he was riddled through and not worth rescuing; he sent his apologies to the company for making such a noise."
One of the themes that continually filtered through was the class consciousness both in the war and in the education system ...and in the universities. Graves, despite his welshness, clearly belongs to the upper class. He doesn't flaunt it....in fact, he seems to be almost unconscious of it. But the privilege extended to people of the same class and the special advantages extended via the "old-boys" network and officer's messes is palpable.
There is not much about his poems but since I've read the book I have taken the time to explore a few of his more popular poems: Two Fuisliers, Boy in churchyard, The kiss, Flying crooked; Double red daisies. Generally, I rather like them....like his skill with words ..though maybe not his knowledge of biology. Flying crooked demonstrates that he has no realisation that the cabbage white moth flies crooked for a special reason....it makes it harder for predators to swoop on it. It's an evolutionary survival mechanism. (OK that's not poetry....but it does demonstrate a gap in Grave's education and knowledge). And speaking of education, the English boarding school system comes across as being a great contributor to warped attitudes among those exposed to it. The casual comment by the headmaster of Charterhouse: "My boys are amorous but seldom erotic".......seems slightly weird to me. As Malcolm Muggeridge commented in his Bio..."Tread softly for you tread on my jokes"....he had girls and the affections between (frequently) senior boys and junior boys seemed very strange to him when he met up with these boarding school products at university. And Graves continued with his homoerotic relationship (from school) for many years it seems. (Though, presumably, didn't really see himself as gay).
Overall. Glad that I've read it and can now say "Goodbye to all that" myself. But it's not a book that I would consider re-reading so it will be donated to charity. ( )