Thursday, January 27, 2011

Winter Color - Near South River, Greene County, Virginia

Fireside Reading

Robert Graves is a poet and novelist, perhaps best remembered today for his historical novel I Claudius. Good-bye To All That is an autobiographical account of his experiences as a soldier fighting in World War I.

Trench warfare was a brutal business that nearly destroyed an entire generation of young men. Sixteen million died in the conflict and another twenty-one million were wounded. Graves survived, although at times death seemed to be inevitable. He writes:
"Beaumont had been telling me how he had won about five pounds' worth of francs in the sweepstakes after the Rue du Bois show [battle]: a sweepstakes of the sort that leaves no bitterness behind it. Before a show, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up after-wards. Those who are killed can't complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here."

Even after the Armistice, the horrors of the battlefield continued to haunt Graves while he was a student at Oxford.
"In the middle of a lecture I would have a sudden very clear experience of men on the march up the Bethune-La Bassee road; the men would be singing, while French children ran along beside us, calling out: 'Tommee, Tommee, give me bullee beef!' and I would smell the stench of the knacker's yard just outside the town. Or it would be in Laventie High Street, passing a company billet; an N.C.O. would roar: 'Party, 'shun!' and the Second Battalion men in shorts, with brown knees, and brown, expressionless faces, would spring to their feet from the broken steps where they were sitting. . . . Or in a deep dug-out at Cambrin, talking to a signaller; I would look up the shaft and see somebody's muddy legs coming down the steps; and there would be a sudden crash and the tobacco smoke in the dug-out would shake with the concussion and twist about in patterns like the marbling on books. These day-dreams persisted as an alternate life and did not leave me until well in 1928. The scenes were nearly always recollections of my first four months in France; the emotion-recording apparatus seemed to have failed after Loos."
Good-bye To All That was published in 1929, is still in print and well worth reading. It is a glimpse into a world that is nearly forgotten today, a time when the promise of the young 20th Century seemed to be dying in the mud of Europe.

Good-Bye To All That by Robert Graves, Random House 1985

2 comments :

  1. Nice work Edd.Those soft winter colors are easy on the eye. This looks like an ideal spot to sit and soak in the quiet scenery.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Robert. This time of year it is a bit cold to do much sitting but I do enjoy the subtle colors this time of year.

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