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