Goodbye to All That

"On our visits to Germany, I had felt a sense of home in a natural, human way, but above Harlech I found a personal peace independent of history or geography." 

Graves has a childhood fondness and reverence for his German family and visiting them in Germany. British and German hostilities leading up to and during WWI cause him to hide his German heritage. His affection for Harlech, though, remains steadfast, and is one that lies outside nations and conflict.

"Businessmen's sons, at this time, used to discuss hotly, the threat, and even necessity of a trade war with the Reich. German meant 'dirty German.'" 

At Charterhouse, Graves’s peers begin openly discussing the rising tensions between Germany and England. Most students feel Germany presents an economic threat to England's primacy and speak of Germans with disdain, if not outright hatred. This leads to Graves being bullied by some of the other students. 

"Of the six noes, Nevill Barbour and I are, I believe, the only ones who survived the War." 

During a debate at Charterhouse over compulsory military service, only six of Graves’s dormitory house population disagree with the notion of such service. Most of his peers enlist early, knowing war is on the horizon, and die soon after, as they serve as infantrymen. 

"He would not send me to France, he said, until I had entirely overhauled my wardrobe and looked more like a soldier—my company commander's report on me was: 'unsoldier like and a nuisance.'" 

Though Graves goes on to distinguish himself in his brief military service, he has difficulty adjusting to certain aspects of army life, such as fastidiousness with his dress. Graves continuously thinks these things trivial but, using his ability to “masquerade,” Graves manages to conduct himself with more care.

“The men had learned far more about Minden, Albuhuera, and Waterloo, and the Battle of the Pyramids, than they had about the fighting on the other fronts, or the official cause of the War.” 

During Graves’s training for and service with the Royal Welch Fusiliers, he learns a great deal about their illustrious military history. This shows the ironic distance between the values considered important to proper military service and the skills needed for the realities of military service. World War I puts these dissonances within British society into stark relief. 

"'Well, how long is the War going to last and who's winning? We don't know a thing out here.'" 

When Graves arrives for duty in France, he's surprised to find out that even high-ranking officials like Dunn, Graves’s company commander, have little idea of how their actions relates to the war's bigger picture. Graves often contrasts the soldier's reality—obedience and ignorance—with the reality of people in England: patriotism and sensationalism.

"The men are much afraid, yet always joking." 

Faced with the terrifying reality of near-constant bombardment by German shells and artillery fire, Graves finds that many soldiers in the Welsh Regiment use humor to diffuse their fear. It's when situations become too grim for even the Welsh Regiment to make jokes that Graves begins to become pessimistic. 

"I had never seen human brains before; I somehow regarded them as a poetical figment." 

To this point, Graves, as a member of the English upper-middle class, has lived a relatively sheltered life, studying, playing sports, and writing poetry. For him, “brains” has had more significance as a figurative concept than as a visceral reality. When faced with the violence of trench warfare, though, Graves comes to terms with the human body as more than an object of poetic interest.

"I protested: 'But all this is childish. Is there a war on here, or isn't there?'" 

Graves finds the Royal Welch's Second Battalion's adherence to peacetime values, such as training in proper horseback riding for its officers, ludicrous and impractical in the face of the war. Though he expresses this outrage to a friend, Graves also has no problem voicing his dissent to senior officers. 

"My best way of lasting through to the end of the War would be to get wounded." 

Graves, along with many other soldiers, hopes to be wounded—though not fatally—in order to return home and receive an honorable discharge from service. Graves also finds that he can earn great respect from his company by demonstrating bravery. Hence, Graves finds that going out into No-Man's Land on patrol, under the cover of darkness, fulfills both of these needs.

"A professional soldier's duty was simply to fight whomever the King ordered him to fight." 

In Graves’s experience, the British soldiers don't keep track of their gains and losses, or the causes of the War, nor do they have any politically-motivated feelings about the Germans. Rather, British military tradition and loyalty to their country provide motivation enough to fight without asking questions. This attitude changes as the war carries on.

"Despite the number of uniforms in the streets, the general indifference to, and ignorance about, the War surprised me." 

While on leave in London, Graves observes how the war proves too abstract a concept for people in England to understand on any meaningful level. Though soldiers on leave populate the London streets, they haven't brought with them the horrors of trench warfare, except for in their own psyches. 

"My remaining trench service with the Second Battalion that autumn proved uneventful; I found no excitement in patrolling, no horror in the continual experience of death." 

As Graves continues his service in France, his morale deteriorates as he witnesses more deaths and the demoralizing living conditions in the trenches. He begins to worry about his mental health and leaves the war with post-traumatic stress disorder.

"As for atrocities against soldiers—where should one draw the line?" 

Graves and the other soldiers discount "propaganda reports of atrocities" (182) committed against civilians by German soldiers, having seen the realities of the war and witnessing nothing that could be called an “atrocity.”However, when it comes to soldier-on-soldier actions, Graves and the others can't figure out a way to measure their atrociousness. War, it seems, changes the metric entirely. 

"It would be no worse getting killed asleep than awake." 

The soldiers and officers in the trenches learn to catch sleep whenever and however they can: standing, sitting, lying down. This statement reflects Graves’s growing desperation, which turns his desire to simply be wounded enough to leave the trenches into apathy towards his own death.

"Division could always be trusted to send a warning about verdigris on vermorel-sprayers, or the keeping of pets in trenches, or being polite to our allies, or some other triviality, exactly when an attack was in progress." 

Here, Graves again emphasizes the divide between official military practice and the reality of the men serving in the trenches. For the division headquarters, such matters as the keeping of pets does not seem trivial, while for the soldiers, this advice serves no purpose, especially when given on the day of an offensive. 

"He was hit by a shell and very badly wounded, and died on the way down to the base, I believe." 

Colonel Crawshay sends this erroneous report of Graves’s death to Graves’s mother, showing the chaotic nature and fallibility of the military's medical office and communications services. Graves writes his mother the next day, informing her that he is indeed still alive. Despite his injury and subsequent recovery, Graves returns to service a few times but he never quite recovers fully, both physically and mentally. 

"We could no longer see the War as between trade-rivals: its continuance seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder." 

Well into World War I, Graves and Sassoon begin to question England's continued involvement in it, at the cost of so many lives. They begin to feel that the war has been perpetuated by older British politicians intent on saving face at all costs, with no concern for the repercussions of their continued commitment to the conflict. Sassoon's letter expressing anti-military sentiment because of these thoughts nearly causes him to be court-martialed. 

"But 'everybody' did not include me…" 

Graves writes this line in response to Sassoon's poem celebrating the Armistice, in which "everybody burst out singing" (278). Graves’s experiences in the war have left him with heavy emotions and trauma, causing inner turmoil and confusion about what to do after the war ends. Rather than singing, Graves walks along a riverbank and cries, confused about how to re-enter civilian life. 

"My new loyalty to Nancy and Jenny tended to overshadow Regimental loyalty, now that the War seemed to be over." 

The end of England's involvement in the war, Graves’s homeland service, and his marriage to Nancy cause him to rethink his commitment to the Royal Welch. Graves decides he is not a career military man and recommits himself to his studies and the life of a scholar. 

"Socialism with Nancy was a means to a single end: namely judicial equality between the sexes." 

Nancy, Graves’s wife, belongs to the nascent group of feminists in England in the 1910s, dedicated to achieving equality of the sexes and the right for women to vote. WWI put a damper on suffragette activities but women over 30 earned the right to vote in 1918. Nancy and Graves support the British Labor Party, which tended to be more concerned with women's rights than the other political parties. 

"The war still continued for us and we translated everything into trench-warfare terms."

Graves’s PTSD is so severe that he begins to hallucinate during his classes at Oxford. Fortunately, despite not receiving any psychological help, Graves has the camaraderie of Edmund Blunden, a fellow veteran and poet, with whom Graves can speak about the war and be understood.  

"I could recognize the principal varieties of babies' screams: hunger, indigestion, wetness, pins, boredom, wanting to be played with; and learned to disregard all but the more important ones." 

Graves approaches his duties of fatherhood as secondary to his pursuit of a career as a writer. Living in a small cottage in Islip with Nancy and their four young children, Graves takes time for himself to write, leaving Nancy, who hopes to continue painting, to tend to the children.