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Title: Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves ISBN: 0-374-93233-6 Publisher: Octagon Books Pub. Date: June, 1980 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $22.50

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (7 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: an eloquent and moving memoir
Comment: Robert Graves simply and elegantly recounts his experiences as a young, (initally) idealistic officer in the British Army. A friend of Sigfried Sasson and Wilfred Owens, Graves, in my opinion, is the better writer of the lot. His writing is so lucid, we feel the impulsiveness as he enlists (and receives a comission, as was his due to his place in Edwardian society), and we also gradually come to understand the pointlessness of the carnage and the horrors of the war.

The book is at its most moving, however, as Graves re-tells of his leave back to England - the comparisons to Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front are erie - I was particularly moved by part where Graves remembers the family of a deceased friend he was visiting, the mother pacing the house at all hours of the night ... it really made the human costs of the war feel suddenly very personal.

As other reviewers have mentioned, it is an excellent memoir of the war, and in my opinion, the best first - hand account of the war in the west.

Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent First Hand Account of the First World War
Comment: I have been aware of this book with its' familiar title since childhood but I only recently read it. I feared it would be a dull dry-as-dirt retelling of war stories of forgotten dead men. I was pleasantly surprised. The book is not at all dull but
presents Graves war experience in an exciting fast pased way. I had to skim the first part about his childhood. Every biography has a dull childhood section dealing with the subject's juvenile trails and tribulations and conflicts with family members. I find these universally uninteresting.

Graves was 17 when the war started and volunteered for officer candidate school within days. He became a lieutenant in the Royal Welch Guards and eventually was promoted to captain in charge of his own company of infantry by age 21. Unlike
our present system where college is mandatory prerequisite for a young man seeking to become an officer, social standing determined that Graves would become an officer rather than an enlisted man.

Graves participates in several trench warfare battles. Trench warfare as Graves describes is a monotonous and dirty business. Rats are everywhere. Groundwater seeps relentlessly into living and fighting spaces. The men live in warrens of chambers cut into ground branching away from the main trenches. To break up
the monotony and to show that he's not a coward, Graves often volunteers for scout duty. He sneaks into no mans land at night to assess the enemy. On occasion the senior officers order suicidal attacks in which every man of the company must go over the top and charge fortified machine gun positions. Graves
tells of one attack in which his company was ordered to take part. Three companies go before his and each is destroyed with 100% casualties wounded or killed. Graves and his men are crouching poised at the top step of their trench waiting for their turn to attack when the attack is suddenly called off. In a later attack Graves is wounded by shrapnel and left for dead for over 24 hours before receiving medical attention. He recovers fully from these wounds but is assigned to training duty after his recovery.

Later parts of the book deal with Graves' first marriage, his education at Oxford, a failed attempt at shopkeeping and a post war teaching position in Cairo. I found these of less interest than the war scenes. Graves lived to age 90 and went on the write the immensely entertaining I, Claudius and over a hundred other books.

Rating: 5
Summary: Compulsory reading for every politician.
Comment: A sad commentary on our society that only the audio versions of this book are available. With the increase of interest in the First World War recently it is to this book that many people should turn for a gripping, factual account of life before, during and after the Great War. Mr Graves documents the pastoral quiet of England in the early part of the twentieth century and abruptly descends to recounting, in cold detail, the dreadful slaughter of the trenches. Through some of the most famous battles in history he survives, physically more or less intact but from the dry words; modest, English, reserved, we glimpse the true weight of the burden that such memories impose on their carriers and understand better the terrible toll that the War levied on all the nations of Europe.