Robert Graves. Goodbye to All That

"Those were the early days of trench warfare, the days of the jam-tin bomb and the gas-pipe trench-mortar; still innocent of Lewis or Stokes guns, steel helmets, telescopic rifle-sights, gas-shells, pill-boxes, tanks, well-organized trench-raids, or any of the later refinements of trench warfare.

After a meal of bread, bacon, rum, and bitter stewed tea sickly with sugar, we went through the broken trees to the east of the village and up a long trench to battalion headquarters.  The wet and slippery trench ran through dull red clay.  I had a torch with me, and saw that hundreds of field mice and frogs had fallen into the trench but found no way out.  The light dazzled them, and because I could not help treading on them, I put the torch back in my pocket.  We had no mental picture of what the trenches would be like, and were almost as ignorant as a young soldier who joined us a week or two later.  He called out excitedly to old Burford, who was cooking up a bit of stew in a dixie, apart from the others:  'Hi, mate, where's the battle?  I want to do my bit.'

The guide gave us hoarse directions all the time.  'Hole right.' 'Wire high.'  'Wire low.'  'Deep place here, sir.' 'Wire low.'  'Deep place here, sir.' 'Wire low.'  The field-telephone wires had been fastened by staples to the side of the trench, and when it rained the staples were constantly falling out and the wire falling down and tripping people up.  If it sagged too much, one stretched it across the trench to the other side to correct the sag, but then it would catch one's head.  The holes were sump-pits used for draining the trenches."  (pp. 82-83)

(Robert Graves [1895-1985], English poet, classicist, and novelist -- the author of over 140 works -- despised Virgil's Aeneid.  His article entitled "The Virgil Cult" begins:  "Whenever a golden age of stable government, full churches, and expanding wealth dawns among the Western nations, Virgil always returns to supreme favor.... Why Virgil's poems have for the last two thousand years exercised so great an influence on our Western culture is, paradoxically, because he was a renegade to the true Muse.  His pliability; his subservience; his narrowness; his denial of that stubborn imaginative freedom which the true poets who preceded him had prized ... these were the negative qualities which first commended him to government circles, and have kept him in favour ever since."

I never, quite, understood where this pathological loathing of all things Virgil (and all things Eliot) came from, until I chanced upon a Penguin copy in Nepal of Goodbye to All That, his grim, detailed, realistic, heartbreaking account of the tragic collapse of the British Empire in the muddy trenches of WWI.  Having survived the schoolyard persecutions, mockery, and bullying in response to his German ancestry (his full name was Robert von Ranke Graves), his outspokenness, as well as his moral seriousness and relative poverty, he took up boxing, poetry, choir, and an aristocratic boy three years younger.  Upon the outbreak of WWI in August, 1914, he promptly enlisted, taking a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, only to find himself leading young men to their inevitable, miserable, bloody, mud-stained slaughter at the hands of mindless generals, reading Virgil and studying the maps.  This stunning, moving account of the tragedy of WWI includes a fascinating panoply of secondary characters:  the poet Siegfried Sassoon, whom he befriended in the trenches and alienated with the publication of Goodbye in 1929; George Mallory, his schoolmaster at Charterhouse and fellow climber in the Lake District, who died on the Northeast Ridge of Everest in 1924 (see Wade Davies' Into the Silence for another account of the shell-shocked survivors of WWI); his landlord John Masefield; and T.E. Lawrence, his companion and fellow prankster at Oxford.  "Lawrence's eyes immediately held me," Graves writes.  "They were startlingly blue, even by artificial light, and never met the eyes of the person he addressed, but flickered up and down as though making an inventory of clothes and limbs" (p. 243).  He and his first wife, Nancy Nicholson, bicycled past the Stonehenge in the moonlight on their way to visit the aging Thomas Hardy.  "We rode ... [past] several deserted army camps which had an even more ghostly look.  They could provide accommodation for a million men; the number of men killed in the British and overseas Forces during the war" (p. 247).  Until the outbreak of WWII, Robert Graves lived abroad -- teaching in Cairo, living in Majorca, in Spain, until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and then, briefly, in the United States.  It was as if he could not bear to set foot, again, on the land of the country that had done what it had done.

For the best account of the outbreak of WWI, see Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, which was on JFK's mind, if not in his hands, during the Cuban Missile Crisis  For the best, relatively brief, extraordinarily well-written account of the whole of the First World War, see John Keegan's WWI.  Keegan, a military historian, has also written a thoughtful, fascinating comparison and contrast of technology and warfare in the Battle of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Battle of the Somme, entitled The Face of Battle.  For an account of the victors, dividing the spoils and unwittingly setting the table for WWII, see especially Margaret MacMillan and Richard Holbrooke's Paris 1919.)