For Remembrance Day, commemorating the armistice on November 11th, 1918, I’ve been reading my beautiful Folio edition of Robert Graves iconic memoir, Goodbye to All That (1929, revised 1959). As the description at Wikipedia shows, there is much more to this book than the unsentimental and frequently comic treatment of the banalities and intensities of the life of a British army officer in the First World War.
There are many memorable passages, like this one:
I have still have the roll of my first platoon of forty men. The figures given for their ages are misleading. On enlistment, all over-age men had put themselves in the late thirties, and all under-age men had called themselves eighteen. But once in France, the over-age men did not mind adding a few genuine years. No less than fourteen in the roll give their age as forty or over, and these were not all.
Fred Prosser, a painter in civil life, who admitted to forty-eight, was really fifty-six. David Davies, collier, who admitted to forty-two, and Thomas Clark, another collier who admitted to forty-five, were only one or two years junior to Prosser. James Burford, collier and fitter, was the oldest soldier of all.
When I first spoke to him in the trenches, he said: ‘Excuse me, sir, will you explain what this here arrangement is on the side of my rifle?’
‘That’s the safety catch. Didn’t you do a musketry-course at the depot?’
‘No, sir, I was a re-enlisted man, and I spent only a fortnight there. The old Lee-Metford didn’t have no safety-catch.’
I asked him when he had last fired a rifle.
‘In Egypt in 1882,’ he said.
‘Weren’t you in the South African War?’ ‘
I tried to re-enlist, but they told me I was too old, sir. I had been an old soldier in Egypt. My real age is sixty-three.’
He spent all his summers as a tramp, and in the bad months of the year worked as a collier, choosing a new pit every season. I heard him and David Davies one night discussing the different seams of coal in Wales, and tracing them from county to county and pit to pit with technical comments.
The other half of the platoon contained the under-age section.
I had five of these boys; William Bumford, collier, for instance, who gave his age as eighteen, was really only fifteen. He used to get into trouble for falling asleep on sentry duty, an offence punishable with death, but could not help it. I had seen him suddenly go to sleep, on his feet, while holding a sandbag open for another fellow to fill.
So we got him a job as an orderly to a chaplain for a while, and a few months later all men over fifty and all boys under eighteen got combed out. Bumford and Burford were both sent to the base; but neither escaped the war. Bumford grew old enough by 1917 to be sent back to the battalion, and was killed that summer; Burford died in a bombing accident at the base-camp.
Or so I was told — the fate of hundreds of my comrades in France came to me merely as hearsay. (p.89)
In the original, all this text is in two paragraphs, but I have punctuated it in line with contemporary standards for online reading.
In memory of
Private Thomas Hill, Service Number 8357,
who served in the 2nd Battalion, Royal Welsh Fusiliers,
and died aged 29 on the 1st of January 1915,
leaving a wife, Nellie
and two children, Clifford and Joan, who died in the Blitz in WW2.
His name, on Panel 5, is one of 11,000 recorded on the Ploegsteert Memorial to the Missing in Belgium.
It commemorates men from the Allied Powers
who fought on the northern Western Front outside the Ypres Salient
and whose graves are unknown.
and
Private Joseph Hoare, Service Number: 3544
who served in the 1st Battalion, Irish Guards
and died aged 18 on the 5th of December 1917.
His name is one of 7048 recorded on the Cambrai Memorial in Louverval, France.
It commemorates the missing soldiers of the United Kingdom and South Africa
who died at the Battle of Cambrai and have no known graves.
His name is included on the family memorial at Sleaty Graveyard, Carlow, Ireland.
Author: Robert Graves
Title: Goodbye to All That
Introduction by Raleigh Trevelyan
Publisher: Folio Society, 1981, first published 1929, revised 1959
Hardcover in slipcase, no dustjacket, 295 pages
B&W photos; binding illustration: Crossing the Ancre, France, WW1 (Popperfoto)
ISBN: None
Source: Personal library, purchased secondhand from AbeBooks, $21.50
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
It was and remains such an important book about the Great War. It is fascinating to read it in conjunction with Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, which you have probably done.
… and we just keep on doing it, with ever more lethal weapons.
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By: Eleanor Dilley on November 11, 2023
at 5:30 pm
Yes.
It’s actually quite chilling to read Graves on the subject of developments in armaments… the out-dated weaponry that they had at the start of the war; a strange kind of envy of German superiority in arms; the inventions that made their way into the trenches as time went by. I’m not the first to think that the world would be a better place if we spent most of the military budget on health, education and welfare instead.
I hesitated about posting this, because (as you know if you read my review of These Days) I do not want to spark any divisive commentary.
But then I thought, at this time last year I had put this book in my diary to read in 2023, and I think I can trust the kind of reader who comes here to read it, to be mindful of the solemnity of this day and of the harm that intemperate comments can do.
Remembrance Day has always meant more to me than Anzac Day because of the losses in my family in both World Wars. My grandfather and my great-uncle fought in WW1 too, but they survived.
I’ve read Sassoon’s poetry, but not his memoirs. Perhaps for next year.
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By: Lisa Hill on November 11, 2023
at 6:34 pm
They are definitely worth reading.
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By: Eleanor Dilley on November 11, 2023
at 9:52 pm
‘Graves’. A brilliant book and a perfect aptronym in this poignant context. Your extracts about age are apposite to my family. Of 17 (sic) siblings, my grandfather and four brothers enlisted in 1915. Only he survived. One of the other four was 16, and had been adopted into an already huge family at Gordon, near Ballarat. His adoptive parents named him after the town. Today at our house his Death Penny is on non-jingoistic display with a studio photograph of my grandfather in his new uniform. As we might expect, he looks as if he has no idea of what awaits him. When I was a small child he used to terrify me at my instigation with his horror stories of the Somme. My Mother told me he would describe such things to me and no one else because I looked like one of his dead brothers. His influence on my attempts at writing (anti)war-related fiction has been strong.
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By: Tony English on November 11, 2023
at 6:08 pm
Lisa, I do know how to spell ‘brilliant’.
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By: Tony English on November 11, 2023
at 6:11 pm
LOL, I’ll repair it!
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By: Lisa Hill on November 11, 2023
at 6:17 pm
Hello Tony, thanks for sharing this. 16 years old…
I used to go on holidays down at Inverloch where an in-law’s aunt not long deceased had a similar sort of simple memorial on the mantelpiece, which had been there for nearly three-quarters of a century. It was a poignant reminder of the longevity of her loss.
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By: Lisa Hill on November 11, 2023
at 6:48 pm
Thanks, as always, Lisa, for a stimulating post for Remembrance Day.
Robert Graves’ autobiographical “Goodbye to All That” was one of the first major books of first-hand experience of the Western Front that I read, in 1967, closely followed by Siegfried Sassoon’s autobiographical novels, “Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man” and “Memoirs of an Infantry Officer” (and later, “Sherston’s Progress”), plus the poetry Graves and Sassoon, and Owen, wrote, and Sassoon’s actual autobiographies, including “Siegfried’s Journey”.
Last year I read Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s two-volume biography of Sassoon. An important corrective in this was Wilson’s explanation about the factual inaccuracies of Graves’ book. Apparently Sassoon annotated his own copy with his detailed corrections.
On the other hand, if we accept Graves wrote from memory, we can still read his account as a vivid depiction of an appalling but extremely significant experience.
You might like to consider Frederic Manning’s “The Middle Parts of Fortune” (also known as “Her Privates We”), an autobiographical novel about the Western Front written by an Australian author who served in the British Army.
Or the other Australian accounts of the Western Front, such as Leonard Mann’s “Flesh in Armour”, or the recently published Australian memoir “Somme Mud” (and sequel) by E.P.F. Lynch.
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By: John Gough on November 11, 2023
at 7:18 pm
Hello John, thanks for your comment:)
The introduction to this edition includes mention of inaccuracies and matters that offended some of the people referred to in it. Graves says somewhere that he used letters that he’d written home as a source, and also that when he revised it he was able to add some details that had been censored in the letters. But I do think he must have been writing from memory too because I think that many of his criticisms would not have got past the censors at all.
On the other hand, I expect that some incidents would have been burned into his memory as well.
I’ve read “The Middle Parts of Fortune” (and reviewed it here) and it’s well worth reading too because Manning wrote it from the ranks rather than from an officer’s perspective.
One of the best accounts I’ve read from a different perspective altogether is Kitty’s War (2013), by Janet Butler (see here) because it puts paid to the idea that the nurses were all safely away from the front and in no danger. Not that Kitty’s letters home said anything about that, she didn’t want to worry her mother. But Janet Butler matched up the dates of the letters home with where the action and the clearing stations were, and she documents cases of nurses being gassed and killed by shrapnel. It’s an amazing story.
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By: Lisa Hill on November 11, 2023
at 9:46 pm
That is a really, really good passage. It’s made me want to go read Graves right now.
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By: Elle on November 11, 2023
at 9:38 pm
The book is full of brilliant passages like that.
The amazing is, that Graves had a very disrupted education, moving from one school to another for various reasons. It’s a wonder he learned anything at all, much less how to write so vividly.
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By: Lisa Hill on November 11, 2023
at 9:48 pm
I’ve literally just reserved it from my local library—thank you for the push!
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By: Elle on November 11, 2023
at 9:48 pm
Wonderful!
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By: Lisa Hill on November 11, 2023
at 9:55 pm
I hadn’t heard of this book but it sounds excellent. Thanks for this post.
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By: whisperinggums on November 11, 2023
at 11:19 pm
Did you do the war poets at school?
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By: Lisa Hill on November 12, 2023
at 8:41 am
I really can’t remember about school, but I think we did touch on them in first year university English. By think, I mean, I have done a few of them, and I think it was university not school!
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By: whisperinggums on November 13, 2023
at 12:02 am
I wouldn’t be sure either, except I’ve still got my poetry book from Form V!
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By: Lisa Hill on November 13, 2023
at 12:09 am
I have mine from Form I (or what we called in Queensland, Grade 8 … we were ahead of the nomenclature times there!) And I did have all my Uni poetry books until downsizing. They have gone now, except for a few special ones, as I can find the poetry online and I’m never going to read the whole books again.
But I can’t even visualise what text/s we used for poetry in Forms V-VI, though I remember some of the poems we did. Like TS Eliot.
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By: whisperinggums on November 13, 2023
at 10:50 am
I wonder if kids today even get poetry text books. They probably just use what’s online…
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By: Lisa Hill on November 13, 2023
at 10:56 am
Yes, I don’t know, but I would be surprised if they have a poetry textbook. There are probably pluses and minuses to whichever way you go.
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By: whisperinggums on November 14, 2023
at 8:30 am
A touching and very personal post, Lisa. Graves knew how to write and his daughter Lucia did too. Her book, A Woman Unknown is a personal favourite of mine.
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By: Brett Hetherington on November 12, 2023
at 4:04 am
Thank you, Brett. I just looked up A Woman Unknown, and it sounds like one I must track down.
Goodreads doesn’t have a date of first publication, but the earliest edition is from 1999. Does that sound right? She would have been an older woman by then…
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By: Lisa Hill on November 12, 2023
at 8:44 am
Thanks for your reply, Lisa. Yes, the earliest version is from Virago in 1999 (according to my 2001 Counterpoint edition, which I quoted from for my own book on Spain) Tracking down a copy is a great idea, I’d agree. She actually lived quite close to where I do but the exact town is something she decided not to state. (My guess is Vallirana in the Baix Llobregat area of Barcelona province)
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By: Brett Hetherington on November 14, 2023
at 7:59 am
Ah yes, I have your book on my wishlist!
I loved Spain. We had three weeks there, and we did touristy things (art galleries, museums etc) but we went everywhere by train and kept away from the coast where all the Brits apparently are.
And I spent six months learning Spanish first, which made all the difference to our experience because I could say We are Australian tourists and then they knew we weren’t Brits or Americans!
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By: Lisa Hill on November 14, 2023
at 8:44 am
I’m happy you had a rewarding time over here and Spain and that you’re planning to read my book on some of the unsung parts of it, Lisa. (Like you, I kept mainly to the less touristy interior.) I really applaud you for learning Spanish before you came. That certainly makes a difference, as you say. I wonder why Aussies didn’t visit Spain much on the European tour. (I certainly didn’t when first coming over to spend months travelling across Europe in 1994 and it was only in early 1997 when I first set foot in Spain and was in love the place in a couple days…)
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By: Brett Hetherington on November 15, 2023
at 9:22 am