My continuing obsession with all things WWI took a turn away from history books to this, probably the most famous memoir of the war. It’s another of my Dad’s Folio Society volumnes that I’ve inherted. I wonder if he ever read it?

Although the book mainly concerns Graves’ wartime experiences, it also includes his childhood schooldays at Charterhouse and the immediate postwar period when he was a student at Oxford and then a teacher in Cairo. Although his parents were prosperous middle class gentry, he has something of an outsider’s perspective thanks to his Irish father and German mother. He spent almost every summer before the war with his German family. Indeed several of his cousins fought in the war on the other side. Another interesting point that I was unaware of, was that he was good friends with Siegfried Sassoon, and Sasson in turn knew Wilfred Owen. A small world for poets in the trenches! Graves describes Sasson as a “fire eater”, brave beyond reason, it’s a wonder that he survived. Graves in contrast seems to have been lucky. Brave and conscientious, but fortunate to not be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although he spent plenty of time at the front immersed the nightmare world of trench warfare he narrowly misses being sent “over the top” several times. When at last his luck runs out and he’s involved in an attack, he’s almost immediately wounded with a piece of shrapnel through the lung. It’s bad enough to put him out of the war, but not enough to kill him; the “Blighty wound” that all the soldiers longed for. In a moment of black comedy his commanding officer thought he’d been killed and sent a telegram off to his parents informing them of his heroic death. He jokes that being dead was quite inconvenient because his pay was stopped for a while. He spent the last two years of the war first convalescing in hospital and then later working as a training officer.

The book vividly describes the horrors of the trenches; the unburied corpses, the mud and filth, the constant threat of sudden death from high explosive, snipers, or gas. It’s astonishing how often he describes meeting someone, or describing an anecdote about another soldier, and then in the next sentence how he died a short while later. Death, so common it’s just a note. In contrast are the wonderfully drawn portraits of the various characters he shares his wartime experience with. Their bravery and foibles, their hopes and fears. He’s rather unkind to the French, which seems to have been a common attitude of the British soldiers, but in contrast he rather admires the Germans, and discounts stories of their atrocities as mere propaganda. He later recounts how a fellow officer declared that they’d been fighting the wrong nation, and that if there was another war he would refuse to go, unless it was against the French, at which point he’s sign up in a flash.

Graves takes a great deal of professional pride in his regiment, the Royal Welch, and describes at length their operational and tactical methods, comparing them favourably against other regiments in the British army. He describes various techniques for triangulating snipers or carrying out patrols into no man’s land. He is far from the constantly cynical anti-war caricature that’s now assumed of all intelligent men caught up in the war. A great example of this trope is one of my favourite TV comedies, Blackadder Goes Forth. It’s only later as he recuperates back in England and becomes sickened by the gross jingoism he encounters that he questions what it’s all for. But even then he councils Sassoon against writing directly in protest of the war. One has the impression that despite the immense suffering and tragedy he was still proud to have taken part and his role in it.

All through the book I had to continually remind myself how young he was. Only 18 at the outbreak and a captain in charge of a company of around 200 men by the time he was wounded at age 20. When I was 20 I was barely able to wash and cook for myself! What immense responsibility to heap on such young shoulders. And to live the experience of a lifetime before you are barely into adulthood. The remainder of one’s life must have seemed a weird twilight aftermath - especially, I suppose, if you are identified primarily as a WWI poet and your best selling book is this memoir. The book deserves its reputation as a classic. It’s beautifully written, a joy to read, and fully immerses you in the life of a young soldier caught up in the great conflagration. Now I suppose I’ll have to read Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, if only to read Sassoon’s descriptions of “David Cromlech” (Sassoon’s pseudonym for Graves).