Goodbye to All That

Graves wrote this autobiography when he was in his early thirties. It covers his childhood, his schooling at Charterhouse, his service as an infantry officer in the First World War and the uneasy years that followed. He describes life in the trenches, the loss of friends, and his own wounding with plain honesty and dry humour. He also writes about the odd customs of English schools and the army, and about his friendship with fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon. The book is a classic first hand account of the war and of a generation's disillusion with the society that sent it there.