Goodbye to All That

by Robert Graves

  The Palace, St Asaph.

  Hippophagist banquet held at Langham’s Hotel, February 1868

  A. G. Asaph.

  (I met several bishops during the war, but none afterwards; except the Bishop of Oxford, in a railway carriage, two years ago, discussing the beauties of Samuel Richardson. And the Bishop of Liverpool, at Harlech, in 1932 – I was making tea on the sandhills, when he came out from the sea with cries of pain, having been stung in the thigh by a jellyfish. He gladly accepted a cup of tea, tut-tutting miserably to himself that he had been under the impression that jellyfish stung only in foreign parts.)

  Wearying of this idleness, I arranged to be transferred to the Sixteenth Officer Cadet Battalion in another part of the same camp. There I did the same sort of work as with the Fourth at Oxford, and stayed from February 1918 until the Armistice on November 11th. Rhyl being much healthier than Oxford, I could play games without danger of another break-down. Nancy got a job at a market-gardener’s near the camp, and came up to live with me. A month or two later she found that she was having a baby, stopped land work, and went back to her drawing.

  None of my friends had approved of my engagement, particularly to a girl as young as Nancy. One of them, Robbie Ross, Oscar Wilde’s literary executor, whom I first met through Siegfried, tried to dissuade me from marriage, hinting, very unkindly that there was Negro blood in the Nicholson family – that perhaps one of our children might revert to coal-black. Siegfried could not easily accustom himself to the idea of Nancy, whom he had not met, but he still wrote from Craiglockhart. A few months later, though in no way renouncing his pacifist views, he decided that his only possible course was, after all, to return to France. He had written to me in the previous October that seeing me again made him more restless than ever. He found the isolation of hospital life nearly unbearable. Old Joe had written him a long letter to say that the First Battalion were just back at rest-billets from the Polygon Wood fighting; the conditions and general situation were more appalling than anything yet known – three miles of morass, shell-holes, corpses, and dead horses through which to bring up the rations. Siegfried felt he would rather be anywhere than in hospital; he couldn’t bear to think of poor Old Joe lying out all night in shell-holes and being shelled. Several of the transport-men had been killed, but at least, according to Joe, ‘the Battalion got its rations’. If only the people who wrote leading articles in the Morning Post about victory could read Joe’s letter! (When this feat won Joe a D.S.O., he was sent a slip to complete with biographical details for a new edition of The Companionage and Knightage, but looked contemptuously at the various headings. Disregarding ‘date and place of birth’, and even ‘military campaigns’, he filled in two items only:

  Issue: Rum, rifles, etc.

  Family seat: My khaki pants.)

  Siegfried now wrote the poem ‘When I’m asleep, dreaming and lulled and warm’ about the ghosts of soliders, reproaching him in dream for his absence – they had looked for him in the line from Ypres to Frise and not found him. He told Rivers that he would go back to France if they agreed to send him, but made it quite clear that his views were what they had been in July when he wrote the letter of protest – if possible, more violently so. He demanded a written guarantee that he would be sent overseas at once, and not kept hanging around a training battalion. In a letter to me he reprehended the attitude I had taken in July, when I reminded him that the regiment would either think him a coward, or regard his protest as a lapse from good form. It was suicidal stupidity and credulity, he wrote, to identify oneself in any way with good form; a man of real courage would not acquiesce as I did. I admitted, he pointed out, that the people who sacrificed the troops were callous bastards, and that the same thing was happening everywhere, except in Russia. What my answer was, I forget; perhaps that, while in France, I had never seen such a fire-eater as he – the number of Germans whom I killed or caused to be killed could hardly be compared with his wholesale slaughter. In fact, Siegfried’s unconquerable idealism changed direction with his environment: he varied between happy warrior and bitter pacifist. His poem:

  To these I turn, in these I trust,

  Brother Lead and Sister Steel;

  To his blind power I make appeal,

  I guard her beauty clean from rust…

  had originally been inspired by Colonel Campbell, V.C.’s blood-thirsty ‘Spirit of the Bayonet’ address at an army school. Later, Siegfried offered it as a satire; and it certainly comes off, whichever way you read it. I was both more consistent and less heroic than Siegfried.

  Whether I pulled any strings escapes my memory; at any rate this time he got posted to the Twenty-fifth Royal Welch – dismounted Yeomanry – in Palestine. He seemed to enjoy the life there, but in April a letter from ‘somewhere in Ephraim’, gave me the distressing news that the division had orders for France. He wrote that he would be sorry to get back to trenches, and perhaps go over the top at Morlancourt or Méaulte. The mention of Morlancourt in the communiqués had brought things home to him. He expected that the First and Second Battalions had about ceased to exist by now, for the nth time.

  I heard again, at the end of May, from France. Siegfried quoted Duhamel: ‘It was ordained that you should suffer without purpose and without hope, but I will not let all your sufferings be lost in the abyss.’ Yet he wrote the next paragraph in his happy-warrior vein, saying that his men were the best he’d ever served with. He wished I could see them. Though I mightn’t believe it, he was training them bloody well and couldn’t imagine whence his flame-like ardour had come; but come it had. His military efficiency derived from the admirable pamphlets now being issued: so different from the stuff we used to get two years before. He said that when he read my letter he began to think: ‘Damn Robert, damn everyone except my company, the smartest turn-out, ever seen, and damn Wales, and damn leave, and damn being wounded, and damn everything except staying with my company until it has melted away! Limping and crawling among the shell-holes, lying very still in the afternoon sunshine in dignified desecrated attitudes.’ He asked me to remember this mood when I saw him (if I saw him) worn out and smashed up again, querulous and nerve-ridden. Or when I read something in the Casualty List and got a polite letter from Mr Lousada, his solicitor. There had never been such a battalion, he said, since 1916, but in six months it would have ceased to exist.

  Nancy’s brother, Tony, had also gone to France now, and her mother made herself ill by worrying about him. Early in July he should be due for leave. I was on leave myself at the end of one of the four-months’ cadet courses, staying with the rest of Nancy’s family at Maesyneuardd, a big Tudor house near Harlech. This was the most haunted house that I have ever been in, though the ghosts, with one exception, were not visible, except occasionally in the mirrors. They would open and shut doors, rap on the oak panels, knock the shades off lamps, and drink the wine from the glasses at our elbows when we were not looking. The house belonged to an officer in the Second Battalion, whose ancestors had most of them died of drink. The visible ghost was a little yellow dog that would appear on the lawn in the early morning to announce deaths. Nancy saw it through the window that time.

  The first Spanish influenza epidemic began, and Nancy’s mother caught it, but did not want to miss Tony’s leave and going to the London theatres with him. So when the doctor came, she took quantities of aspirin, reduced her temperature, and pretended to be all right. But she knew that the ghosts in the mirrors knew the truth. She died in London on July 13th, a few days later. Her chief solace, as she lay dying, was that Tony had got his leave prolonged on her account. I was alarmed at the effect that the shock of her death might have on Nancy’s baby. Then I heard that Siegfried had been shot through the head that same day while making a daylight patrol through long grass in No Man’s Land; but not killed. And he wrote me a verse-letter from a London hospital (which I cannot quote, though I should like to do so) beginning:

  I’d timed my death in action to the minute…


  It is the most terrible of his war-poems.

  Tony was killed in September. I went on mechanically at my cadet-battalion work. The new candidates for commissions were mostly Manchester cotton clerks and Liverpool shipping clerks – men with a good fighting record, quiet and well behaved. To forget about the war, I was writing Country Sentiment, a book of romantic poems and ballads.

  In November came the Armistice. I heard at the same time of the deaths of Frank Jones-Bateman, who had gone back again just before the end, and Wilfred Owen, who often used to send me poems from France. Armistice-night hysteria did not touch our camp much, though some of the Canadians stationed there went down to Rhyl to celebrate in true overseas style. The news sent me out walking alone along the dyke above the marshes of Rhuddlan (an ancient battlefield, the Flodden of Wales), cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead.

  Siegfried’s famous poem celebrating the Armistice began:

  Everybody suddenly burst out singing,

  And I was filled with such delight

  As prisoned birds must find in freedom…

  But ‘everybody’ did not include me.

  26

  IN the middle of December the cadet battalions were wound up, and the officers, after a few days’ leave, sent back to their units. I had orders to rejoin the Royal Welch Third Battalion, now at the Castle Barracks, Limerick, but decided to overstay my leave until the baby was born. Nancy expected it early in January 1919, and her father took a house at Hove for the occasion. Jenny, born on Twelfth Night, was neither coal-black nor affected by the shocks of the previous months. Nancy had no foreknowledge of the experience – I assumed that she must have been given some sort of warning – and it took her years to recover from it I went over to Limerick, and there lied my way out of the overstaying of leave.

  Limerick being a Sinn Fein stronghold, constant clashes occurred between the troops and the young men of the town, yet little ill-feeling; Welsh and Irish always got on well together, just as Welsh and Scottish were sure to disagree. The Royal Welch had the situation comfortably in hand; they made a joke of politics and turned their entrenching-tool handles into shillelaghs. Limerick looked like a war-ravaged town. The main streets were pitted with holes like shell-craters and many of the bigger houses seemed on the point of collapse. Old Reilly at the antique shop, who remembered my grandfather well, told me nobody built new houses at Limerick now; the birth-rate was declining and when one fell down the survivors moved into another. He also said that everyone thed of drink in Limerick except the Plymouth Brethren, who died of religious melancholia.

  Life did not start in the town before nine in the morning. Once, at about that time, I walked down O’Connell Street, formerly King George Street, and found it deserted. When the hour chimed, the door of a magnificent Georgian house flew open and out came, first a shower of slops, which just missed me, then a dog, which lifted up its leg against a lamp-post, them a nearly naked girl-child, who sat down in the gutter and rummaged in a heap of refuse for filthy pieces of bread; finally a donkey, which began to bray. I had pictured Ireland exactly so, and felt its charm as dangerous. When detailed to search for concealed rifles at the head of a task force, in a neighbouring village, I asked Attwater, then still adjutant, to find a substitute; explaining that as an Irishman I did not care to be mixed up in Irish politics. That January I played my last game of rugger: as full-back for the battalion against Limerick City. We were all crocks and our opponents seemed bent on showing what fine fighting material England had lost by withholding Home Rule. How jovially they jumped on me, and rubbed my face in the mud!

  My new loyalty to Nancy and Jenny tended to overshadow regimental loyalty, now that the war seemed to be over. Once I began writing a rhymed nonsense letter to them in my quarters overlooking the barrack square:

  Is there any song sweet enough

  For Nancy or for Jenny?

  Said Simple Simon to the Pieman:

  ‘Indeed, I know not any.’

  I have counted the miles to Babylon,

  I have flown the earth like a bird,

  I have ridden cock-horse to Banbury Cross,

  But no such song have I heard.

  At that moment some companies of the battalion returned to barracks from a route-march; the drums and fifes drew up under my window, making the panes rattle with The British Grenadiers. The insistent repetition of the tune and the hoarse words of command as the parade formed up in the square, company by company, challenged Banbury Cross and Babylon. The British Grenadiers succeeded for a moment in forcing their way into the poem:

  Some speak of Alexander,

  And some of Hercules,

  and then were repulsed:

  But where are there any like Nancy and Jenny,

  Where are there any like these?

  Had I ceased to be a British Grenadier?

  I decided to resign my commission at once. Consulting the priority list of trades for demobilization, I found that agricultural workers and students were among the first classes to go. I did not particularly want to be a student again and would rather have been an agricultural worker – Nancy and I had spoken of farming when the war ended – but where was my agricultural background? And I could take a two years’ course at Oxford with a Government grant of two hundred pounds a year, and be excused the intermediate examination (Mods.) on account of war-service. The preliminary examination I had already been excused because of a ‘higher certificate examination’ passed at Charterhouse; so there remained only the finals. The grant would be increased by a children’s allowance. It seemed absurd at the time to suppose that university degrees would count for anything in a regenerated post-war England; but Oxford offered itself as a convenient place to mark time until I felt more like earning a livelihood. We were all accustomed to the war-time view, that the sole qualification for peace-time employment would be a good record of service in the field, that we expected our scars and our commanding officers’ testimonials to get us whatever we wanted. A few of my fellow-officers did manage, as a matter of fact, to take advantage of the employers’ patriotic spirit before it cooled again; sliding into jobs for which they were not properly qualified.

  I wrote to a friend in the War Office Demobilization Department, asking him to hurry through my release. He wrote back that he would do his best, but that I must not have had charge of Government moneys for the past six months. As it happened, I had not at the time; but Attwater suddenly decided to put me in command of a company. He complained of being disastrously short of officers who could be trusted with company accounts. The latest arrivals from the New Army battalions were a constant shame to the senior officers. Paternity-orders, stumer cheques, and drunkenness on parade grew frequent; not to mention table manners at which Sergeant Malley stood aghast. We now had two mess ante-rooms, the junior and the senior; yet if a junior officer happened to be regimentally a gentleman (belonged, that is, to the North Wales landed gentry, or came from Sandhurst) the colonel invited him to use the senior ante-room and mix with his own class. The situation must have seemed very strange to the three line-battalion second-lieutenants captured at Mons in 1914, now promoted captains by the death of most of their contemporaries and set free by the terms of the Armistice.

  Attwater cancelled the intended appointment only when I promised to help him with the battalion theatricals now being arranged for St David’s Day; I undertook to play Cinna in Julius Caesar. His change of mind saved me over two hundred pounds, because next day the senior lieutenant of the company which I was to have taken over went off with the cash-box, and I should have been legally responsible for its loss. Before the war he used to give displays on Blackpool Pier as ‘The Handcuff King’. He got away safely to the United States.

  I rode out a few miles from Limerick to visit my uncle, Robert Cooper, at Cooper’s Hill. He was a farmer, a retired naval commander, and the Sinn Feiners had begun burning his ricks and driving his cattle. Through the window he showed me distant herds grazing beside
the Shannon. ‘They have been there all winter,’ he said despondently, ‘but I haven’t had the heart to take a look at them these three months.’ I spent the night at Cooper’s Hill, and woke up with a sudden chill, which I recognized as the first symptoms of Spanish influenza.

  Back at the barracks, I found that a War Office telegram had come through for my demobilization, but that all demobilization among troops in Ireland was to be stopped on the following day for an indefinite period because of the Troubles. Attwater, showing me the telegram, said: ‘We’re not going to let you go. You promised to help me with those theatricals.’ I protested; he stood firm; but I did not intend to have influenza at an Irish military hospital with my lungs in their present condition.

  I decided to make a run for it. The orderly-room sergeant had made out my papers on receipt of the telegram; all my kit lay ready packed. There remained only two things to get: the commanding officer’s signature to the statement that I had handled no company moneys, and the secret code-marks which the battalion demobilization officer alone could supply – but he was hand-in-glove with Attwater, so I dared not ask him for them. The last train before demobilization ended would be the six-fifteen from Limerick that same evening, February 13th. My one hope was to wait until Attwater left the orderly-room and then casually ask the commanding officer to sign the statement, without mentioning Attwater’s objection to my going. Attwater remained in the orderly-room until five minutes past six. As soon as he was out of sight I hurried in, saluted, got the necessary signature – fortunately my old friend Macartney-Filgate was now in command, saluted again, and hurried away to collect my baggage. I had counted on a jaunting-car at the barrack gates but found none. About five minutes left, and the station a good distance away! A First Battalion corporal passed. I shouted to him: ‘Corporal Summers, quick! Get a squad of men! I’ve got my ticket and must catch the last train home.’ Summers promptly called four men; they picked up my stuff and doubled off with it, left, right, left, to the station. I tumbled into the train as it moved slowly out and threw a pound-note to Corporal Summers. ‘Goodbye, corporal, drink my health!’