Goodbye to All That

I promised some thoughts on ‘Goodbye to All That’,  Robert Graves’s memoir of his schooldays and his years during and immediately after the Great War, including his time as a young officer in the trenches. When I was first introduced to this book, aged about 14 and attending a minor public school, it still had a great power to shock. I can’t now recall if I was urged to read it by a teacher or discovered it for myself.

 

Back in the mid-1960s the Great War was generally understood to have been a tragedy, but a lot of people still objected to the Joan Littlewood view  (‘Lions led by Donkeys’ etc) expressed by the play ‘Oh, What a Lovely War’  (which I believe was later copied by something called ‘Blackadder’, which I have never seen) as unpatriotic and irreverent.  My view of the era was hugely influenced by the grandly-bound volumes of ‘Punch’ (a now-defunct humorous magazine) which stood in long rows in a corner of my prep school library. It was a beautiful room, looking out through French windows, northwards over dense woodland across the Tavy valley, a view enlivened by the occasional passage of steam trains on the two lines that ran that way, clanking and puffing, sometimes seeming to race with each other, leaving rival plumes of steam behind them. It was an Edwardian prospect, a good place to lose myself in the Edwardian world. I didn’t then realise that I was also benefiting from that perfect circumstance for thought and contemplation, a North-lit room.

 

There, undisturbed by my unbookish schoolfellows, I could often hide from unpleasant activities or unwanted and fairly pointless chores, of the sort that were always being invented to keep us from being idle.  Nobody ever looked for anyone in there. Of course, I read little of the dense type and gazed mainly at the illustrations, particularly the richly-detailed political caricatures and set pieces of Bernard Partridge which even now (for me) set the standard for political cartoons, an art form I love. They were superbly drawn, far more serious and less frivolous than those of today.

 

As I leafed through them, week by week, it was obvious at that distance that a slow disaster was under way. Partridge’s drawings grew darker and less optimistic as the years went by.  From them I formed my impression of the Kaiser, of Admiral Tirpitz, of Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg and of Asquith, Churchill and Lloyd George. From them I learned a narrative of the war, and gained an impression of the atmosphere of my country before and after that war, which has never left me. It was full of dark skies and foreboding, things Partridge was very good at portraying.  It was obvious, from the volumes after 1918, that the cartoons (and articles) were dealing with a country wholly transformed.  Uncle Sam, for a start, was much more frequently present. John Bull and Britannia, had begun to look much more careworn.  A revolution of some sort had taken place, and something very important and rather comforting had been lost for good. I couldn’t have put this into words at the time. I knew it was true. I remember passing through Amiens, on the old ‘Golden Arrow’ in 1965 and half-expecting, half-hoping to see the ghosts of dead soldiers by the side of the track.

 

I went on from that school to a larger, more organised establishment where (and this immediately appalled me) it was much harder (though not impossible) to hide from the tedious demands of authority, and its obsession with finding me something to do, in a crowd, when I much preferred to follow my own ends, in my own company.

 

There we were in surroundings consciously designed to imitate the Charterhouse which Graves describes, a type of school which for  many years I accepted as somehow inevitable, but which I now greatly mistrust. I’ve no doubt that some of the big old Public Schools provide an excellent education and give their pupils an independence and self-reliance that is indispensable. But I’ve always found it hard to argue against the view that the English upper classes like boarding schools because they don’t much like their own children.

 

My own poor parents, both of them from backgrounds where such things were a mystery, struggled to do their best for me and my brother without really understanding how the system worked.  Off we went into that world of tuck boxes, school caps, gerunds, prunes, football in the sleet, cross country runs, dormitories, prefects,  gristle, suet and impetigo, a world beautifully summed up in the title of an anthology ‘Whimpering in the Rhododendrons’, and perfectly described in the ‘Molesworth’ books which no social anthropologist, studying England, should neglect.

 

I’ve no doubt it was character-forming. But did anyone really need the sort of character that it formed? And mightn’t there have been a better way of forming the better bits? Too late for me now. I suspected at the time that it was all a terrible mistake, though I always enjoyed the beautiful setting of my prep-school, a handsome Georgian squire’s house amid rooky beechwoods, on a Devon hilltop, and found many ways of enjoying myself.  I also didn’t want to get let out of this strange world, just in case it wasn’t a mistake. It is now both too late and too early to know.

 

Now, here, in my hand was a book by a distinguished man of letters, a poet of high repute, an undoubted success in life and an oracle of poetry, a man who had fought for his country in battle and been badly-wounded doing so, denouncing the public school way of life (even in the mid-1960s still recognisably similar) for its hatred of thought,  its miserable sexual confusion, and its worship of sport. Graves’ unstated but implied conclusion, that intelligent people in such schools ought to learn to box,  very well indeed, seems to me sensible but impracticable.

 

When, in the end, I and the public school system parted company, Robert Graves and ‘Goodbye to All That’  had something to do with it. It was impossible, after reading it, to be sure that what I was experiencing was right, or that it was doing me more good than harm.

 

And then he turned his mind to the War.  I suspect that Graves was genuinely physically brave, though not very conscious of it, in a way that many more people used to be. His description of his own very severe wound is either conscious and deliberate understatement or an example of the old-fashioned Protestant stoicism which we were all once taught to observe, but which has largely disappeared in the modern world.  I suspect it is the latter. He seems genuinely not to have minded going out on near-suicidal missions between the front lines, and, while he muses on the chances of him being reduced by the grind and fear of war to a shaking wreck with soiled trousers, it didn’t happen to him( as it did to many strong and upright men). Though if he had not been so badly wounded, who knows? So-called shell shock was a great destroyer of minds, and there were, in my childhood, many mental hospitals where its worst victims were still said to lie, trembling and staring, never to recover from the horror of the trenches.

 

 

 

Graves, brought up in the Edwardian English upper middle classes, just seems to have assumed that this is what he was supposed to be. The description he gives of warfare is all the better for being so detached. It is plain from what he says that the generals were largely clueless, the quality of troops very variable, the Germans in general very effective fighters, the waste of life appalling, the conditions verging on the unspeakable.  It is also plain that his eventual weariness with the war (like Siegfried Sassoon’s) was not in any way motivated by pacifism or any other sot of left-wing dogma. There’s a wonderful account of a conversation with Bertrand Russell at Garsington, in which he shocks Russell quite badly by explaining the true attitudes of the men serving under him.

 

The whole thing is written with a wonderful, insouciant lightness of touch which makes the dark, heavy truth he tells all the more startling. And then there is the day when, on leave and full of revulsion at the jingoist, sentimental view of the war among civilians,  he goes to Church for the last time, and his scorn for the Church of England military padres (who mostly stayed away from the front), compared with the Roman Catholic priests (who went eagerly forward, to be sure to be in a position to give the last rites). Some of this I remember almost word for word after nearly 50 years, so strong and clear is the writing. Graves was born and brought up in another, wholly different England from the one I live in.  If you think that life has always been more or less the same, and that people are not shaped by moral and religious climates, then this book will disabuse you of that.

 

Oh, and a couple of other things, for those who remember some controversies we have had here. He recalls a French schoolroom, with a fearsome mural depicting the slow decline of a drunkard. It ends with delirium tremens (not a symptom of ‘withdrawal’, as it is now claimed to be,  but of continued drunkenness, as it has always been understood) and death. And there is a scene in Cairo where a woman is found naked and screaming in the public street, and her insanity is explained by the police as being due to the widespread use of cannabis in Egypt at that time (also mentioned by Malcolm Muggeridge in ‘Chronicles of Wasted Time’ ). The disastrous effect of the widespread use of this drug in Egypt led directly to the international treaties making it illegal, which are now being subverted by a powerful and well-funded campaign . Nobody ever learns from history, when self-interest is involved.