Don’t mistake my view of Graves: he’s an extremely carnal writer, and his scenes of trench warfare clench at a reader’s bowels. But here the sentences have the quality more of a semantic memory than an episodic one—memory told more than memory lived. There is not a single scene but several condensed into phrases. He tells you he’s sick but doesn’t occupy the sick body. The only sense memory—large but not dwelled on above—is that of shells bursting in bed. Because they are plural, the faces are less vivid to us.
