Goodbye to All That

Published in 1929, Goodbye to All That is Robert Graves’s remarkable autobiography of a childhood in Edwardian England and a young adulthood transformed by the First World War. From his schooldays at Charterhouse to the trenches of France, Graves recounts the friendships, absurdities and brutal realities that shaped his generation, including his close friendship with fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon. His account of trench warfare, his serious wounds and the difficult return to civilian life offers an unusually intimate portrait of a world irrevocably altered by conflict.

Written with candour, dark humour and a striking refusal of sentimentality, the book is both a personal reckoning and a fierce rejection of the society that preceded the war. Its unsparing treatment of military life, patriotism, class and memory made it one of the defining autobiographical works to emerge from the First World War. Graves’s later revisions changed the character of the original, but the 1929 edition remains especially compelling for its rawness and its sense of a writer taking leave of an entire world.

From the book

“There was no patriotism in the trenches.”

— Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That

On Goodbye to All That

“Graves's superbly sardonic account of his childhood, schooling, the great war and his first marriage”

— P. D. Smith, The Guardian