Goodbye to All That
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Goodbye to All That, an autobiography by Robert Graves, first appeared in print in 1929. It expressed Graves' desire to say "Good-Bye to All That", "All That" being an England dominated by middle-class morality. Graves first wrote the work in his thirties, when he had a long and eventful life ahead of him; the book deals mainly with his childhood, youth and military service.
A large part of the book is taken up by his experiences of the First World War, where he gives a detailed description of trench warfare. Many readers will be interested in his description of the killing of German prisoners of war by British troops; although he had not witnessed any incidents himself and knew of no large-scale massacres, he knew of a number of incidents where prisoners had been killed individually or in small groups, and he believed that a large proportion of Germans who surrendered never made it to prisoner of war camps.
Graves heavily revised Goodbye to All That and re-published it in 1957 with many significant events and figures either excised or added.
Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon, deeply suspicious of the work, famously savaged a copy (now housed in the Royal Welch Fusiliers archive in Caernarfon).