Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves
Yet still I had not got my code-marks, and knew that when I reached the demobilization centre at Wimbledon the officers there would refuse to let me go. Not that I cared very much. I should at least have my influenza in an English, and not an Irish, hospital. My temperature was running high, and my mind working clearly, as it always does in fever, with its visual imagery, which is cloudy and partial at ordinary times, defined and complete. We reached Fishguard after a rough crossing. I bought a copy of the South Wales Echo and read that a strike of London Electric Railwaymen would take place the next day, February 14th, unless the railway directors met the union’s demands. So as the train steamed into Paddington, I jumped out, fell down, picked myself up, and ran across to the station entrance where, in spite of competition from porters – a feeble crew at this period–I seized the only taxi in sight as its occupant paid the fare. I had foreseen the taxi-shortage and could afford to waste no time. I brought my taxi back to the train, where scores of stranded officers eyed me with envy. One, a fellow-traveller in my compartment, had been met by his wife. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘but would you like to share my taxi anywhere? (I have influenza, I warn you.) I’m going down to Wimbledon, so I shall be getting out at Waterloo; the steam-trains are still running.’ That delighted them, because they lived at Ealing and had no idea how to get home except by taxi.
On the way to Waterloo he said: ‘I wish there were some way of showing our gratitude – something we could do for you.’
‘Well, there’s only one thing in the world that I want at the moment. But you can’t give it to me, I’m afraid. And that’s the set of secret code-marks to complete my demobilization papers. I’ve bolted from Ireland without them, and there’ll be hell to pay if the Wimbledon people send me back.’
He rapped on the glass of the taxi, told the driver to stop, got down his bag, opened it, and produced a satchel of army forms. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I happen to be the Cork District Demobilization officer, and here’s the whole bag of tricks.’
Then he filled in my papers.
At Wimbledon, instead of having to wait in a queue for the expected nine or ten hours, I got released at once; Ireland was officially a ‘theatre of war’, and demobilization from theatres of war had priority over home-service demobilization. After a hurried visit to my parents, now back in our own house half a mile across the Common, I went on to Hove. Arriving at supper-time, I warned Nicholson about my influenza, and hurried away to bed. Within a day or two, the whole family caught it, except Nicholson, Jenny, and the housemaid, a Welsh gipsy, who kept it off by a charm – the leg of a lizard tied in a bag round her neck. A new epidemic, as bad as the summer one, had started; not a nurse could be found in all Brighton. Nicholson at last rounded up two ex-nurses: one competent, but frequently drunk, and with the habit, when drunk, of ransacking all the wardrobes in the house and piling the contents into her own bag. The other sober, but incompetent, would stand a dozen times a day in front of the open window, arms outspread, and cry in a stage-voice: ‘Sea, sea, give my husband back to me!’ The husband, by the way, was not drowned, merely unfaithful.
A doctor, found with equal difficulty, gave me no hope of recovery; it was septic pneumonia now, and had affected both my lungs. But, having come through the war, I refused to the of influenza. This made the third time in my life that I had been given up, and each time because of my lungs. I should have mentioned in my first chapter the double-pneumonia following measles, which nearly did for me at the age of seven. Maggie, the gipsy-servant, wept whenever she dusted my room – I thought because of a tiff with her young man, but these were tears for me, my widow, and my orphan girl. I focused attention on a poem, ‘The Troll’s Nosegay’, which was giving me trouble; I had taken it through thirty drafts and still it would not come right. The thirty-fifth draft passed scrutiny, I felt better, and Maggie smiled again. Nancy’s attack was a light one, fortunately.
A few weeks later, I watched a mutiny of the Guards, when about a thousand men of all regiments marched out from Shoreham Camp and paraded through the Brighton streets, in protest against unnecessary restrictions. The troops’ impatience of military disipline between the Armistice and the signing of peace delighted Siegfried; he had taken a prominent part in the General Election which Lloyd George forced immediately after the Armistice, asking for a warrant to hang the Kaiser and make a stem peace. Siegfried, supporting Philip Snowden’s candidature on a Pacifist platform, had faced a threatening civilian crowd; he trusted that his three wound-stripes and the mauve and white Military Cross ribbon (which he had not thrown away with the Cross itself) would give him a privileged hearing. Snowden and Ramsay MacDonald were now perhaps the two most unpopular men in England, and whatever hopes we had nursed of a general anti-Governmental rising by ex-service men soon faded. Once back in England, they were content with a roof over their heads, civilian food, beer that was at least better than French beer, and enough blankets at night. Any overcrowding in their home was as nothing compared to what they had grown accustomed to; a derelict French four-roomed cottage would provide billets for sixty men. Having won the war, they were satisfied and left the rest to Lloyd George. The only serious outbreak took place at Rhyl. There a two days’ mutiny of young Canadians caused much destruction and several deaths. The signal for the rising was a cry: ‘Come on, the Bolsheviks!’
Nancy, Jenny, and I went up to Harlech, where Nicholson lent us his house to live in. We were there for a year. I discarded my uniform, having worn nothing else for four and a half years, and looked into my trunk to see what civilian clothes I still had. The one suit, other than school uniform which I found, no longer fitted. The Harlech villagers treated me with the greatest respect. At the Peace Day celebrations in the castle, I was asked, as the senior Man of Harlech who had served overseas, to make a speech about the glorious dead. I spoke in commendation of the Welshman as a fighting man and earned loud cheers. But not only did I have no experience of independent civilian life, having gone straight from school into the army: I was still mentally and nervously organized for war. Shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight, even though Nancy shared it with me; strangers in daytime would assume the faces of friends who had been killed. When strong enough to climb the hill behind Harlech and revisit my favourite country, I could not help seeing it as a prospective battlefield. I would find myself working out tactical problems, planning how best to hold the Upper Artro valley against an attack from the sea, or where to place a Lewisgun if I were trying to rush Dolwreiddiog Farm from the brow of the hill, and what would be the best cover for my rifle-grenade section. I still had the army habit of commandeering anything of uncertain ownership that I found lying about; also a difficulty in telling the truth – it was always easier for me now, when charged with any fault, to lie my way out in army style. I applied the technique of taking over billets or trenches to a review of my present situation. Food, water supply, possible dangers, communication, sanitation, protection against the weather, fuel and light – I ticked off each item as satisfactory.
Other loose habits of war-time survived, such as stopping cars for a lift, talking without embarrassment to my fellow-travellers in railway carriages, and unbuttoning by the roadside without shame, whoever might be about. Also, I retained the technique of endurance: a brutal persistence in seeing things through, somehow, anyhow, without finesse, satisfied with the main points of any situation. But at least I modified my unrestrainedly foul language. The greatest difficulty lay in facing the problem of money, which had not worried me since those first days at Wrexham; but at the moment my savings of some £150, my war-bonus of £250, the disability pension of £60 a year that I now drew, and occasional sums that came in from poems, seemed plenty. Nancy and I engaged a nurse and a general servant, and lived as though we had an income of a thousand a year. Nancy spent much of her time illustrating some poems of mine; I got my Country Sentiment in order, and wrote reviews.
Very thin, very nervous, and with about four years’ loss of sl
Siegfried had gone to live at Oxford as soon as demobilized, expecting me to join him. However, after a couple of terms there, he accepted the literary editorship of the newly-published Daily Herald. He sent me books to review for it. In those days, the Daily Herald was not respectable, but violently anti-militarist and the only daily newspaper that dared protest against the Versailles Treaty and the blockade of Russia by the British fleet. The Treaty of Versailles shocked me; it seemed destined to cause another war some day, yet nobody cared. While the most critical decisions were being taken in Paris, public interest concentrated entirely on three home-news items: Hawker’s Atlantic flight and rescue; the marriage of England’s reigning beauty, Lady Diana Manners; and a marvellous horse called The Panther – the Derby favourite, which came in nowhere.
The Herald spoiled our breakfast every morning. We read in it of unemployment all over the country due to the closing of munition factories; of ex-service men refused reinstatement in the jobs they had left when war broke out, of market-rigging, lockouts, and abortive strikes. I began to hear news, too, of the penury to which my mother’s relatives in Germany had been reduced, particularly the retired officials whose pensions, by the collapse of the mark, now amounted to only a few shillings a week. Nancy and I took all this to heart and called ourselves socialists.
My family, who were living permanently in Harlech, having sold the house at Wimbledon, did not know quite how to treat me. I had fought gallantly for my country – indeed, of six brothers, I alone had seen active service, and my shell-shocked state entitled me to every consideration; but my sympathy for the Russian rebellion against the corrupt Czarist Government outraged them. I once more forfeited the good will of my Uncle Charles. My father tried to talk me over, reminding me that my brother Philip, once a pro-Boer and a Fenian, had recovered from his youthful revolutionary idealism and come out all right in the end. Most of my elder brothers and sisters were in the Near East, either British officials, or married to British officials. My father hoped that when I recovered I would go to Egypt, perhaps in the consular service, where the family influence would help me, and there get over my ‘revolutionary enthusiasm’.
Socialism with Nancy was a means to a single end: namely judicial equality between the sexes. She ascribed all the wrong in the world to male domination and narrowness, and would not see my experiences in the war as anything comparable with the sufferings that millions of working-class married women went through without complaint. This, at least, had the effect of putting the war into the background for me; my love for Nancy made me respect her views. But male stupidity and callousness became such an obsession with her that she began to include me in her universal condemnation of men. Soon she could not bear a newspaper in the house, for fear of reading some paragraph that would horrify her – about the necessity of keeping up the population; or about women’s limited intelligence; or about the shameless, flat-chested modern girl; or anything at all about women written by clergymen. We joined the newly formed Constructive Birth Control Society, and distributed its literature among the village women, to the scandal of my family.
What made things worse was that neither of us went to Harlech church, and we refused to baptize Jenny. My father even wrote to Nancy’s godfather, who happened to be my publisher, asking him to persuade Nancy, for whose religion he had promised at the font to be responsible, into giving her child Christian baptism. It scandalized them, too, that Nancy kept her own name for all purposes, refusing to be called ‘Mrs Graves’ in any circumstances. She explained that, as ‘Mrs Graves’, she had no personal validity. Children, at that time, were the sole property of the father; the mother not being legally a parent.
27
IN October 1919, I went to Oxford at last, and Nicholson gave us the Harlech furniture to take along. Oxford was overcrowded; the lodging-house keepers, some of whom nearly starved during the war, now had their rooms booked up terms ahead, and charged accordingly. Keble College built a row of huts for its surplus students. Not an unfurnished house could be rented anywhere within the three-mile radius. I solved the difficulty by pleading ill-health and getting permission from St John’s College to live five miles out, on Boar’s Hill – where John Masefield, who thought well of my poetry, had offered to rent us a cottage at the bottom of his garden.
We found the University remarkably quiet. The returned soliders did not feel tempted to rag about, break windows, get drunk, or have tussles with the police and races with the Proctors’ ‘bulldogs’, as in the old days. The boys straight from the public schools kept quiet too, having had war preached at them continually for four years, with orders to carry on loyally at home while their brothers served in the trenches, and make themselves worthy of such sacrifices. Since the boys went off to cadet-battalions at the age of seventeen, the masters kept firm control of the schools; trouble there nearly always came from the eighteen-year-olds. G. N. Clark, a history don at Oriel, who had got his degree at Oxford just before the war and meanwhile been an infantryman in France and a prisoner in Germany, told me: ‘I can’t make out my pupils at all. They are all “Yes, sir” and “No, sir”. They seem positively to thirst for knowledge and scribble away in their note-books like lunatics. I can’t remember a single instance of such stern endeavour in pre-war days.’
The ex-service men, who included scores of captains, majors, colonels, and even a one-armed twenty-five year old brigadier, insisted on their rights. At St John’s, they formed a ‘College Soviet’, successfully demanded an entire revision of the scandalous catering system, and chose an undergraduate representative to sit on the kitchen-committee. The elder dons, whom I had often seen during the war trembling in fear of an invasion, with the sacking and firing of the Oxford colleges and the rape of their families in the Woodstock and Banbury Roads, and who then regarded all soldiers, myself included, as their noble saviours, now recovered their pre-war self-possession and haughtiness. The change in their manner amused me. My moral tutor, however, though he no longer saluted me when we met, remained a friend; he persuaded the College to let me change my course from Classics to English Language and Literature, and take up my £60 Classical Exhibition notwithstanding. I felt glad now that it was only an exhibition, not a scholarship, though in 1913 this had disappointed me: College regulations permitted exhibitioners to be married, scholars must remain single.
I found the English Literature course tedious, especially the insistence on eighteenth-century poets. My tutor, Percy Simpson, the editor of Ben Jonson’s plays, sympathized, telling me that he had suffered once, as a boy, for preferring the Romantic Revivalists. When his schoolmaster beat him for reading Shelley, he had protested between the blows: ‘Shelley is beautiful! Shelley is beautiful!’ Yet he warned me not on any account to disparage the eighteenth century when I sat for my finals. I also found it difficult to concentrate on cases, genders, and irregular verbs in Anglo-Saxon grammar. The Anglo-Saxon lecturer was candid about his subject: it was, he said, a language of purely linguistic interest, and hardly a line of Anglo-Saxon poetry extant possessed the slightest literary merit. I disagreed. I thought of Beowulf lying wrapped in a blanket among his platoon of drunken thanes in the Gothland billet; Judith going for a promenade to Holofernes’s staff-tent; and Brunanburgh with its bayonet-and-cosh fighting – all this came far closer to most of us than the drawing-room and deer-park atmosphere of the eighteenth century. Edmund Blunden, who also had leave to live on Boar’s Hill because of gassed lungs, was taking the same course. Th