When the whistle blew they stood to save the King4 and the roof came off the sheds. Two thousand men, maybe, singing?it was the most moving thing I knew. Then there'd be the thunder of seats pushed back, the stamp of army boots on the pave, and as the train went out they sang Tipperary.5
1976
2. Group of soldiers. Save the King.' 3. Two Scottish songs. 5. The Irish song 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary.' 4. I.e., to sing the British National Anthem, 'God ROBERT GRAVES 1895-1985
Robert von Ranke Graves was born in London of partly Anglo-Irish and partly German descent?his great- uncle was the distinguished German historian Leopold von Ranke. He left Charterhouse School to go immediately into the army, serving in World War I until he was invalided out in 1917. After the war he went to Oxford, took a B.Litt. degree, and in 1929 published Goodby e to All That, a vivid account of his experiences in the war, including his almost dying from severe chest wounds. His autobiography, as he put it, 'paid my debts and enabled me to set up in Majorca as a writer.' He lived on that Spanish island with the American poet Laura Riding?his muse and mentor?until in 1936 the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War forced them to leave. Their relationship soon ended, and after World War II he returned to Majorca, where he remained for the rest of his life.
Graves began as a Georgian poet, but he was a Georgian with a difference. The mingling of the colloquial and the visionary in his vocabulary, the accent of conversation underlying the regular rhythms of his stanzas, the tension between a Romantic indulgence in emotion and a cool appraisal of its significance?these are qualities found even in his early poetry. His best work combines the ironic and the imaginative in a highly individual manner, and he is also capable of a down-to-earth poetry, often mocking in tone and dealing with simple domestic facts or even the more annoying of personal relationships. He admired Thomas Hardy but chided Yeats, Pound, and Eliot for their obscurity and slovenliness, preferring that poetry be lucid, orderly, and civil.
Graves made his living by his prose, which is extensive and varied and includes, in
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GRAVES: GOODBYE TO ALL THAT / 198 5
addition to Goodbye to All That, a number of historical novels in which characters and events from the classical or biblical past are reconstructed in a modern idiom: the most notable of his historical novels are I, Claudius (1934), Claudius the God (1934), and King Jesus (1946). In The White Goddess (1948), a study of mythology drawn from a great variety of sources and devoted to what he considered the great female inspirational principle, Graves argued that only a return to goddess worship and an abandonment of patriarchal for matriarchal society could help modern poetry recover its lost force, clarity, and mythic wisdom.
From Goodbye to All That
[THE ATTACK ON HIGH WOOD]
Next evening, July 19th, we were relieved and told that we would be attacking High Wood,1 which could be seen a thousand yards away to the right at the top of a slope. High Wood, which the French called 'Raven Wood', formed part of the main German battle-line that ran along the ridge, with Delville Wood not far off on the German left. Two British brigades had already attempted it; in both cases a counter-attack drove them out again. The Royal Welch2 were now reduced by casualties to about four hundred strong, including transport, stretcher-bearers, cooks and other non-combatants. I took command of 'B' Company.
The German batteries were handing out heavy stuff, six- and eight-inch, and so much of it that we decided to move back fifty yards at a rush. As we did so, an eight-inch shell burst three paces behind me. I heard the explosion, and felt as though I had been punched rather hard between the shoulder-blades, but without any pain. I took the punch merely for the shock of the explosion; but blood trickled into my eye and, turning faint, I called to Moodie: 'I've been hit.' Then I fell. A minute or two before I had got two very small wounds on my left hand; and in exactly the same position as the two that drew blood from my right hand during the preliminary bombardment at Loos.' This I took as a lucky sign, and for further security repeated to myself a line of Nietzsche's, in French translation:
Now, tn ne me -pens pas tuer!4
One piece of shell went through my left thigh, high up, near the groin; I must have been at the full stretch of my stride to escape emasculation. The wound over the eye was made by a little chip of marble, possibly from one of the Bazentin5 cemetery headstones. [Later, I had it cut out, but a smaller piece has since risen to the surface under my right eyebrow, where I keep it for a souvenir.] This, and a finger-wound which split the bone, probably came from another shell bursting in front of me. But a piece of shell had also gone in two inches below the point of my right shoulder-blade and came out through my chest two inches above the right nipple.
]. The battle for High Wood, one of the bloodiest 3. The Battle of Loos, September 1915. fights of the Somme Offensive, began on July 14, 4. No, you cannot kill me. Friedrich Nietzsche 1916, and was won by the British on September (1844-1900), German philosopher. 15, 1916. 5. The Battle of Bazentin Ridge, July 14-17,
2. Royal Welch Fusiliers. 1916, part of the Somme Offensive.
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1986 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1
My memory of what happened then is vague. Apparently Dr Dunn came up through the barrage with a stretcher-party, dressed my wound, and got me down to the old German dressing-station at the north end of Mametz Wood.6 1 remember being put on the stretcher, and winking at the stretcher-bearer sergeant who had just said: 'Old Gravy's got it, all right!'They laid my stretcher in a corner of the dressing-station, where I remained unconscious for more than twenty-four hours.
Late that night, Colonel Crawshay came back from High Wood and visited the dressing-station; he saw me lying in the corner, and they told him I was done for. The next morning, July 21 st, clearing away the dead, they found me still breathing and put me on an ambulance for Heilly, the nearest field hospital. The pain of being jolted down the Happy Valley, with a shell hole at every three or four yards of the road, woke me up. I remember screaming. But back on the better roads I became unconscious again. That morning, Craws- hay wrote the usual formal letters of condolence to the next-of-kin of the six or seven officers who had been killed. This was his letter to my mother:
22.7.16
Dear Mrs Graves,
I very much regret to have to write and tell you your son has died of
