In World War One, Graves is serving as a lieutenant with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and is shortly promoted to Captain because his superior officers are killed in combat. He serves alongside Siegfried Sassoon, another writer, who is outspoken and determined to return to the front every time he is injured and hospitalized. Graves describes trench warfare in detail, particularly recalling the ineptitude of the generals who strategized and planned the doomed Battle of Loos. The Battle lasted just over a week, and took place on the Western Front of France. This was the first battle in which the British army used deadly poison gas against the enemy. It also saw the first mass engagement of General Kitchener's Army, who were often disparagingly referred to as "Kitchener's Mob". Kitchener formed this "new army" by conscripting five hundred thousand "volunteers". Graves tells of the lack of officers available to train the new recruits, and to remedy this, Kitchener called in university graduates and promoted them to the Officer Training Corps, encouraging them to spot potential leaders in their new trainee soldiers, and promote them accordingly. In this way, hundreds of "temporary gentlemen" were granted officer commissions that they had barely been trained for. It was these men who were called upon to lead the Fusiliers at the Battle of Loos.
Graves does not hold back in calling the battle a disaster, and lays blame for this squarely at the door of General Kitchener. The Allied French and British troops tried to break through the German defenses and return the conflict to a moving battle, but the Germans contained their attacks, and the British lost twice as many men as the Germans did. He is also scornful of the official review of the Battle of Loos, particularly the words of Major-General Richard Hilton, who stated that calling the battle a failure was errant nonsense; on the contrary, it had almost been a complete success, and were it not for the failure of the soldiers in the trenches to stay in their designated positions, the outcome would have been completely different. Graves is bitter about this account, and in particular the way in which the strategists of the battle were prepared to throw their young armies under the bus like that.
Graves then tells of the Somme Offensive, a long, drawn-out battle that lasted four and a half months in 1916, on both sides of the River Somme, in France. The plan behind the battle was that it would hasten Allied victory; it turned out to be the biggest and most casualty-heavy battle of World War One. Three million British troops fought and one third of them were either killed or seriously wounded. It was one of the bloodiest battles in history.
Graves himself was wounded in the Somme Offensive as he was leading his men through the cemetery at Bazentin-le-petit Church on 20th July 2016. At first, his injuries appeared to be so severe that the military told his family that he had been killed in action. As his family mourned his death, they received a communication from him reassuring them that he was still alive, and he also put an announcement of his survival in the newspaper.
A disturbing accusation made by Graves is that the British committed atrocities against their German prisoners of war whilst in France. His claims are tenuous because he had not directly seen any of these atrocities take place for himself; he knew of no large scale massacres or executions either. However, Graves believed the word-of-mouth stories that he heard and was adamant that a percentage of German soldiers taken prisoner were simply not returned to their government after the end of the war. He relied particularly on the stories told by officers in the mess at night, all of whom could "remember" hearing about the murder of prisoners for reasons ranging from anger about the death of their friends to the urge to avenge the deaths of fellow soldiers. There was also resentment that the prisoners were transferred to comfortable prison facilities in England that were far more pleasant than the military hospitals that the English soldiers were sent home to convalesce in.
After the war, Graves suffered extensive post traumatic stress disorder. A shell blast blew a hole in his lung, and he was forced to travel home to hospital on a crowded and bumpy train with rotting bandages wrapped around his wounds. Miraculously he survived, He was sent to a hospital where legendary psychiatric specialist Dr William Rivers, but never really responded well to treatment and was constantly haunted by nightmares and fears. In particular he found himself haunted by the ghosts of the men he had served alongside who would appear to him in dream-like visions, grotesquely injured.Although the title of the book claims that this is the time in his life that Graves is saying goodbye to, it seems that actually beginning his life over again after the war was a bigger battle than he had at first imagined.
