War
The main theme of the book is war, and it is also the central theme around which all other sub-themes Graves tells with brutal honesty the experiences he endured during World War One, leading his men to battle in France as the Allies tried to face down the Germans. He also begins to outline other themes of the book as they relate to the larger theme of war; ineptitude of the generals at the top; lack of soldiers; lack of equipment; post traumatic stress disorder. All of these themes are generated from the key theme of war, and chiefly the horror of it.
Both Graves and his best friend Siegfried Sassoon enlisted because they believed in the war, and believed the promises of the generals that they had strategised a victory that would cause minimum loss of troops on the allied side. As the war progressed, they came to a far different standpoint; Sassoon became an anti-war lobbyist and Graves became very bitter, no longer believing in the stories sold to him by politicians and generals who said that they had the best interests of the country and its people at heart, when Graves now believed the opposite. The book also details the horror of the war and the men lost; of three million men sent to fight the battle of the Somme, one million were killed in action.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
Both Sassoon and Graves suffered from a form of PTSD; Sassoon's manifested itself as a depression, and a determination to return to his men at the front despite the recommendations of Dr Rivers, renowned military psychiatrist. Gradually this resolve waned, and after multiple trips to the hospital with PTSD Dr Rivers was forced to call Sassoon fit to return to the front despite Sassoon's reluctance to retun.
Graves, too, suffered from PTSD, chiefly after suffering horrific physical injuries that at first had him declared dead by the authorities. His PTSD seemed to be caused predominantly by what he had witnessed at the front, and by the horrors of seeing his men blown to pieces. He was also suffering greatly from realizing that a war he had believed in fully was not what he had believed, and was gripped with a new cynicism that his family were in opposition with, making it more difficult for him to feel supported on his return.
Inept Leadership
The Battle of Loos and the Battle of the Somme were two of the most devastating battles in any war during the twentieth century. The Battle of the Somme saw over one million soldiers killed in the most horrific conditions, in trench warfare that was ill thought out and geographically impossible to create the circumstances of victory. This was the fault of the inept generals such as General Kitchener, who failed to strategize correctly and who never seemed to foresee the German counter-offenses and defenses that would make the battle slow moving and almost impossible for the Allies to win.
This was a relatively simple element of the battle plan because it involved correctly interpreting the topology of the area as it pertained to closing in on German positions; because of the geography, the opposite effect was reached, and the German army was able to see the Allies in their trenches from almost all of their positions, making it impossible to defend or move forwards. Graves calls out Kitchener by name, and makes his failure to strategize correctly the key reason for the horrific nature of the battles.
War Poetry
One of the themes of the book is the poetry that these "war poets" were producing. Graves' closest friend is Siegfried Sassoon, who began to focus his wartime writing on anti-war subject matter. Graves himself wrote more about what he was witnessing each day; a third poet, Wilfred Owen, who served in the Welsh Fusiliers alongside Graves, wrote mostly about their surroundings, and the experiences of the war, and also a great deal about missing home. The way in which these men were inspired to write about their living histories in poetry form, and also the way in which their poems have lived on as witness statements to the war, is one of the enduring themes of the book.
Trench Warfare
The war in general is the main theme of the book, but trench warfare in particular is one of the smaller themes that is instrumental in the reader's understanding of Graves' experiences in France. Trench warfare was literally fought from two sets of trenches; German trenches, and Allied trenches. The land between the two trenches was called no-man's land, because nobody could claim or own it. Trench warfare was a hiding to nothing, because any man taller than the height of the trench was immediately visible to the enemy, and therefore an obvious target. At the Somme, this problem was exacerbated by the area's topography; the British trenches were on the lower side of the banks of the River Somme which made them visible from the German side, and creating a situation whereby the soldiers were moving targets. Trench warfare also produced other horrific side effects; gangrene and "trench foot", were common, because of the necessity to keep the corpses of dead soldiers in the trenches alongside the living soldiers, who had often risked life and limb to go out into the war zone and bring them back. Trench warfare was specific to the front in France in World War One and was not a particularly successful way in which to conduct an offensive.
