Abstract
Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That was first published in 1929, a vintage year for war books that also saw the publication of A Farewell to Arms and the first English translations of Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The memoir does not begin and end with Graves’s war experience; events from the author’s childhood, adolescence, and post-war adulthood are also included in the narrative, but his time spent in the Royal Welch Fusiliers emerges as the defining formative experience of his young life.1 Graves’s encounter with war was clearly traumatic, and indeed the writing of Goodbye to All That was a conscious attempt to deal with this trauma by putting it behind him, by saying goodbye to it.2 In view of this, it is perhaps understandable that the tone of the narrative is often bitterly ironic, and that those individuals or groups who are deemed to have made a bad episode worse are exposed. The civilian clergy, the Northcliffe press, war-profiteers, and belligerent British mothers all come in for harsh criticism. Yet the author saved his most biting invective for the Anglican army chaplains he encountered on the Western Front.
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Notes
With reference to the ‘before, during, and after’ structure of Goodbye to All That, Samuel Hynes has argued that the book should be viewed not as a war memoir but as ‘a record of historical change in England during the first three decades of [the twentieth] century’. Samuel Hynes (1992) A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Pimlico), p. 427.
Martin Seymour-Smith (1995) Robert Graves, His Life and Work (London: Bloomsbury), p. 67.
Robert Graves (1929) Goodbye to All That (London: Jonathan Cape), p. 242.
Jay Winter (2006) Remembering War (London: Yale UP), p. 124.
Brian Bond (2008) Survivors of a Kind: Memoirs of the Western Front (London: Continuum), p. 9.
Michael Snape (2008) The Royal Army Chaplains’ Department, 1796–1953 (Suffolk: Boydell), p. 358.
Paul Fussell (1977) The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: OUP), pp. 203–8.
Robert Graves (1930) But It Still Goes On (London: Jonathan Cape), p. 15.
Robert Graves (1950) ‘Answer to a Religious Questionnaire’, Partisan Review 17, p. 133.
Guy Chapman (1965) A Passionate Prodigality (London: MacGibbon & Kee), p. 117.
Cyril Falls (1989) War Books: An Annotated Bibliography of Books About the Great War (London: Greenhill), p. 108.
F. J. Harvey-Darton (1931) From Surtees to Sassoon (London: Morley & M. Kennerley), pp. 142 and 144.
Charles Edmonds (aka Charles Carrington) (1929) A Subaltern’s War (London: Peter Davies), p. 196. Carrington’s remarks on the veteran writers, a group to which he himself belonged, are particularly cogent and insightful.
C. E. Montague (1940) Disenchantment (London: Chatto & Windus), p. 86.
Siegfried Sassoon (1999) Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (London: Faber & Faber), p. 299 and (2000) Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (London: Faber & Faber), p. 195.
Jane Leonard (1988) ‘The Roman Catholic Chaplaincy’, in David Fitzpatrick (ed.), Ireland and the First World War (Dublin: Trinity History Workshop), p. 10.
John Bourne (2003) ‘The British Working Man in Arms’, in H. Cecil and P. Liddle (eds), Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experience (Barnsley: Pen & Sword), p. 336.
Brian Bond, Survivors of a Kind, p. 75. Bond outlines several reasons why although quite a number of rankers’ memoirs may have been written few were published. For other examples of published memoirs written by ranker veterans of the British Army, see Patrick MacGill (1916) The Great Push: An Episode of the Great War (London: H. Jenkins);
John Lucey (1938) There’s A Devil in the Drum (London: Faber & Faber);
Norman Cliff (1988) To Hell and Back with the Guards (Braunton: Merlin);
and I. L. Read (1994) Of Those We Loved (Edinburgh: Pentland).
Frank Richards (1933) Old Soldiers Never Die (London: Faber & Faber), pp. 85–6.
George Coppard (1999) With a Machine Gun to Cambrai (London: Cassell), p. 72.
J. Brophy and E. Partridge (1930) Songs and Slang of the British Soldier, 1914–1918 (London: Scholartis), p. 148. Interestingly, in the much revised 1965 edition, entitled The Long Trail, the authors gave a different historical explanation for the use of the word by British soldiers: ‘This word was adopted by the Army from the Portuguese in India during the eighteenth century’. J. Brophy and E. Partridge (1965), p. 161.
C. E. Benstead (1930) Retreat: A Story of 1918 (London: Methuen), p. 87.
Alan Robinson (2008) Chaplains at War: The Role of Clergymen during World War II (London: Taurus), p. 50.
Hugh Cecil (1995) The Flower of Battle: British Fiction Writers of the First World War (London: Secker & Warburg), p. 156.
Ernest Raymond (1922) Tell England: A Study in a Generation (London: Cassell), p. 130.
Ernest Raymond (1988) The Story of my Days: An Autobiography, 1888–1922 (London: Cassell), p. 177.
Hugh Cecil, The Flower of Battle, p. 5; and Jenny Macleod (2004) Reconsidering Gallipoli (Manchester: MUP), p. 159.
Examples of memoirs written by former Anglican chaplains include George Birmingham (1918) A Padre in France (London: Hodder & Stoughton);
P. B. Clayton (1929) Plain Tales from Flanders (London: Longmans);
Harry W. Blackburne (1932) This Also Happened on the Western Front (London: Hodder & Stoughton);
Guy Rogers (1956) A Rebel At Heart (London: Longmans);
Frank Russell Barry (1970) Period of My Life (London: Hodder & Stoughton);
and Martin Andrews (1974) Canon’s Folly (London: Joseph).
See Jane Leonard, ‘The Catholic Chaplaincy’, p. 10; J. G. Fuller (1990) Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 156;
Tom Johnstone and James Hagerty (1996) The Cross on the Sword, Catholic Chaplains in the Forces (London: Geoffrey Chapman), pp. 107 and 112;
Stephen Louden (1996) Chaplains in Conflict (London: Avon), p. 47;
Joanna Bourke (1999) An Intimate History of Killing (London: Basic), p. 272;
Richard Holmes (2005) Tommy (London: Harper), pp. 508 and 514;
Richard Schweitzer (2005) The Cross and the Trenches (London: Praeger), p. 173; and Alan Robinson, Chaplains at War, p. 26.
Patrick Porter (2005) ‘New Jerusalems; Sacrifice and Redemption in the War Experiences of English and German Military Chaplains’, in Pierre Purseigle (ed.), Warfare and Belligerence: Perspectives in First World War Studies (Leiden: Brill), pp. 101–32.
Michael Snape (2005) God and the British Soldier (London: Routledge), pp. 86–7.
Keith Simpson (1985) ‘The British Soldier on the Western Front’, in Peter Liddle (ed.), Home Fires and Foreign Fields (London: Brassey’s Defence Publishers), pp. 135–6.
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© 2011 Edward Madigan
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Madigan, E. (2011). Introduction: Anglican Army Chaplains and Post-War Literature. In: Faith under Fire. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297654_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297654_1
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