Rating: 
Summary: Brutally honest war memoir
Review: Robert Graves, poet and author of "I, Claudius", was also an infantry officer in the Great War. Here he has written a war memoir which ranks in the same league as Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia".Honest and open to a fault, he chronicles his upbringing in the English public schools system and his dislike of hypocrisy. This antagonism he will carry with him throughout his period in the trenches. Graves' vivid portrayal of life in the trenches is second to none. He recounts the endless routine of trench life with its boredom and the terror of attack and German shelling. Held up to special scorn is the sheer stupidity of the higher command and its insistence on wasting the lives of officers and men. Graves successful attempt at convincing a military board to go easy on his friend and writer Siegfried Sassoon is an amazing segment in itself (Sassoon wrote a pacifist tract while at the same time leading his infantry company with- by all accounts- great courage). His description of the effects of life in the trenches is well written. Neurosthania (shell-shock) was the 19th century term before post-traumatic disorder was coined. The portrayal of it is vivid, not in a clinical way, but in the way Graves writes about himself and his comrades as they adjust to civilian life. Everything before Graves life seems a prologue to the war, and everything after an epilogue. What an great and important book this is.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting Commentary of a WW I British Infantry Captain
Review: Robert Graves, the poet and author ("I, Claudius"), was contemporary and friend of the likes of Siegfried Sassoon or the famous "Lawrence of Arabia"-- but intimate with Robert Hardy ("Return of the Native"). His account of the British trenches, the gas, the artillery duels, the midnight patrols into no-man's land are harrowing. Better yet is his commentary of being a junior officer and "regular" in one of the top British Army Units. He pulls no punches in his appraisal of life in the British officer's mess. The average life expectancy of a British line officer was only three months, and while he says he commits no acts of heroism, one can read between the lines of this book that this is a brilliant, talented and very brave young man that does his duty, and does it well, throughout four long years of boredom and terror. I couldn't put it down.
Rating:
Summary: Into the mind of a soldier and great writer
Review: The Great War was a turning point for the generation of Robert Graves just as post September 11th is a turning point for the current generation: nothing can ever be exactly the same. But it takes a great poet to put those changes into context for the rest of the world--Graves was that poet for his generation. Misunderstood early in life, at times labeled a subversive, after ninety years, he departed this world as a wisened sage. This is the story of his early life, including his experiences in the great war. It is a must read for any ex-soldier and for anyone who wants to understand the core of Graves' thought.
Rating:
Summary: Autobiographical masterpiece
Review: There is no other book that so completely expresses the creativity, the fear, the destruction or the hope, which characterized the generation of Englishmen who fought in the trenches of the First World War. A compelling read for any who questions the morality of armed conflict, the sacrifice of life for political cause, or the brutality of modern war. The young Graves, and many of his companions brought to life through his writing, show that the legacy left by the young men who experienced this calamitous war could be more profound and enduring by virtue of their words than by the guns and bullets which ended so many of their young lives. A true classic, this book ought never to go out of print.
Rating:
Summary: An Amazing Book
Review: This is an amazing historical book as well as a seemlessly written autobiography. It is very powerful and compelling in its straightforward descriptions of the war and Graves' part in it. It also helped me understand WWI much better. When I opened it I couldn't put it down and read straight through. I'd reccomend this book to all people, historians, WWI buffs or someone who wants a wonderful read! It truly is Phenominal!
Rating:
Summary: My Favorite Book
Review: This is my favorite book. I've just bought the hardcover to replace an aging paperback, which finally kicked after 15 years and two trips across Europe. It is the finest example of economy in prose I've ever come across. The subject matter is brutal and tragic and because Graves is such a skillful and composed narrator it is never rendered with anything but dignity. The discussions of Germans and Germany - where Graves had many relatives, often fighting in the opposite trench - make the supposed ''moral ambiguity'' going on in the modernist fiction and art of Graves's day seem like finger painting. The last thing I am interested in is military history but because of ''Good-bye To All That'' I can give a fair account of British regimental hirearchy at the turn of the century. It's very complicated and no effort is made by Graves to spoon-feed the reader its structure; you just have to figure it out. But the knowledge doesn't embarrass me. Like everything else in the book the meaning of the regimental structure is portrayed as part of the necessary world of real men, not as an organ of a corrupt or faceless government (which it certainly also was). Grave's regiment (the Royal Welch Fusiliers, not Welsh, as some of the other reviewers have it) is a thing that kept real and in some cases brilliant men sane and alive (usually), and it is one of the few things they could depend on in times of crisis. I feel the same way about the book.
Rating:
Summary: Superb...
Review: This is the autobiography of the poet and novelist Robert Graves (most famous for his "Claudius" duology), written about the first 34 years of his life.
It begins with his childhood and moves to his school years and then onto his experiences in World War I. This is where Graves' writing talent really shines as he describes his various horrid experiences in and out of the trenches, his marriage and his family's life, all with fluid writing and calm remembarance. It is probably the greatest World War I memoir in terms of depth and quality of writing and is chock full of interesting information for the amateur or serious historian, but also tells a very intersting and poignant story of one man's experiences in the defining event of the 20th-century.
Highly reccommended.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent, moving account of a bye-gone era
Review: This novel is a wonderful evocation of a past era, spanning the early decades of this century. It provides a telling insight into the attitudes and prejudices of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, as well as an unforgettable account of life in the trenches in the frist World War. It tells us much about the author, his humanity, his insight, his undoubted inspirational courage, and his vanity. His was clearly a complex character, who although charged with socialist ideals, cherished his heritage, his military past and even his old school, although clearly against it's "system" as a whole. This is an intriguing and thoroughly readable book, full of humour, pathos and tales of umimaginable human endurance, almost too difficult to comprehend in this cossetted era of the century's end.
Rating: 
Summary: maybe the original was better
Review: To call a book the greatest memoir of WWI, seems to me to be a matter of damning with faint praise. I don't doubt that this is the best of the lot, but its weaknesses are those of the war it recalls. First of all, one of the central myths of the war is that a reluctant but decent generation of European youth was destroyed by the war, indeed Europe was destroyed by the war. Graves spends the early portion of the book lusting after a boarding school catamite. This homosexuality, or at least a sadomasochistic homoeroticism, is a consistent feature of the educational system of England's elites at the time and amply demonstrates that rot had already beset British society. Then he heads off to the war, despite his personal opposition to it, indicative of the fact that these were not young men who were dragooned into the Service, by and large they were enthusiastic about the War. The middle section of the book is taken up with the senselessness of the war itself and of life in the trenches. But there is something intrinsically tedious to reading about tedium. And the attempt to indict the stupidity of the officers who were running the war falls flat in light of John Keegan's superb explication of their actions in his recent book The First World War (see review). The final section of the book deals with his marriage to a socialist, feminist, nutcase and his halting attempts to complete a degree and get started in business. Finally, with all of these burdens piling up, he shucks it and heads off to Egypt and then Majorca, wishing "Good-bye to all that". I like Robert Graves' historical fiction very much, but I did not like this book. I should note that this is a rewritten version of the book. Graves apparently took most of the edge off of the original when he rewrote it extensively in 1957. It is possible that the original warrants this Top 100 ranking. The extant version does not. GRADE: C-
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding view of late Victorian Britain
Review: Tragic and poiniant view of a non-conformist trapped the dying days of the British class system
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