Goodbye to All That

Following the advertisement at the end of reference 1, I now get around to noticing 'Goodbye to All That', first read as a child. But now thoroughly confused with Sassoon's memoirs read since, as a result of the accident in Ely. See reference 2. Brain no longer capable of holding the two stories in separate compartments.

Graves had a not very happy time at school, turning to boxing to save him from bullying by the sporty types, there called 'bloods'. A skill which served him well in the army, which he joined straight out of school, more or less the day the (first world) war started, where it was regarded as some compensation for his being useless on a horse, an accomplishment expected of all proper officers. A skill to which quality training time was devoted, at least in the early years of the war.

In the advertisement, I wrote of the ridiculous behaviour of the regular officers of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. This now turns out to be slightly wide of the mark, in the sense that while it was rather odd behaviour by the standards of today, it was deliberate, being thought to be a good way of turning young men from public schools into officers. And Graves comes to have a high regard for the two regular battalions - the first and the second - which I think that he thought were all the better for all the spit and polish. And all the wart bashing - wart being the moniker of junior officers. Maybe this is something those in charge of the firearms units of the Metropolitan Police would do well to better understand. See reference 3. See also Graves' words about the value of drill (p156 of the Penguin edition).

I associate this morning to the 'prentice name of King Arthur in T. H. White's 'The Sword in the Stone', also wart. But while White was difficult childhood, public school and Cambridge. he was an inter-war man and no soldier. Perhaps instead he read and admired this very book.

Then there is the question of drink. Graves records that one could only stand so much front line service in the trenches and after a while, say a year or so, one's nerves went. Some officers got around this by getting through a bottle or more of whisky a day - which had the serious disadvantage of resulting in awful mistakes in battle. Others were simply shipped off to safer billets, either in the rear areas or back in England. The men, however, just had to soldier on until killed or wounded. Not so many cushy numbers for them, only cushy wounds, if they were lucky. He claims that this was all brought on by misbehaviour of the endocrine system, misbehaviour which took years to come right after the war, if one got that far.

Graves also records much nonsense and many unnecessary deaths; the army on which he reports is recognisably of the same type and time as that on which Hašek reports. He is not a warrior in the way of Ernst Jünger and is not ashamed to say that his main concern was to come out of it all in one piece, in so far as that was consistent with honourable service in his honourable regiment.

Honourable service which included, for some, having to shoot a few privates to get the rest to go over the top. Which as well as being an awful thing to have to do to men in one's own platoon, must have been very scary - as I imagine that it would be quite likely that the men would shoot back. Or shoot you in the back later - of which practice Graves makes no mention at all, except in the context of sergeants being told off to look after officers behaving in a suspect way. German spy scares were not restricted to England and there were plenty of officers with family ties to Germany.

Graves says that each of the first two battalion of the Fusiliers, say with a nominal strength of 1,000 men, got through around 25,000 men in the course of the war. Very few who went in at the beginning came out at the other end. One problem being that battalions with a good reputation were apt to be abused by senior officers, stuck in at the sharp end time after time. I recall reading of someone in another famous regiment, the Durham Light Infantry, thinking much the same sort of thing during the second war.

All of which means that the maintenance of discipline in this dreadful war remains a puzzle to me. How did the governing & officer classes get away with it? As, of course, they did not in Tsarist Russia.

A good book, although one does wonder, given its polish and the ten year interval between it and the trenches, how much of an artefact the book is, rather than a diary. Graves does not mention keeping one. A good book, full of telling anecdotes and one could go on retelling them for a long time, but I close with one Sir Pyers Mostyn, then a young lieutenant, whom he comes across at some point, possibly a relative of the late General Sir David Mostyn, lately Adjutant-General. Evidence for being that they both look as if they come from military families. Evidence against being this last's service in the wrong regiment, the Green Howards.

Camera notes: taken inside, this may have been the snap for which I was invited to adjust the luminosity (see reference 4). In any event the picture turned into a 4Mb file (quite a lot larger than in the olden days) with name 'WP_20151218_15_56_05_Rich_LI'. It claims to be a jpg file but blogger disagrees and I had to take a snap, so converting it to a png file, before blogger would load it. While Windows Explorer declines to display it as an icon. Curiously, the nearby files for which it does display an icon have the same names and type but are nearer 6Mb than 4Mb. Maybe all will be revealed in due course. In the meantime, I can be pleased that the new Lumia does better with low luminosity indoors than the old did. Assuming that is that luminosity is the right word.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/pour-le-merite.html.

Reference 2: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/topping-books.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/dress-code.html.

Reference 4: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/testing.html.