Armistice Day is an appropriate time to review GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT by Robert Graves (Isis Audio Books, 1957 revised edition). This was one of the best books on tape I have listened to in the four years that I have been commuting to law school. What a sobering description of the awful experience of the First World War. Graves (probably best known to modern readers as the author of I, CLAUDIUS) was a junior officer for the British Expeditionary Force in France during the years of trench warfare on the Western Front. I found myself struggling to comprehend the frame of mind of the millions of gallant young men who threw themselves over the top of the trenches and rushed across no-mans-land into machine gun fire. Graves says that only six men of the original 1914 complement of his battalion were still with the battalion at wars' end. All the rest either got "lucky wounds"-- e.g., a foot or arm lopped off--that invalided them to home service, or died. The situation was similar to that in Heller's CATCH-22, where the combat soldiers had to live with the knowledge that from a strictly actuarial perspective, the odds of their survival were less than 50-50; often much less.
What I found so troubling about Graves' story was wondering--doubting--whether in similar circumstances I would do anything different than the young soldiers of the Great War who went to their deaths in the service of national strategies and technical military doctrines that can only be described as blind, callous, and utterly unsane. In the Twentieth Century we have learned a lot of hard lessons about the proper relationship between the individual's conscience and the need to conform with a community. I wonder, can there be a working society in which each individual is driven by the call of his own conscience? It has taken me more than a third of a century to begin to be able to hear my own conscience and to begin to submit myself to the care of a higher power.
Graves wrote this book at the end of the 1920s, when, after years of suffering and loss--an atrocious and inhumane prep school education, the Great War, and a painful divorce--he left England forever and said GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT . Some of this famous book's enduring resonance comes from the possibility that all of us in these late days of the Twentieth Century ("here on this planet", as one of my favorite people, Oprah, would say) are striving to learn the patience and the humility to say goodbye to doing anything less than what is sane.
Editor's Recommendations, Summer 1996In this inaugural edition of IBIC's Featured Books, I'd like to draw your attention to several titles which have helped to shape my life and thinking.
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