Robert Graves, born in England in 1895, enlisted as a second lieutenant in August 1914, rising to the rank of captain by October 1915. He was badly wounded at the Battle of the Somme (July to November, 1916). He was expected to die but, sent back to England, he recovered. He nearly died again in the flu epidemic of 1918.
He went on to become one of the most notable and controversial writers of the twentieth century: critic, poet, novelist, and memoirist. In 1921 Graves and his wife moved to a village outside of Oxford.
. . . The Rector . . . asked me to speak . . . at a War Memorial service. He suggested that I should read war-poems. But instead of Rupert Brooke on the glorious dead, I read some of the more painful poems by [Siegfried] Sassoon and Wilfred Owen about men dying from gas-poisoning, and about buttocks of corpses bulging from the mud. I also suggested that the men who had died . . . were not particularly virtuous or particularly wicked, but just average soldiers, and that the survivors should thank God they were alive, and do their best to avoid wars in the future. Though [some in the audience] professed to be scandalized, the ex-service men had not been too well treated on their return, and liked to be told that they stood on equal terms with the glorious dead. They were modest men: I noticed that, though respecting the King’s [request that they] wear their campaign medals on this occasion, they kept them buttoned up inside their coats.
Amen! But let’s hope we have not been “doing our best” in the last century to avoid future wars . . . . If we have, then God help us.
Bully for Graves!