9 quotes
Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out.
Goodbye to All That (1929)
Having now been in the trenches for five months, I had passed my prime.
Goodbye to All That (1929)
The scenes were nearly always recollections of my first four months in France; the emotion-recording apparatus seems to have failed after Loos.
Goodbye to All That (1929)
Cuinchy bred rats. They came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly.
Goodbye to All That (1929)
Hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches even if one had survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home.
Goodbye to All That (1929)
England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war madness that ran about everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language; and it was newspaper language.
Goodbye to All That (1929)
Anglican chaplains were remarkably out of touch with their troops. The Second Battalion chaplain, just before the Loos fighting, had preached a violent sermon on the Battle against Sin, at which one old soldier behind me had grumbled: "Christ, as if one bloody push wasn't enough to worry about at a time!"
Goodbye to All That (1929)
Shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight, even though Nancy shared it with me; strangers in daytime would assume the faces of friends who had been killed... I could not use a telephone, I felt sick every time I travelled by train, and to see more than two new people in a single day prevented me from sleeping.
Goodbye to All That (1929)
At the end of my first term's work, I attended the usual college board to give an account of myself. The spokesman coughed, and said a little stiffly: "I understand, Mr. Graves, that the essays which you write for your English tutor are, shall I say, a trifle temperamental. It appears, indeed, that you prefer some authors to others."
Goodbye to All That (1929)