Penguin Essentials: Goodbye To All That

A Raw and Candid Portrait of the Great War

"The trenches have made themselves rather than been made, and run inconsequently in and out of the big thirty-foot high stacks of bricks... the parapet of a trench which we don't occupy is built up with ammunition boxes and corpses."

In one of the most honest and candid self-portraits ever committed to paper, Robert Graves tells the extraordinary story of his experiences as a young officer in the First World War. Written in the late 1920s as he prepared to leave England forever, Goodbye to All That serves as a hauntingly vivid account of life in the trenches.

Graves describes the frontline with raw detail, capturing the dehumanizing horrors and the absurdist reality of military life that left him shell-shocked. These experiences were to haunt him for the rest of his life, making this work not just a war memoir, but a profound meditation on the end of an era and the personal cost of survival. It remains one of the most essential and powerful accounts of the Great War ever written.