In 1929, Robert Graves left England for Majorca, under the spell of the young American poet Laura Riding, abandoning his wife and four children. This autobiography was written by way of excuse. He seems to have felt that if he exposed the callousness and stupidity of the English class system, which he had suffered from since childhood, readers would not blame him for clearing out. Complaint did not come easily, however. His English upbringing had taught him to hide his feelings. One of the fascinations of the book is how it contrives to sound briskly self-confident while cataloguing pain and disaster.

Things went wrong for him early on. He was half German, and to his schoolfellows this seemed socially unacceptable. At Charterhouse, he was bullied so persistently that he came close to nervous breakdown. It convinced him that the public school spirit was "a fundamental evil", which you could eradicate only by dismissing staff and pupils and tearing down the buildings. When he joined the second battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers on the Western Front, he found it steeped in the same snobbery and prejudice. New officers were referred to as "warts" by their seniors, and routinely humiliated. Despite the war situation, petty rules abounded. In the mess, only captains or above were allowed to drink whisky or turn on the gramophone. Minor dress regulations were enforced with bone-headed obduracy. When the mauled remnants of the battalion limped back to their trenches after the battle of Loos, the colonel sent a message to say that he had noticed some men with their shoulder straps unbuttoned and trusted it would not happen again.

But the book never dwindles into mere accusation. Graves was young, proud and complex, and had internalised many of the social codes he condemned. His response to the bullying at Charterhouse had been to learn to box and win both middleweight and welterweight cups - scarcely a renunciation of the public school spirit. The Royal Welch's battle honours and regimental traditions filled him with boyish enthusiasm. He came to agree with the blimps that smartness on parade was vitally linked with morale in combat. Although he professed to regard the war as a wicked folly, he despised pacifists. When his brother-officer Siegfried Sassoon published a pacifist manifesto, Graves persuaded him to get medical treatment. These contradictions ran through his life - maverick and martinet were always tangling inside him. Far from damaging the book, they give it human credibility. A complete personality emerges. Nothing, you feel, has been tidied away for consistency's sake. His war reporting, too, seems unedited, mixing the grotesque and the banal. An impromptu, behind-the-lines cricket match uses, as a wicket, a large cage containing a dead parrot. Stripping currant bushes in an overgrown garden one day, he comes on his company sergeant major at the same task, and they both slink away embarrassed. Events like these preserve the human scale amid the carnage. So does Graves's studiously calm manner, which brings an air of polite surprise to the direst situations ("I had never seen human brains before; I had somehow regarded them as a poetical figment"). His divided nature betrays itself in vacillation about killing. Sniping from the support lines, he sees, through his telescopic sight, a German soldier taking a bath. To shoot a naked man seems distasteful, so he does not fire. However, he hands the rifle to his sergeant, who does.

Early in the Somme offensive he was officially killed. A shell splinter hit him in the back and exited through his chest. His colonel wrote telling his mother of his death, and it was announced in The Times. Meanwhile, Graves lay in a corner of the dressing station and "amused" himself watching bubbles of blood escape through the opening of his wound. The sang-froid is typical. In fact, he was shattered by the war. It took him years to recover. Shells would burst on his bed at night; ghosts accosted him in the street. His book has become history. More English readers, probably, know about the great war from it than from any other. But it is history with the contradictions intact: history before the historians have cleaned it up. So although it is an anti-war book, it displays just those qualities - courage, pride, patriotism - that made the war happen.

Letter from Jonathan Cape,
November 8, 1929

We have high hopes of selling as many as 50,000, maybe even more than that. I don't know what the sale of All Quiet on the Western Front is. All kinds of extravagant figures are blowing about, but the figures of sales which are quoted in the Press are like actors' salaries invented for press purposes. We think Goodbye to All That might be as successful . . . The note we want to strike is that we have the German war book which is a huge success, but here is THE English war book which is the best war book of all and one which every Britisher must possess.