Here are some queries abut this week's readings:

1. Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That:

   Robert Bertholf provides a brief biography of Graves.

   • At the end of chapter 9/beginning of chapter 10 (pages 65/66), something odd happens: viz., a world war breaks out. How come Graves waits till this point -- which is, really, pretty well advanced in the book -- to start the war that this book is (ostensibly) about? Is this "delay" -- if that is really what it is -- a structural mistake? That is, do the first nine chapters seem to "fit" the book we are reading (if so, how?), or do they somehow seem "out of place," "misplaced," nine chapters from a "different" book that have wandered into this book by mistake? (If so, in what ways don't they work here?).
     One might ask the same question, more or less "in reverse," about the relationship to its ostensible topic of the chapters from 26 (page 279) through the end of the book.
     Not to seem mysterious about such matters, these are really both questions about what Graves's book is about, aren't they?

   • On page 112, line 3 from the bottom, Graves is "ashamed." Of what? What has happened here? Why (of all things) "shame"?? (What one might take to be a relevant one-word reply -- it would be only a short-hand reply, of course -- does not appear in the book until page 289.)

   • On page 114, Graves describes a man making "a snoring noise mixed with animal groans" -- and it is not a very pretty picture he conjures up for us here, in fact. Is there a good reason for this description? and for its closeness to the scene just looked at on page 112?

   • On page 132, Graves gives his reader a sort of "calculus" for when to risk one's life. The math may not be entirely clear, but the fact that it is math is sort of . . . well, depressing, no? Does this passage function in anything like the way the passage on page 114 functions? What might that function be?

   • Passages on pages 144-147, 216-217, and 228-232 (among many others) involve a kind of laughter, a kind of satire, about which Paul Fussell comments in his preface. Does Fussell convince you about the function of these (and similar) passages? What in the world is the old-fashioned word "vouchsafed" doing in Graves's note at the bottom of page 147? Surely it is a word that is utterly out of place here, right? By the way, of a more or less similar scene (pages 179-180), Graves himself calls it a "caricature scene": what does he mean by this term, which, with variants, occurs frequently in the second half, and particularly the last sections, of this book? Does it strike you as apt?

   • Pages 171-173 present a fairly chilling discussion of an officer's health (mental? physical?) and its correlation with his usefulness. Why?

   • An odd passage on page 209 finds Graves looking at dead animals as less suited to the scene he is in than dead people are. How do you read this passage? as sentimental tripe?

   • Page 218 describes Graves's wounding in what seems to be fairly clinical writing. Why does Graves choose this tone, this vocabulary?

   • Page 238 describes Colonel Crawshay's wounding by "friendly fire": what is this passage doing here?

   • On pages 240-241, Graves discusses battlefield cowardice and executions carried out for that offense, alongside official denials of the practice. You've read this sort of thing in Graves, albeit in different contexts, before (e.g., with respect to the fabled German atrocities in Belgium). Why?
     By the bye, has anyone here ever seen Stanley Kubrick's now old movie (with Kirk Douglas), Paths of Glory? Based on a novel by Humphrey Cobb, it deals with mass executions for refusal to go "over the top" (out of the trenches) in the French army during WW1.

   • Chapter 24 (Siegfried Sassoon's "insanity"): what is the function of this chapter? Doesn't it seem just a leeetle bit odd?

   • Graves not infrequently describes the experience of flashbacks (e.g., pages 265, 287, 293). Why do they seem to matter to him?

   • Chapter 25 has an utterly astonishing STRUCTURE, moving from flashback through absurdity, marriage (and an associated "caricature scene") intermixed with the ongoing War (Zeppelin raids during the honeymoon), Siegfried Sassoon, a return to the War, the "surround" of death, the Armistice, and Graves's sense of exclusion from the resultant joy. When the chapter ends, the book seems to move into a kind of "part three" (see the first question -- roughly, are these latter chapoters really a "part three"? -- above). Does this chapter work? if so, to do what? if not, why not? what is it failing to do that it wants to?

2. WW1 poetry:

   Probably the most famous WW1 poem, and the one most of you have already encountered, is by John McRae, "In Flanders Fields":

   In Flanders fields the poppies blow
   Between the crosses, row on row,
   

   That mark our place; and in the sky

   The larks, still bravely singing, fly

   Scarce heard amid the guns below.

   We are the Dead. Short days ago
   We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
   

   Loved and were loved, and now we lie

   In Flanders fields.

   Take up our quarrel with the foe:
   To you from failing hands we throw
   

   The torch; be yours to hold it high.

   If ye break faith with us who die

   We shall not sleep, through poppies grow
   

   In Flanders fields.

   You're reading a slew of poems. This is not like them. Why not? And, for fun, one more that is also unlike those you are reading, this one Rupert Brooke, "The Soldier":

   If I should die, think only this of me:
   

   That there's some corner of a foreign field

   That is for ever England. There shall be
   

   In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

   A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
   

   Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

   A body of England's, breathing English air,
   

   Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

   And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
   

   A pulse in the eternal mind, no less,

   Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

   Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
   

   And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

   In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

   John McRae, author of "In Flanders Fields," ("Canada's best-known poem," says Britannica Online), died in 1918 -- dispirited by all the deaths he had experienced in France, and weakened by progressive illness: asthma, bronchitis, pneumonia, meningitis. "In Flanders Fields" is dated 1915.

   Rupert Brooke wrote "The Soldier" in November-December of 1914; he died in the Aegean in April of 1915 -- the result of blood poisoning from a neglected injury. Note that, in form, "The Soldier" is a regular Petrarchan (non-Shakespearian) sonnet abab cdcd efgefg.

   These are representative of "popular" WW1 poems. What's "unpopular" about, oh, say, Gurney?

   A good poetry site is provided by Harry Rusche's "Lost Poets of the Great War" (Emory University).