Goodbye to all that

'There has been a lot of fighting hereabouts. The trenches have made themselves rather than been made, and run inconsequently in and out of the big thirty-foot high stacks of bricks; it is most confusing.

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.

He describes life in the trenches in vivid, raw detail, how the dehumanizing horrors he witnessed left him shell-shocked.

They were to haunt him for the rest of his life.