“I noticed The Essays of Lionel Johnson lying on the table. It was the first book I had seen in France…that was neither a military textbook nor a rubbishy novel. I stole a look at the fly-leaf, and the name was Siegfried Sassoon.” - Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That
Written in response to the #fiftywords challenges that @jayna has been posting.
Yeah, I cheated this week, given that goodbye was the prompt:
@jayna/new50-wordshortstorychallenge-izk1rtmnh1
As it happens, I’m about halfway through reading Good-bye to All That by Robert Graves, his memoir mostly of his time in the trenches during the First World War. The scene above was from when he first met Sassoon in 1915. By 1917 Sassoon had been sickened by the carnage and issued a public anti-war statement that could have led to his court-martial and execution. Graves was able to convince senior officers that Sassoon was suffering from shell shock, what we now call PTSD.
Graves also wrote poetry, The White Goddess, The Reader Over Your Shoulder, and I, Claudius among other works.
In other news,
You Really Need to Follow @donallogue
Public domain photo of Robert Graves