Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves – Summary
Soldiers often boasted of torturing prisoners. The narrator recounts two such instances of which he heard first hand, of a Canadian and an Australian who captured German prisoners but then killed them with Mills bombs instead of bothering with them. He recounts other instances. The Allies had on their side Turcos, North African native infantry. A Turco soldier used to ask a British cook for a jam every day. When the cook tired of this, he told him to bring him a beheaded German and he'd get his jam – and the Turco soldier did. A captain of a battalion of a Surrey regiment shares how his troops are so bad that during the last two battles he had to shoot one of his own men to get the rest out of the trench. They discuss how arm drills are good for morale, and that divisions that do well at drills and have guts perform best in battle, even if drills aren't directly related to actual fighting. When men are able to continue the drill well despite confused or impossible orders from t...