Goodbye To All That by Robert Graves

As with the title of this book, so the format of the blog.  Here are some quotes from Goodbye to All That:

The colonel in one battalion I served with got rid of four new Anglican chaplains in four months; finally he applied for a Roman Catholic, alleging a change of faith in the men under his command. For the Roman Catholic chaplains were not only permitted to visit posts of danger, but definitely enjoined to be wherever fighting was, so that they could give extreme unction to the dying. And we had never heard of one who failed to do all that was expected of him and more. Jovial Father Gleeson of the Munsters, when all the officers were killed or wounded at the first battle of Ypres, had stripped off his black badges and, taking command of the survivors, held the line. (p.190)

So I stayed and tried to compose Latin epigrams, which was, in those days, my way of killing time... (p.200)

The returned soldiers did not feel tempted to rag about, break windows, get drunk, or have tussles with the police and race with the Proctor's 'bulldogs', as in the old days...G.N. Clarke, a history don at Oriel, who had got his degree just before the War and meanwhile been an infantryman in France and a prisoner in Germany, told me: 'I can't make out my pupils at all. They are all "Yes, Sire" and "No, Sir". They seem positively to thirst for knowledge and scribble away in their note-books like lunatics. I can't remember a single instance of such stern endeavour in pre-War days.' (p.291-2)