Armistice Day
While Goodbye To All That is among other things one of the classic WWI memoirs, Robert Graves usually counts as lucky as far as the authors participating in this war go. After all, he survived (unlike Owen) and didn't have to spend time in an asylum, either (unlike Sassoon). True, he almost died (and was reported dead; his mother even go the requisite condolence letter), but he survived, went on to have a tumultous private life and become a bestseller not with his poetry but with I, Claudius. He was lucky. Wasn't he?
From Wild Olives, the memoirs of his son William, about Robert Graves' final years on Mallorca during the 70s, when he was diagnosed with senile dementia:
Father began getting up in the middle of hte night and walking to the village. Lost, he would knock on the first door he recognized. Francisco Mosso opened his door: 'Don Roberto, you're out late tonight. Wait for me to get dressed and I'll take you home.' The villagers looked after him. (...) Perhaps the most horrible stage of the now accelerating process was when Father's war neuroses and shell shock returned. It was tragic to see the terror in his eyes as he tried to run away, supported by his nurse and a walking stick, from the ghosts of the Somme. His lucid periods grew shorter and shorter. And still he tried to run.
This is what war did. This is what war does, still.
From Wild Olives, the memoirs of his son William, about Robert Graves' final years on Mallorca during the 70s, when he was diagnosed with senile dementia:
Father began getting up in the middle of hte night and walking to the village. Lost, he would knock on the first door he recognized. Francisco Mosso opened his door: 'Don Roberto, you're out late tonight. Wait for me to get dressed and I'll take you home.' The villagers looked after him. (...) Perhaps the most horrible stage of the now accelerating process was when Father's war neuroses and shell shock returned. It was tragic to see the terror in his eyes as he tried to run away, supported by his nurse and a walking stick, from the ghosts of the Somme. His lucid periods grew shorter and shorter. And still he tried to run.
This is what war did. This is what war does, still.