Things of Global Significance

This week I am mostly reading Goodbye To All That …

… and have been interested to read that Robert Graves was based at Litherland barracks which is just down the road from us. I can’t find the exact location so I will have to ask around the local wrinklies to see if they know. It was next to the Brotherton’s ammunition factory which Graves and Siegfried Sassoon thought might take out both Litherland and Bootle should it explode. The book also mentions Sassoon throwing his Military Cross into the sea at Formby and his family believed this was true until very recently when it turned up on Mull. I was about to suggest a treasure hunting expedition to the children but they will have to stand down now. Sorry – the language of the trenches seems to have got to me.

I always thought that Robert Graves survived the war pretty much unscathed but he was severely wounded, so severely that his mother was informed of his death and his obituary published in the times. He returned to France but was sent back as unfit for trench service and despite efforts to return to some sort of active service overseas he spent the rest of the war in Britain. Graves and Sassoon were both affected with what was termed neurasthenia at the time but which is probably PTSD. Graves was so much affected that the shakes would be triggered by any strong and unexpected smell – even that of flowers – as a reminder of the gas which both sides used. The strange thing is that all this horror is written about in such a detached way that you seem to accept it like Graves did – he didn’t agree with the war and still tried desperately to fight in it – possibly because it was all he knew in his working life – it was all he could do. He goes from the severe trauma of the moment of his injury, through the hospitalisation in France to his recuperation at Osborne House on the Isle of White with little change of pace. I suppose this chimes with the title of the book – just a chronological charge through the events in order to put them behind him, though the pace is not really manic or plodding – just matter-of-fact and yet it still seems to draw you in with a sort of hypnotic rhythm. This is the first book in ages I have raced to finish.
GEB is still around though. Finished Ant Fugue and now I am into the juicy chapters about mapping brains structure to brain function at all levels, based on the brain/Ant Colony isomorphisms from Ant Fugue; pictures of neurons and that sort of stuff.