Good - Bye to All That Good - Bye to All That , an autobiography by Robert Graves , first appeared in 1929 , when the author was thirty - four . " It was my bitter leave - taking of England , " he wrote in a prologue to the revised second edition of 1957 , " where I had recently broken a good many conventions " . The title may also point to the passing of an old order following the cataclysm of the First World War ; the inadequacies of patriotism , the rise of atheism , feminism , socialism and pacifism , the changes to traditional married life , and not least the emergence of new styles of literary expression , are all treated in the work , bearing as they did directly on Graves ' life . The unsentimental and frequently comic treatment of the banalities and intensities of the life of a British army officer in the First World War gave Graves fame , notoriety and financial security , but the book ' s subject is also his family history , childhood , schooling and , immediately following the war , early married life ; all phases bearing witness to the " particular mode of living and thinking " that constitute a poetic sensibility . Laura Riding , Graves ' lover , is credited with being a " spiritual and intellectual midwife " to the work . Wartime experiences . A large part of the book is taken up by his experience of the First World War , in which Graves served as a lieutenant , then captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers , alongside his equally famous comrade Siegfried Sassoon . " Goodbye to All That " provides a detailed description of trench warfare , including the tragic incompetence of the Battle of Loos and the bitter fighting in the first phase of the Somme Offensive . Wounds . In the Somme engagement , Graves was severely wounded while leading his men through the cemetery at Bazentin - le - petit church on 20 July 1916 . The wound was so severe , in fact , that military authorities erroneously reported to his family that he had died . While mourning his death , Graves ' s family received word from him that he still lived , and put an announcement to that effect in the newspapers . Reputed atrocities . The book also contains a secondhand description of the killing of German prisoners of war by British troops . Although Graves had not witnessed any incidents himself and knew of no large - scale massacres , he had been told about a number of incidents in which prisoners had been killed individually or in small groups . Consequently he was prepared to believe that a proportion of Germans who surrendered never made it to prisoner - of - war camp s . " Nearly every instructor in the mess " he wrote , " could quote specific instances of prisoners having been murdered on the way back . The commonest motives were , it seems , revenge for the death of friends or relatives , [ and ] jealousy of the prisoner ' s trip to a comfortable prison camp in England " . Post - war trauma . Graves was severely traumatised by his war experience . After he was wounded in the lung by a shell blast he endured a squalid five - day train journey with unchanged bandages . During the war he received an electric shock using a trench telephone which scared him so much that he did not use one again until twelve years after the event . Upon his return home , he describes being haunted by ghosts and nightmares . Critical responses . Siegfried Sassoon and his friend Edmund Blunden ( whose First World War service had been in a different regiment ) both took umbrage at the contents of the book . Sassoon ' s complaints mostly related to Graves ' s depiction of him and his family , whereas Blunden had read the memoirs of J . C . Dunn and found them at odds with Graves in some places . The two men set about defacing Blunden ' s copy of " Good - Bye to All That " with marginal notes contradicting some of Graves ' s statements . The copy survives and is now held by the New York Public Library . Graves ' s father , Alfred Perceval Graves , incensed at some aspects of the book , wrote a riposte to it entitled " To Return to All That . "