Introduction: Anglican Army Chaplains and Post-War Literature

Abstract

Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That was first published in 1929, a vintage year for war books that also saw the publication of A Farewell to Arms and the first English translations of Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The memoir does not begin and end with Graves’s war experience; events from the author’s childhood, adolescence, and post-war adulthood are also included in the narrative, but his time spent in the Royal Welch Fusiliers emerges as the defining formative experience of his young life.¹ Graves’s encounter with war was clearly traumatic, and indeed the writing of Goodbye to All That was a conscious attempt to deal with this trauma by putting it behind him, by saying goodbye to it.² In view of this, it is perhaps understandable that the tone of the narrative is often bitterly ironic, and that those individuals or groups who are deemed to have made a bad episode worse are exposed. The civilian clergy, the Northcliffe press, war-profiteers, and belligerent British mothers all come in for harsh criticism. Yet the author saved his most biting invective for the Anglican army chaplains he encountered on the Western Front.