Thanks to "Witness", a BBC News 24 programme of the stories of our times told by the people who were there, we can enjoy a direct account of the effects the war had on people, in this case on Robert Graves, who became particularly popular for his historical novels like I, Claudius.
In his case, I imagine the events were specially painful given his partly Anglo-Irish and partly German descent. He served in World War I until he was invalided out in 1917. In 1929 he published Good bye to all an account of his experiences in the war. Later, he chose Mallorca to spend the rest of his life, where he lived in the picturesque village of Deià.
A century after the start of World War One the sons of Robert Graves, one of Britain's best known war poets, remembers the profound effect the conflict had on his father on a BBC News programme.
William Graves recalls his father's work and how the experience of fighting and getting wounded in the Great War remained with him for the rest of his life.
William Graves recalls his father's work and how the experience of fighting and getting wounded in the Great War remained with him for the rest of his life.
Here's more information about his poem "A dead Boche".
A DEAD BOCHE*
To you who’d read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I’ll say** (you’ve heard it said before)
”War’s Hell!” and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood***
A certain cure for lust of blood:
Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green****,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.
