a war of friendship and critical writings, there is a self-serving element here, a desire on Graves’s part,
whichwas never to leave him, to affirm his own importance as poet against anyone
and everyone else; but there is also an element of Sassoon and Graves as poetscontra
mundum, an implied solidarity against the philistine environment of the army. As
Graves observes in 1916, ‘S.S. and I have great difficulty in talking about poetry and
that sort of thing together as the other officers of the battalion are terribly curious
and suspicious. If I go into his mess and he wants to show me some set of verses,
he says: ‘‘Afternoon Graves, have a drink...by the way, I want you to see my latest
recipe for rum punch.’’...We are a disgrace to the battalion and we know it.’^7
Sassoon’s account of their meeting, in his fictionalizedMemoirs of an Infantry
Officer(1930), is rather different:
Returning from an after dinner stroll I found that several Second Battalion officers had
come to visit us....Among them, big and impulsive, was David Cromlech [Robert Graves],
who had been with our Battalion for three months of the previous winter. As I approached
the group I recognised his voice with a shock of delighted surprise. He and I had never
been in the same Company, but we were close friends, although somehow or other I have
hitherto left him out of my story. On this occasion his face was only dimly discernible, so
I will not describe it, though it was a remarkable one. An instinct for aloofness which is
part of my character caused me to remain in the background for a minute or two, and I
now overheard his desperately cheerful ejaculations with that indefinite pang of affection
often felt by a detached observer of such spontaneous behaviour...[N]either of us really
wanted to talk about the Somme battle....We knew that this might be our last meeting,
and gradually an ultimate strangeness and simplicity overshadowed and contained our
low-voiced colloquies. We talked of the wonderful things we’d do after the war; for to me
David had often seemed to belong less to my war experience than to the freedom which
would come after it. He had dropped his defensive exuberance now, and I felt that he was
rather luckless and lonely—too young to be killed up on Bazentin Ridge.^8
Significantly, ‘David Cromlech’ does not enter the story until ‘George Sherston’
(Sassoon) has had his share of ‘the horrors of war’ and been awarded the Military
Cross, almost a year after their first meeting. The Graves figure here is more
obviously recognizable as the one-dimensional Graves ofRegeneration—on the
surface full of bungling good will, tactlessly public-schoolboyish. The narrative
structure of Sassoon’sMemoirsthus sets his older voice of experience against the
youthful symbol of hope, a voice already tainted, in 1928, by the sense that the post-
war world, and Graves too, had failed to live up to his expectations—personally
and poetically. It establishes a counter-myth which has become dominant: Sassoon
as the embittered protest-poet and mentor, Graves the ‘too young’ victim who
could do little more than put on a good show (‘desperately cheerful’, defensively
exuberant) in accordance with the precepts in which he had been trained. The
(^7) Graves to Edward Marsh, 15 Mar. 1916, inIn Broken Images: Selected Letters of Robert Graves
1914–1946, ed. Paul O’Prey (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 42.
(^8) Siegfried Sassoon,Memoirs of an Infantry Officer(1930), repr. inThe Complete Memoirs of George
Sherston(London: Faber, 1972), 354–5.