Dat hebben we gehad (Goodbye to all that), Robert Graves, 1929

Dit is een deel van de omslag van de vertaling van het boek Goodbye to all that. Het is de bewerking uit 1957 van het boek uit 1929.  

Het omslag van de eerste uitgave uit1929.

Ik ken de versie van 1929 niet, maar heb gelezen dat die anders is dan die van 1957. Graves had in de twintiger jaren een verhouding met de Amerikaanse dichteres Laura Riding, van wie het idee kwam een autobiografie te schrijven die een afsluiting moest vormen van zijn leven tot dan toe. Graves was toen 34, zijn huwelijk was gestrand.

Ik kan de site niet meer terugvinden waarin ik las, dat de eerste uitgave eigenlijk 'eerlijker' was dan de herziene versie van 1957. Graves werkte in die tweede alles weg wat herinnerde aan Laura, die periode uit zijn leven leek toen weer minder belangrijk.

Graves begint zijn boek met het verhalen van zijn afkomst. Zodoende krijg je al een aardig beeld van wat voor man hij is. Van zijn moeder heeft hij Duits bloed, wat zichtbaar wordt aan de naam Von Ranke. Hij heeft het op school dikwijls moeilijk, het boksen helpt hem zich staande te houden.

Hij geraakt in de Grote Oorlog, en beschrijft zijn wederwaardigheden daar. Nergens is hij sentimenteel, hij beschrijft de ergste dingen kort. We komen heel wat bijzonderheden aan de weet over het hoe en wat in de loopgraven. Om een beetje te laten zien hoe Graves dat doet, heb ik hieronder een aantal citaten overgenomen van Wikiquotes:  

 

Goodbye to All That (1929 

Having now been in the trenches for five months, I had passed my prime.

Graves' autobiography is famous for its vivid account of life in the trenches in the First World War (1914–18).

• James Burford, collier and fitter, was the oldest soldier of all. When I first spoke to him in the trenches, he said: "Excuse me, sir, will you explain what this here arrangement is on the side of my rifle?" "That's the safety catch. Didn't you do a musketry-course at the depôt?" "No, sir, I was a re-enlisted man, and I spent only a fortnight there. The old Lee-Metford didn't have no safety-catch." I asked him when he had last fired a rifle. "In Egypt in 1882," he said. "Weren't you in the South African War?" "I tried to re-enlist, but they told me I was too old, sir... My real age is sixty-three."
  • Ch.12

• I protested: "But all this is childish. Is there a war on here, or isn't there?"
  "The Royal Welch don't recognize it socially," he answered. (Dat maakt voor de Royal Welch geen verschil wat de onderlinge verhoudingen betreft.)
  • Ch.14

Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out.

• Cuinchy bred rats. They came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly. While I stayed here with the Welsh, a new officer joined the company... When he turned in that night, he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand.
  • Ch.14

• Having now been in the trenches for five months, I had passed my prime. For the first three weeks, an officer was of little use in the front line... Between three weeks and four weeks he was at his best, unless he happened to have any particular bad shock or sequence of shocks. Then his usefulness gradually declined as neurasthenia developed. At six months he was still more or less all right; but by nine or ten months, unless he had been given a few weeks' rest on a technical course, or in hospital, he usually became a drag on the other company officers. After a year or fifteen months he was often worse than useless.
  • Ch.16 On being in the trenches in France in 1915

• There was a daily exchange of courtesies between our machine guns and the Germans' at stand-to; by removing cartridges from the ammunition-belt one could rap out the rhythm of the familiar prostitutes' call: "MEET me DOWN in PICC-a-DILL-y", to which the Germans would reply, though in slower tempo, because our guns were faster than theirs: "YES, with-OUT my DRAWERS ON!" (Ja, maar zonder onderbroek.)
  • Ch.16

• Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out. (...  dat hij erover op moest houden.)
  • Ch. 17

It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches even if one had survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home.

• Hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches even if one had survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home.
  • Ch. 17

• Anglican chaplains were remarkably out of touch with their troops. The Second Battalion chaplain, just before the Loos fighting, had preached a violent sermon on the Battle against Sin, at which one old soldier behind me had grumbled: "Christ, as if one bloody push wasn't enough to worry about at a time!" (Jezus, alsof één knokpartij tegelijk godver nog niet genoeg is.)
  • Ch. 17

• England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war madness that ran about everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language; and it was newspaper language.
  • Ch. 21

• "I got shot in the guts at the Beaumont-Hamel show. It hurt like hell, let me tell you. They took me down to the field-hospital. I was busy dying, but a company-sergeant major had got it in the head, and he was busy dying, too; and he did die. Well, as soon as ever the sergeant-major died, they took out that long gut... and they put it into me, grafted it on somehow. Wonderful chaps, these medicos! ... Well, this sergeant-major seems to have been an abstemious man. The lining of the new gut is much better than my old one; so I'm celebrating it. I only wish I'd borrowed his kidneys, too."
  • Ch.21

• Opposite our trenches a German salient protruded (een vooruitstekende punt inde Duitse linie), and the brigadier wanted to "bite it off" in proof of the division's offensive spirit. Trench soldiers could never understand the Staff's desire to bite off an enemy salient. It was hardly desirable to be fired at from both flanks; if the Germans had got caught in a salient, our obvious duty was to keep them there as long as they could be persuaded to stay. We concluded that a passion for straight lines, for which headquarters were well known, had dictated this plan, which had no strategic or tactical excuse.
  • Ch.22

• Nancy and I were married in January 1918 at St. James's Church, Piccadilly, she being just eighteen, and I twenty-two. George Mallory acted as the best man. Nancy had read the marriage-service for the first time that morning, and been so disgusted that she all but refused to go through with the wedding, though I had arranged for the ceremony to be modified and reduced to the shortest possible form. Another caricature scene to look back on: myself striding up the red carpet, wearing field-boots, spurs and sword; Nancy meeting me in a blue-check silk wedding-dress, utterly furious; packed benches on either side of the church, full of relatives; aunts using handkerchiefs; the choir boys out of tune; Nancy savagely muttering the responses, myself shouting them in a parade-ground voice.
  • Ch. 25

• Shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight, even though Nancy shared it with me; strangers in daytime would assume the faces of friends who had been killed... I could not use a telephone, I felt sick every time I travelled by train, and to see more than two new people in a single day prevented me from sleeping.
  • Ch.26 On being at home in Harlech in 1919. During the First World War, the mental effects of war on the fighting men were called shell shock or neurasthenia — or dismissed altogether as cowardice. Graves describes very clearly symptoms of what would now be seen as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

• In the middle of a lecture I would have a sudden very clear experience of men on the march up the Béthune–La Bassée road; the men would be singing... These daydreams persisted like an alternate life and did not leave me until well in 1928. The scenes were nearly always recollections of my first four months in France; the emotion-recording apparatus seems to have failed after Loos.
  • Ch. 27 On studying at Oxford University in 1919

• At the end of my first term's work, I attended the usual college board to give an account of myself. The spokesman coughed, and said a little stiffly: "I understand, Mr. Graves, that the essays which you write for your English tutor are, shall I say, a trifle temperamental (een beetje heetgebakerd). It appears, indeed, that you prefer some authors to others."
  • Ch. 27

• Professor Edgeworth, of All Souls', avoided conversational English, persistently using words and phrases that one expects to meet only in books. One evening, Lawrence returned from a visit to London, and Edgeworth met him at the gate. "Was it very caliginous in the metropolis?" "Somewhat caliginous, but not altogether inspissated," Lawrence replied gravely.
  
  • Ch. 28
  • (Was het erg nebuleus in de Metropool? - Tamelijk nebuleus, maar het veroorzaakte geen inspiratorische problemen, antwoordde L. doodernstig.)

Het voorwoord in mijn uitgave (vertaling) was van Stefan Brijs. Ik ken Brijs van Post voor Mevrouw Bromley, een roman die hij schreef over de Grote Oorlog. Brijs blijkt zeer veel materiaal geput te hebben uit Graves. Goodbye to all that geldt in het algemeen als onontbeerlijk voor een goed inzicht in het leven in de loopgraven tijdens de WO-I.
Graves had veel contacten met andere bekende Britten, zoals T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Bertrand Russel, en meer. Al deze mensen komen ook aan de orde, wat het boek nog eens extra interessant maakt.
Graves is zeer ernstig gewond geraakt tijdens de gevechten. Hij werd zelfs als gesneuveld gerapporteerd aan zijn moeder! Wat moet dat gek geweest zijn, toen die hoorde dat haar zoon nog leefde! Zijn longen waren wel ernstig aangetast. Toch is Graves maar liefst 90 jaar oud geworden. Hij is gestorven op Mallorca.
Graves is twee keer getrouwd geweest, bij alle twee de vrouwen had hij vier kinderen. Hij heeft, behalve Goodbye to all that, nog een ongelooflijke hoeveelheid andere boeken geschreven, waaronder het bekende I, Claudius. En natuurlijk was Grave, net als Sassoon en Owen, dichter.



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Grote Oorlog

Graves als officier 

Graves op latere leeftijd.

Ik moet bekennen dat ik soms moeite met dit boek had. Hij schrijft heel veel in weinig woorden. Daarbij ben ik niet op de hoogte van militaire termen als compagnie, bataljon, divisie, de diverse rangen enzovoorts. Daardoor ontgingen mij soms dingen. Ik dacht aanvankelijk dat dat aan mijn Engels lag - ik las het boek een paar jaar geleden in het Engels - maar ook in de vertaling kwam ik er niet altijd uit. Mijn concentratie raakte daardoor soms ook weg.

Er staan nog interessante dingen in DIT BLOG, en in deze Active history .

Graf van Graves, 1895 -1885.