Explore "Goodbye to all That" by Robert Graves on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I HAD just finished with Charterhouse and gone up to Harlech, when England declared war on Germany. A day or two later I decided to enlist. In the first place, though the papers predicted only a very short war - over by Christmas at the outside - I hoped that it might last long enough to delay my going to Oxford in October, which I dreaded. Nor did I work out the possibilities of getting actively engaged in the fighting, expecting garrison service at home, while the regular forces were away. In the second place, I was outraged to read of the Germans' cynical violation of Belgian neutrality. Though I discounted perhaps twenty per cent of the atrocity details as wartime exaggeration, that was not, of course, sufficient. Recently I saw the following contemporary newspaper cuttings put in chronological sequence:
When the fall of Antwerp became known, the church bells were rung [i.e. at Cologne and elsewhere in Germany]. - Kölnische Zeitung.