Explore "Goodbye to all That" by Robert Graves on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
AT Annezin we reorganized. Some of the lightly wounded rejoined for duty, and a big draft from the Third Battalion arrived, so that within a week we were nearly seven hundred strong, with a full supply of officers. Old Adelphine made me comfortable. She used to come into my room in the morning while I shaved and tell me the local gossip - about her stingy daughter-in-law and the unscrupulous Maire and the woman at Fouquières who had just been delivered of black twins. She called the Kaiser a bitch, and spat on the floor to confirm it. Her favourite subject was the shamelessness of modern girls. Yet she herself had been gay and beautiful and much sought after when young, she said. As lady's maid to a rich draper's wife at Béthune, she had travelled widely in the surrounding country, and even over the border into Belgium. She told me scandal about the important families who once lived in the various villages we were now using as billets.
Once she innocently asked whether I knew La Bassée. I said that I had tried to visit it recently but been detained.