World War One. Gravess Good Bye to All That Essay

World War One. Gravess Good Bye to All That - Essay Example In his autobiographical novel â€Å"Goodbye to all that†, Graves aims to overcome his traumatic war experience and close that chapter of his life, resolving â€Å"never to make England my home again† (Graves 1960: 279). The author criticizes the British class system and, consequently, his economic class, his education, family religious upbringing, his military leaders and British government as he finds all of them responsible for the tragedy of war and cruel, senseless death of millions of young men. Graves says goodbye to the old class system of Britain as his war experience taught him that, despite coming from different social backgrounds, all people share the same values and identities. As the author?s parents educated him through a strict social code, which treated the lower classes as morally inferior to the bourgeoisie, the author had been aware of class distinctions since childhood. Yet as a four year old boy, when Graves was staying in hospital with scarlet feve r, he discovered that some children, also himself, received deferential and preferential treatment. His interest in different social classes continued through adulthood, when he used to ask his acquaintances â€Å"at what point in childhood or adulthood they have become class-conscious, but never have been given a satisfactory answer (Graves 1960: 24). However, during the war Graves found himself impressed with natural intelligence of poor, uneducated men and, thus, learned to respect people from lower social classes. Graves commanded a platoon of forty men coming from low social backgrounds, who joined the war for money. While at first he called them â€Å"most marginal elements of the society†, with time he came to appreciate their intelligence, courage, and ability to stay calm in the battlefield. Furthermore, at the war all soldiers, no matter their social status, had to face the same conditions, danger, fear, and in many cases severe wounds and death. As a result, Grave s admitted that twenty years after his first experience with the separation of different social classes he â€Å" had refused it† (Graves 1960: 25). After the war, when struggling to maintain his family only with his family, Graves opened a small shop; an activity that was typical of lower-class people and, thus, despised by people from Grave’s background. In this way, he demonstrates that he does not care about class distinctions anymore. The First World War has changed British social classes irreversibly. First, lower class citizens had a chance to earn money when fighting in the war and, thus, raise their standard of living. Furthermore, such factors as rationing and the control of essential for everybody contributed to the decrease in extreme poverty by the end of the war. On the contrary, due to the rationing and lack of many goods in the market, the living standards of the middle and upper class significantly deteriorated. Moreover, many families affected by the rise in tax land had to sell their land holdings. It is estimated that 25% of properties in England were sold between 1917 and 1921. The living conditions of higher class families also deteriorated due to the deaths of the men, who used to be the main financial supporters. As a result of that, higher class women had to take jobs, which changed not only the class structure, but also the position of women in the society (Bourke 2003). At that time, it was a widespread view that the First World War enabled women to advance