Home icon. The Works of Robert Graves. Exhibition: 1 April to 17 June 2011.

Cabinet 1: World War I


The First World War.

The First World War. A Photographic History. Edited by Laurence Stallings. London: William Heinemann, 1934.

In his poem ‘A Dead Boche’ in Fairies and Fusiliers (1917), Graves exclaims ‘War’s Hell’. In August 1915, the Fusiliers were decimated in a suicidal advance from Cambrin, a village about 24 kilometres north of Arras. It had been a decoy movement to detract from the main attack at Loos, near Lens, north-east France. Graves was the only officer to survive in this skirmish.

This famous image in this photographic history of the First World War depicts an eerie calmness amongst the carnage, a sparse bleak environment full of human wreckage and mud.