MixedThe Sydney Morning HeraldJean Moorcroft Wilson\'s new biography describes the disastrous innocence that led Graves to enlist in August 1914. Just 19, he was feeling nervous about going up to Oxford; he wanted a break from study and the army seemed to offer an escape. He did not doubt that Britain was in the right nor that the war would be waged with impeccable honour, and be all over within a few months. One year later, all illusions lost, Graves was writing poems whose brutally confronting physical descriptions of the dead and wounded horrified even Sassoon ... Jean Moorcroft Wilson has already written biographies of Sassoon and Edward Thomas. She knows the territory so well that she risks an overdetailed narrative. This volume ends with the publication of Goodbye to All That, when Graves was 35. It rounds off the war experience, and brings Riding, Graves\' manipulative muse, to centre stage. What to do with the next 55 years? The author\'s final sentence, \'I look forward to continuing the story\', sounds courageous.
