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Robert Graves was thirty-three when he wrote Goodbye to All That, and he wrote it fast - in a matter of weeks, by his own account, needing money and ready to burn his bridges. That speed shows, and remarkably it works in the book's favour. Published in 1929, this memoir of an Edwardian childhood, a miserable public school education, and above all the trenches of the First World War remains one of the most vivid and unsettling accounts of that conflict ever written, precisely because it refuses the composure of a more carefully considered book.

The structure is straightforward enough. The opening section covers Graves's upbringing in Wimbledon, his German relations, and his desperately unhappy years at Charterhouse, where the petty cruelties of the English public school system are rendered with a coldness that prefigures everything to come. The middle - the bulk of the book and the reason for its endurance - follows his service as a young officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers in France, where he was so badly wounded on the Somme that he was reported dead and his family received condolence letters. The final stretch covers the difficult decade after: a failing marriage, shattered nerves, an England behaving as though nothing were amiss. The title is literal. Graves left for Majorca and vowed never to make England his home again.

What distinguishes the war chapters is their texture. Graves has no interest in strategy or statistics. Instead he gives you the lice, the rations, the gallows humour, the strange loyalty soldiers felt to their officers even as disillusionment with the war itself curdled into contempt for the staff who ran it. He records suicides in the trenches with the same flat tone he uses for regimental gossip. The effect is cumulative and devastating - terror and tedium grinding existence down to moments that are either unbearably vivid or interminably dull, with nothing in between. He also dismantles, almost casually, the myth of the stoic British soldier. The men in this book crack, weep, malinger, and break, and Graves does not exempt himself - his account of his own shell shock, the years of nightmares and flinching at loud noises, is among the earliest and most honest depictions of what we would now call PTSD in English letters.

Honest is the word that has to be qualified, though, because Goodbye to All That has a documented problem with facts. Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, both of whom appear in the book and both of whom were there, annotated a copy with some six thousand words of corrections. Captain James Dunn of the Second Battalion added his own, particularly incensed by Graves's claim that a Scots regiment had fled High Wood in cowardice - a charge against demonstrably brave men that later editions corrected. The dialogue throughout reads suspiciously well: rhythmic exchanges that build to punch-lines, theatrical set-pieces that feel composed rather than remembered. Graves wrote from memory, embellished freely, and the falling-out with Sassoon over the book's fibs was permanent and bitter. Anyone coming to this as a historical record should come armed with that knowledge. It is a book that tells the truth about how the war felt while being unreliable about what, precisely, happened.

There are other frictions for a modern reader. Graves's class assumptions sit close to the surface - casualty counts that tally officers and privates separately, an unexamined acceptance that some deaths matter more than others. His handling of his own romantic confusion, including the schoolboy infatuation he describes at Charterhouse and the intensity of his bond with Sassoon, is candid for 1929 but evasive by any later standard. And the post-war chapters, though they contain memorable encounters with Thomas Hardy and others, sag noticeably after the trenches. The marriage to Nancy Nicholson is sketched rather than explored, and the book ends more by exhaustion than design.

None of this dislodges it. The 1957 revision, the version most readers will encounter, tightened the prose and restored real names, and Graves enjoyed noting that nobody seemed to register how thoroughly he had rewritten it. In either edition the core achievement stands: a war memoir that broke the genre away from glory-hunting military men and handed it to the damaged young, written with a bitter wit that makes the horror land harder rather than softer. Read it alongside Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer if you want the corrective angle. But read it. Few books say goodbye to anything so memorably.