The unsentimental and frequently comic treatment of the banalities and intensities of the life of a British army officer in the First World War gave Graves fame,[1] notoriety and financial security,[1] but the book's subject is also his family history, childhood, schooling and, immediately following the war, early married life; all phases bearing witness to the "particular mode of living and thinking" that constitute a poetic sensibility.
[2] Graves, in a 1969 interview, claimed that he "entirely rewrote" the book—"every single sentence"—when it was reissued in the 1950s, suggesting that the process of co-writing The Reader Over Your Shoulder had made him more conscious of, and determined to rectify, deficiencies in his own style.
"[4]: 19 A large part of the book is taken up by his experience of the First World War, in which Graves served as a lieutenant, then captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, with Siegfried Sassoon.
The average life expectancy of an infantry subaltern on the Western Front was, at some stages of the War, only about three months; by which time he had been either wounded or killed.
"[4]: 59 Regarding trench conditions and Cuinchy-bred rats, Graves stated, "They came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly.
Graves also noted that if "the atrocity-list had to include the accidental-on-purpose bombing or machine-gunning of civilians from the air, the Allies were now committing as many atrocities as the Germans."
Observing French and Belgian civilians showing British soldiers body parts allegedly mutilated by German troops, he argued that these were more likely the result of indiscriminate shelling.
He recounted two first-hand anecdotes from a Scottish-Canadian and an Australian, who told him how they murdered German prisoners while escorting them using Mills bombs.
He also added that the use of "semi-civilized coloured troops in Europe was, from the German point of view, we knew, one of the chief Allied atrocities.
During initial military training in England, he received an electric shock from a telephone that had been hit by lightning, which caused him for the next twelve years to stammer and sweat badly if he had to use one.