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At High Wood on the Somme in July 1916, a shell fragment pierced Graves's lung. He was left for dead at a dressing station, and his colonel wrote to his mother that he had died of wounds. The death was published in The Times around his twenty-first birthday, and Graves, alive in a London hospital, had to correct it himself in the newspapers.
Front-line troops were held together by loyalty to their regiment and battalion, meaning its history, its standards and the men beside them. Abstract patriotism was left to civilians and newly arrived recruits. Morale depended on a close, concrete identity the soldier could see being upheld or shamed, not on love of country.
In 1917 Siegfried Sassoon publicly protested that the war was being needlessly prolonged, which invited a court-martial. Graves, his friend and fellow officer, persuaded the authorities that Sassoon was suffering from shell-shock and testified at the medical board. Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart hospital instead of being tried, and his protest was defused by recasting dissent as illness.
Graves describes neurasthenia that continued for years after he left the front. He saw shells burst in quiet English landscapes, could not use a telephone, and was shaken by sudden noises. The war did not end at demobilization but kept operating inside the veteran, which helped make ordinary civilian life and English convention feel impossible to return to.