Graves's biographies document the story well, and Pat Barker's novel, Regeneration also recounts it. The two officers had become firm friends while serving with the RWF. In 1917, Graves played an important part in saving his fellow poet, Siegfried Sassoon, from a court martial after the latter went absent without leave and wrote to his commanding officer denouncing the war. However, he recovered, at the cost of permanent damage to his lungs, and, after a brief spell back in France, spent the remainder of the war in England, despite his efforts to return to the front. At the Battle of the Somme in 1916 he received such serious injuries that his family were informed of his death. The horror of his wartime experiences had a profound effect upon him he published his first volume of poems, Over The Brazier, in 1916, but he later tried to suppress his war poetry.
However, the prospect of spending another four years of his life studying Latin and Greek did not appeal to the nineteen-year-old Graves, and with the outbreak of World War I he enlisted almost immediately in the Royal Welch Fusiliers (RWF). Graves, born in Wimbledon, England, received his early education at Charterhouse School and won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford University.
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