Chemical warfare
The use of new and ghastly military weaponry defined WWI, and Graves's account is no different. His stories of mustard gas are formidable and horrifying. The mustard gas is a symbol for the horror of warfare, because the threats seem to be never-ending. Now, the very air they breathe can be used against them in battle. If chemical weapons are allowed on the battlefield, the warfare takes on a new even-more-hellish quality.
Promotion of newcomers
There is a symbolic moment in the war when the military had lost so many leaders that they recruited graduate students and made them ranking officers without training or experience. This didn't give Graves a warm and fuzzy feeling, to put it lightly. Instead, this decision shows how precarious the situation became, and how paranoid of chaos he was made to be. He is paranoid of failure because his ranking officers are literally untrained.
Lives lost at Loos
Graves struggles throughout this account to reconcile the decisions made by British and allied forces on the Western front. There is one battle in particular that symbolizes this dilemma perfectly; the battle at Loos. There, the British held the Germans at bay, but at the cost of double the German casualties; they lost twice as many soldiers as the Germans did. This is a horrifying thing for him to witness, and it haunts him, as he thinks about the lives lost.
The wrongly mourned soldier
Graves is mourned as a a lost soldier by his family and community, but he survived after all. This is a symbolic moment in his life, because the family was asked to reckon his loss, so his contribution to their lives is fully represented in their mourning, and it also symbolizes the problem of miscommunication and disorder. Because the war became sloppy (that is Graves's contention), errors in communication occurred more frequently. His own family was the victim of this, but luckily for them, he was able to return to them alive after all.
Mistreatment of prisoners of war
If Graves's commentary about POWs in Britain are correct, then the military is guilty of war crimes, because they claimed they had returned all of Germany's prisoners of war, but in reality, Graves suggests that they kept some under arrest in military prisons without fair trial or due process. The stories heard about their mistreatment darken this memoir a great deal, because these accusations are difficult to stomach.
