Good-Bye to All That is one of the primary sources for Regeneration, and Graves appears in Barker's novel as a character. Barker's subject is Craiglockhart in 1917: Rivers treating Sassoon after the Declaration, with Owen in the same hospital. Graves was the man who intervened to get Sassoon sent there rather than court-martialled, and his memoir is the fullest first-hand account of that intervention and of the friendship it strained. The novel also takes its texture from him. The flatness of tone about atrocity, the officers' slang, the specific detail of how a man behaves in the weeks after being pulled out of the line, are all things Graves put on the record in 1929 and which Barker uses rather than invents.