British writer Robert Graves came terribly close to joining the 9.7 million other soldiers who died in World War I when his body was tossed among mounds of corpses after it was evacuated from the battlefield and he was listed as officially dead, with notices sent to British newspapers and his family. A shell fragment had shot through his lungs at the Battle of the Somme in France. It was 1916, and he was 21 years old. Graves went on to live another 69 years after almost literally coming back from the dead, and along the way he established himself…




