Generals Die in Bed

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Generals Die in Bed is a 1930 anti-war novel by the Canadian-American writer Charles Yale Harrison. Based on the author's own experiences in combat, it tells the story of a young soldier fighting in the trenches of World War I.

1 Plot summary
2 Major themes
3 Literary significance & criticism
4 See also

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The novel starts off in Montreal, as a young soldier (unnamed) is about to depart with the Canadian army to fight the Germans in France. In his squad, consists of people who build close relations with the protagonist known as Brown, Fry, Cleary, Anderson, and Broadbent. The book quickly shifts to the trenches, where the protagonist’s perspective of war quickly changes as he faces the terror of war, along with the wounds and lice he has to deal with while resting after battle. Eventually his comrades start to die, starting with Brown and soon is emotionally affected when he stabs a German soldier with his Bayonet. What worsens his emotional status is the death of his comrade Cleary, who suffered to death. This alone made him change his perspective of war and become more ruthless as the book continued. Eventually he is rewarded a 10 day vacation to England, where he soon despises people for laughing at the war, while the soldiers are fighting so hard. Eventually he returns. In the next battle everyone tries to raid the Germans. When Fry is dying on field, the Protagonist ignores his body and doesn’t help him, which his previous self wouldn’t do. In that battle, only the protagonist and Broadbent, who killed plenty in that battle, live. With how amateurishly they fought in the last battle, they train for the last battle of World War 1. Eventually their general tells them of how the Germans have sunk down one of their medical ships with their U-boats. This gets the soldiers fired up to kill the Germans in the final battle. As they rush into the final battle, they quickly start to take out the Germans thanks to their training, but as they rush up their trench, the protagonist gets injured in his foot and is unable to continue. As he searches for water, while injured, he discovers Broadbent. Broadbent is also severely injured, which one of his legs hanging by one strand of flesh. Moments later Broadbent dies from blood loss. The story cuts to a hospital train the narrator is on. The narrator finds out that the only reason the Germans had sunk that hospital ship was it contained weapons, and that the generals lied to the infantry so they would show no mercy to the Germans.

[edit] Major themes

At the core of Generals Die in Bed is the thesis that war is a futile and bloody endeavour in which men fight fruitlessly for ideals that turn out to be meaningless. Newspapers and "fighting parsons" spew patriotic slogans about "our" side in the war, without any sense of how horrible and traumatic trench warfare really is. Set up as brave and unconquerable heroes, the Canadian infantrymen turn out to be nervous, under-trained, inexperienced boys who enlisted without a fair sense of what they were getting into. Like the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, or such European novels as Henri Barbusse's Under Fire, Generals Die in Bed attempts to strip war of its romance and glamour, to show the real experiences of men at war. Harrison's depiction of the juxtaposition between beleaguered privates and their incompetent generals is basically a socialist argument about how the exploitation of the working classes in civilian life translates into the exploitation of rank-and-file soldiers in the military.

[edit] Literary significance & criticism

Generals Die in Bed was an international bestseller upon its release, and was by far the most successful of Harrison's novels. The reception was lukewarm in Canada, however, because of scenes depicting Canadian soldiers looting the French town of Arras and shooting unarmed Germans (which amounted to a war crime). Former Canadian Expeditionary Force commander General Sir Arthur Currie, said that the novel denigrated the legacy of Canadians in the war. Harrison denied the allegation in a 1930 interview with the Toronto Star, praising Canadian soldiers and justifying his novel as an attempt to depict the war "as it really was."

After its initial success as part of the "war book boom" of the late twenties and early thirties, Generals Die in Bed was largely forgotten, until the Hamilton, Ontario publisher Potlach reissued it in the 1970s. In 2002 Toronto's Annick Press re-issued the original text of Generals Die in Bed packaged for young adults, and further editions by Penguin Books Australia and Red Fox in the UK followed. In 2007 Annick Press released an edition for adult readers and school/university course adoptions.

Charles Yale Harrison wrote several other novels and non-fiction books before his death in 1954.