Generals Die in Bed
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.
Synopsis
The novel begins in Montreal as young infantrymen prepare to depart for the war overseas. The action quickly shifts to the trenches of the Western Front, where the men find themselves ill-equipped to deal with the carnage and terror they experience. The unnamed narrator, a young Canadian, quickly loses his illusions about what warfare means, and begins recounting horrific details of wounds, lice, and other depravations that the men experience. The general incompetence of military officers becomes apparent to the men (hence the title of the book), which the narrator summarizes in a chillingly cynical quote: "We have learned who our enemies are: the lice, some of our officers, and death."
More carnage ensues, including one scene in which the narrator bayonets a young German private and is unable to extract his weapon from his opponents ribs. Sent on leave to England, the narrator finds himself alienated from the society whose values he is meant to be defending.
Back in the trenches, the narrator witnesses the horrific deaths of nearly all of his comrades. In a climactic scene, out of frustration with battle conditions and as revenge for the sinking of the Allied hospital ship Llandovery Castle, the narrator joins other Canadians in slaughtering German soldiers as they attempt to surrender.
The novel concludes with a vivid depiction of the Battle of Amiens of August, 1918, in which the narrator is wounded, before being carried away for the novel's sudden and unresolved ending.
Thematic analysis
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.
Reception after publication
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 adapted Generals Die in Bed into a children's novel, and further editions by Penguin Books Australia and Red Fox in the UK followed.
Charles Yale Harrison wrote several other novels and non-fiction books before his death in 1954.