Generals Die in Bed
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From day one, he’s surrounded by mud and fear. Artillery whistles down without warning. Boys, barely men, cry out for their mothers. Close combat is worse: sudden frenzied scrambles with German boys and bayonets that don’t come out smoothly.
Regular rotation takes them away from the front, and the weary combatants scramble for wine, women, or whatever will help them forget they’ll have to go back. This harrowing spiral continues until an ill-fated hill ge leads to a gushing leg wound and walking papers home.
A new introduction to this edition places Harrison’s novel with its literary contemporaries: ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT and A FAREWELL TO ARMS. Originally published in 1930 and acclaimed as “the best of the war books” by the New York Evening Standard, GENERALS DIE IN BED remains an unforgettable read.
Charles Yale Harrison
Charles Yale Harrison (1898-1954) was an author, activist, and editor. Harrison born in Philadelphia and raised in a Jewish family in Montreal. He served in World War One, an experience that would influence much of his subsequent fiction. A dedicated fellow traveller, Harrison moved from Montreal to New York in the 1920s, where he worked on the staff of the Communist Party of America (CPUSA)-led magazine New Masses alongside outspoken literary critics of proletarian literature such as Mike Gold. He was also a founding member of one of a series of John Reed Clubs, established in 1929 in an attempt to create a large forum for leftist writers. Drawing on his own service in the First World War, he published Generals Die in Bed (1930), a scathingly anti-war novel about the horrors of trench warfare. The novel was well received, and was followed by the novels A Child is Born (1931), There are Victories (1933), Meet Me on the Barricades (1938), and Nobody’s Fool (1948). He also authored a biography of the American socialist lawyer Clarence Darrow (1931), and the self-help book Thank God For My Heart Attack (1949).
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Reviews for Generals Die in Bed
43 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A short memoir of a Canadian soldier in the trenches of World War 1. Full of the horror and futility of old style fighting with the carnage of new style weapons. No wonder they called WW1 the war to end all wars. Well, they did for 20 years or so, anyway.Read Dec 2016
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Originally published in 1930, this searing novel by a Canadian veteran of the Western front vividly depicts the horrors of trench warfare.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A gritty first hand account of life on the Western front in the trenches.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Great description of life in the trenches during WWI. Blows away all patriotic notions of the valour of fighting for ones country.
Book preview
Generals Die in Bed - Charles Yale Harrison
GENERALS
die in bed
CHARLES YALE HARRISON
To
the bewildered youths—
British, Australian, Canadian, and German—
who were killed in that wood a few miles
beyond Amiens on August 8, 1918,
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
CONTENTS
Introduction
Recruits
In the Trenches
Out on Rest
Back to the Round
On Rest Again
Bombardment
Béthune
London
Over the Top
An Interlude
Arras
Vengeance
INTRODUCTION
1914 – 1919
A war that killed approximately ten million people, including eight-and-a-half-million soldiers, in four years also saw the death of a myth—that war is a testing ground, where a young lad proves his mettle by charging into battle atop a silver steed, brandishing a sword. The First World War demonstrated that things were different now: war was soldiers huddled together in stinking, vermin-infested mudholes, praying not to get blown to bits by an amazing variety of killing machines. If a screaming, one-ton shell launched from six miles away had your name, rank, and serial number on it, it mattered not one damn how brave you were. Technology had neatly eradicated the once profound difference between the hero and the coward.
In 1929, eleven years after the war ended, the book at the top of the United States best-seller list was A Farewell to Arms, a novel by a combatant, Ernest Hemingway. Following it was All Quiet on the Western Front, from a veteran of the other side, Erich Maria Remarque. A battalion of similar books followed, as the men who had fought described, at last, what the war was really like.
One of these was written by a young American, Charles Yale Harrison, who fought overseas with the Canadian army. Generals Die in Bed is a shockingly frank, fictionalized portrayal of the horrors encountered by a gaggle of soldiers stuck in that meat grinder, World War One. It is also a magnificent—and controversial—classic of the literature of human combat.
Harrison’s novel illustrates the reality of an obscene debacle, which started with a bang (the sound of nineteen-year-old Serbian Gavrilo Princip’s gun firing the shot that eliminated Bosnia’s Archduke Francis Ferdinand), dragged most of Europe, thick with alliances, into its maw (pitting the Triple Entente
—Britain, France, Russia—against the Triple Alliance
—Germany, Austria, Italy), and culminated in a four-year war of attrition,
with millions of men trapped in a zigzag system of trenches stretching six hundred miles from the North Sea to Switzerland.
Described by an American editor in 1984 as among the first books written about modern warfare,
Harrison’s novel jolted the public from reveries about honor and glory. American novelist John Dos Passos said that Generals Die in Bed has a sort of flat-footed straightness about it that gets down the torture of the front line about as accurately as one can ever get it.
New York newspapers called it a burning, breathing, historic document
(The Times); that stands out among a host of other war books for its honesty and reality
(Herald Tribune); that belongs among the very best of the war books
(Telegram). On the other hand, a detractor complained of being frogmarched to a war, the bestiality and horror of which are so emphasized that the author’s sincere and passionate desire to prevent its recurrence is entirely defeated.
In a sense, he was right; ten years later we were fighting World War Two!
Canadians—that is, some former high-ranking officers—vilified Harrison’s book—and Harrison. Cy Peck, a Victoria Cross winner and later a Member of Parliament, called it pure obscenity, totally unrelieved by the slightest flash of genius. It’s a gross and shameful slander on the Canadian soldier, by a degenerate-minded fool.
Sir Arthur Currie, commander of the Canadian Corps, wasn’t a fan either: I have never read a meaner, nastier and more foul book.
(Being a general, he probably didn’t take kindly to the title, either!) Sir Archibald Macdonell, according to historian Jonathan Vance, became almost apoplectic with rage when he read it. ‘I hope to live long enough to have the opportunity of (in good trench language) shoving my fist into that s—- of a b—- Harrison’s tummy until his guts hang out his mouth!!’
Fortunately, many admired the book. Roy MacSkimming in The Toronto Star found it a devastatingly powerful work, unsparingly honest, unrelenting in its scenes of horror and pathos … anti-war, yet that term hardly does justice to its emotional depths … a cauterizing human document.
Why were the detractors so upset? As well as telling the truth about the front lines, Harrison provided two specific goads. One was his description of the looting of the French city of Arras. The other was their seemingly indiscriminate killing of Germans during the Battle of Amiens. (Allied forces had been told—incorrectly—before the battle that the German navy had sunk the Allied hospital ship Llandovery Castle.) Anticipating trouble, Harrison’s publishers had insisted he sign a document verifying that he had observed the controversial incidents. In 1988, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a documentary about the war that included evidence Harrison’s claims were true. But they also pointed out that the battle-weary Canadians who plundered Arras had earlier been ordered by (British) officers to march for three days without food or sleep, ending up in that deserted city, where they were told to stand to attention until their rations arrived. In the meantime, the abandoned shops of Arras stood filled with goodies. As for the tragedy at Amiens, not only was Harrison present, he was wounded while attacking a machine-gun nest, on August 8, 1918 (see his Dedication).
A senior historian of the Canadian War Museum made the common error of discrediting Generals Die in Bed by treating it as an autobiography, instead of what it is—a novel. Incorrectly identifying the youthful narrator as Harrison himself, he claimed, for example, that although the author served as a private throughout his term of overseas service
he promotes himself
to corporal. (Ironically, Harrison was promoted during the war, to lance corporal, and was recommended for a medal for bravery for running at that machine-gun nest.)
Harrison was much praised for his use of the present tense in the novel, which gives his work immediacy and makes the reader feel as though he is in the midst of the action. The author was also lauded for his (deceptively) simple language and (seemingly) straightforward style: The writing style is a terse staccato, echoing gunfire and pounding hearts, and reinforcing tension,
said ForeWard Magazine. One English reviewer (The Bookie
in Morning Star) wrote, How he manages to express it, the reader can only wonder, but Harrison’s description of a trench bayoneting must be the most horrific passage anywhere in the literature of war.
Although one critic praised Harrison for his lack of literary frills,
the author’s use of motif adds depth and subtlety to his text. The birds that adorn the battlefield represent freedom; while soldiers sit moldering in mud, the birds fly undaunted above. Damaged feet become an abiding symbol of the crippling effects of war on the spiritual evolution of man. The character Fry is suffering with his feet,
and the narrator says of Brown—the first of the group to die—The back of his heel was as raw as a lump of meat.
Late in the novel the motif becomes more complex, taking on religious connotations: behind the lines, the narrator’s injured foot is bathed in olive oil by an old woman, and the next time he is in combat he is shot through the right foot. Like so many fictional war heroes before him, he is destined to return home with a barely perceptible limp.
A major theme is the breakdown of communication as the war drags on; the long-established meanings of words change under pressure. God
—a brooding motif throughout—deteriorates from a neutral figure to a sinister authoritarian, no more to be trusted than the officers. While one soldier, a former preacher, prays, another turns on him in disgust
and orders him, Don’t tell God where we are or we’ll all get killed.
Soldiering
comes to mean saving your own skin and getting a bellyful as often as possible.
And the Germans, the so-called enemy
? We have learned who our enemies are—the lice, some of our officers—and Death.
Harrison’s imagery powerfully communicates the reality of the Western Front. Trees are skeletons holding stubs of stark, shell-amputated arms towards the sky
; artillery is heard faint but persistent like the subdued throbbing of violins in a symphony.
Under bombardment, soldiers look like men seen in an ancient, unsteady motion picture,
and under inspection they reveal faces as red as the poppies of which the war poets are writing back home.
Is it odd that the Great Canadian War Novel should have been written by an American? (Although he grew up in Montreal, Harrison was born in Philadelphia, and after serving overseas with the Royal Montreal Regiment, spent most of his life in New York City.) No. Once in the trenches, whether you were German or British, American or Canadian, it was a universal experience—just get through this thing alive. Even when the Americans arrived, in 1917—85,000 strong, commanded by John Black Jack
Pershing—Harrison failed to feel warm fuzzies for his countrymen. Bubbling with enthusiasm, the Yanks hurled wisecracks across No Man’s Land at Fritzie,
while down the line skulked Harrison and his battle-wise Canuck comrades, cursing them for their ignorance: For the love of God keep quiet until we get out and then make all the God-damned noise you want to.
And there is another reason why an American should write about the Canadian experience of war. Sheer numbers. Harrison wasn’t the only U.S. gent beefing up the ranks of the good neighbor to the north; fully thirty thousand had signed up to help, including the entire battalion of Americans, the 97th Overseas.
The Canadian soldier was an important weapon in the Allied arsenal. (Of the 600,000 Canadians who went to war, 60,000 failed to return.) If a swift and brutal victory was required, Canadians—Charles Yale Harrison among them—were often turned loose as shock troops. They finally got to work together in 1917, when the entire Canadian Corp was unleashed, winning one of the most decisive victories of the war—the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
Robert F. Nielsen
Stoney Creek, Ontario
November 2006
Robert Nielsen is a writer, publisher, and former instructor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
RECRUITS
It is after midnight on payday. Some of the recruits are beginning to dribble into the barracks bunk room after a night’s carousal down the line.
Down the line
in Montreal is Cadieux Street, St. Elizabeth Street, La Gauchetière Street, Vitre Street, Craig Street—a square mile of dilapidated, squalid red brick houses with red lights shining through the transoms, flooding the sidewalks with an inviting, warm glow. The houses are known by their numbers, 169 or 72 or 184.
Some of us are lying in our bunks, uncovered, showing our heavy gray woolen underwear—regulation Army issue.
The heavy odor of stale booze and women is in the air. A few jaundiced electric lights burn here and there in the barn-like bunk room although it is long after lights out.
In the bunk next to mine lies Anderson, a middle-aged, slightly bald man. He comes from somewhere in the backwoods of northern Ontario and enlisted a few weeks ago.