Charles Yale Harrison’s novel
Generals Die in Bed(1930) is one of large group of novels and memoirs written in the late 1920s and early 1930s by soldiers who had experienced and survived World War I. The novel is narrated, in the present tense, as the experiences of an unnamed private in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, from the time of his enlistment in Montreal in the summer of 1917 until he is wounded at the Battle of Amiens in August 1918, after which he is sent home. Harrison’s portrait of life in the trenches is unrelievedly horrible – rats, lice, blood, disease, decaying bodies. What distinguishes Harrison’s novel from most of the other war novels published around the same time is its absolute disillusionment and cynicism. Harrison deflates all conventional notions of…
3196 words
Citation: Clausson, Nils. "Generals Die in Bed". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 July 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=32184, accessed 23 November 2024.]
