42 pages • 1 hour read
Charles Yale HarrisonGenerals Die In Bed
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1930A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Back to the Round”
The narrator summarizes the soldiers’ routine: They spend six days in the front trenches, six days in support trenches, six days in artillery trenches, and then go on rest for five or six days. The routine repeats “endlessly in and out” (27). Despite different locations, everything is always the same: Lice, rats, corpses, and the noise of battle.
The narrator and his comrades now are in the frontline trenches. The parapet and the parados form the front and back walls of the trench; their parapet has been blown up. The loss of the parapet endangers the men, exposing them to fire coming down the length of the trench. The men have dug holes into the side of the parapet or parados for protection. The narrator reflects that the only reason they stay in the trench is because they have been trained for months to obey rules. Any infraction of a rule, no matter how trivial, results in punishment. It has made the men into robots who do what they are told.
When rations arrive, Brown divides their portions so that each person gets the same amount of food. Just as he is about to allocate the sugar ration, a sniper fires at him and he dies. As the sun rises, the war front grows quiet. The men remove Brown’s body from the trench. Broadbent, the lance corporal, divides Brown’s portion of food among the survivors.
Chapter 5 Summary: “On Rest Again”
The narrator and his comrades are relieved from front-line duty and make their way through communication trenches in the dark of night. They reach a crossroad where guns, trucks, and horses strain to provide materiel to the front. The Germans launch an attack at the crossroads. The men can flee to the field, but trucks, guns, and horses are creating a chaotic scene.
After walking for hours they begin to see inhabited homes. They begin to relax, but always in the distance is the roar of artillery, “the link which binds [them] to [their] future” (37). Although the men feel safe, they know they will have to return to the front lines soon.
The men are then conveyed to a large village after hours of travel. The men are ecstatic that they are in a village large enough to have cognac and sex workers. Rumors spread that they will be billeted here for weeks or months. It is payday, and with money in their pockets, the men take off for an estaminet. They eat a staggering amount of food and drink bottles of wine. Fry and the narrator buy more wine and decide to take it to the barn where they are billeted to drink it there. Along the way, Fry calls out sexual propositions to some girls.
The narrator relates that the people who live in the town are in a bad way. The officers are quartered with the villagers, despite the townspeople having little food for themselves, while the men are billeted in a barn. After 10 days in the village, the men are out of money and will be returned to the front in a few days.
When Fry finds a nearby stream, the men decide to go for a swim. They strip off their clothes, and the narrator remarks that Broadbent’s body is “fair and lithe” (46). The narrator also notes that all winter long they have been bundled up in uniforms, but that now, naked, they still look like boys with beautiful bodies. They laugh and play, feeling safe and secure. However, they soon find the body of a French soldier in the river. The corpse reminds them that the battlefield, and perhaps death, awaits them.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Bombardment”
Back in the frontline trench, they live in constant fear. The narrator contrasts how the men behave when they are on rest with how they act when on the line. When they are in the frontline trenches, life is reduced to self-preservation. To prove the point, the narrator relates a scene where the men get into a vicious fight over an accusation that the rations have not been divided equally.
The longer the men are on the frontline, the more anxious they become. Their anxiety is made all the worse by a rumor that an offensive is about to begin. Despite this, the men are required to do countless fatigues including wiring, repairing trenches, sapping, and carrying. Their anxiety is so high that they cannot sleep or rest.
At three in the morning, a bombardment begins. The men are below ground, in a former German dugout that has sturdy wooden beams lit only by a single candle. Despite the relative safety, they are terrified. As the intensity of the bombardment increases, the men struggle to keep the candle lit. The men are so frightened their faces turn greenish-yellow, and some of them vomit.
Anderson tells them that God will not let them survive because of their sinful ways. Fry says that he will never swear again if he survives. However, once the bombardment stops, their prayers seem worthless. The narrator believes that there is no god as powerful as the guns.
After the bombardment, the men learn that the Germans have broken the Allied line in Belgium, and they surmise they will be sent in as shock troops to recapture the line. They are bitter and proud that Canadians are thought of as the best fighters. Later, they discuss how long they think the war will last. They were initially told that it would only be three months, but now more than two years have passed.
When officers call for a raid involving 100 men, the narrator and his unit volunteer. They are told if they succeed, they will get leave in London or Paris. The narrator gives his personal papers and effects to Cleary because he expects to die in the raid.
After an initial shelling of the German lines by the Allied guns, the men go over the top, meaning they burst forth from the trenches into No Man’s Land. The narrator makes it to the German line and drops down into a German trench. He uses his bayonet to stab a German soldier but is unable to pull the bayonet out of the soldier’s body. The narrator struggles with the German until the soldier is dead. Later he takes two German soldiers prisoner and discovers that one of the prisoners is the brother of the dead man. He receives a medal for bravery and 10 days’ leave in London or Paris. Out of the 100 who made the charge, 40 men have died.
Later that night, as the excitement and rum wear off, the narrator experiences extreme cold and shakiness. He keeps reliving the experience of killing the German named Karl. Rather than stay in the reserve dugout, he goes back to the front-line trenches to find his unit. When he arrives, he discovers that Cleary has been severely wounded. The narrator rushes to the medical officer’s dugout, where he watches Cleary die. The narrator retrieves his papers and returns to the reserved dugouts. He is distraught and plagued with questions he does not want to face and cannot answer.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
The narrator’s experiences grow darker and more violent in these chapters, invoking The Dehumanization of Common Soldiers. When the narrator enters a German trench and bayonets a German soldier, Harrison describes the event using explicit sensory detail: The narrator sees the German’s “froth on the corner of his mouth which opens and shuts like that of a fish out of water,” he hears the shrieks of the man he is murdering, and he tugs and pulls, “work[ing] the blade in his insides” (62-63). The visceral imagery is meant to create a sense of immediacy and to reflect the brutal, tactile nature of the hand-to-hand combat the narrator experiences. War is no longer an abstract ideal for the narrator; instead, his direct experience of violent combat is distressing and deeply personal for him, forcing him to kill a man directly.
Having come face-to-face with the realities of war, The Psychological Impact of Combat becomes more central to the narrator’s experiences. In Chapter 6, the narrator notes, “On rest we behaved like human beings; here we are merely soldiers. We know what soldiering means. It means saving your own skin and getting a bellyful as often as possible” (49). The narrator’s ethical and moral self becomes lost in the fear and terror of war. The novel suggests that comradeship is a myth, as the men choose survival over altruism or glorious deeds.
When the bombardment starts, the narrator reveals that men grow green and vomit in fear. Although they pray for salvation, by the end of the bombardment the narrator has given up his belief in the Christian God, a belief he finds cognitively dissonant. He believes that any good and all-powerful god would not allow such evil in the world. He states, “What god is there as mighty as the fury of a bombardment? More terrible than lightning, more cruel, more calculating than an earthquake!” (55). He can no longer take comfort in any religious faith: Just as his romanticized views of combat have been shattered, so too have his former ideas about God and religion.
Later, when he has been excused from duty as a reward for participating in the raid, the narrator begins exhibiting symptoms of severe psychological stress. He is cold, cannot sleep, and begins shaking all over. The image of the man he killed appears in his mind and he cannot rid himself of it. The narrator appears to be suffering from what was known at the time as “shell-shock,” but which is now called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He describes his flashbacks: “I am living through the excitement of the raid all over again; but I cannot relieve myself with action now” (70). The memory of killing the German will return to him again and again. The narrator’s psychological decline and dysregulation are reflected in Harrison’s narrative technique. The sentences and paragraphs become shorter and shorter. Increasingly, the lines devolve to no more than phrases, with the narrative fragmentation illustrating the increasing mental strain the narrator is experiencing.
A historical fact concerning Canadian troops underscores the narrator’s slide into psychological deterioration. Early in Chapter 6, the men have a discussion about the role of Canadian troops in the war. One of them says, “We’re bloody shock troops, that’s what we are!” and another states that the British troops “won’t fight unless there’s a row of Canadian bayonets behind ‘em” (56). While the soldiers are proud of their reputation for bravery, they nonetheless pay a huge price in both their physical and mental health. Serving as front-line shock troops exposes the Canadians to both the worst living conditions and the most gruesome combat experience of any troops, increasing their likelihood of psychological distress.
