Generals Die in Bed Through the Eyes of Two Authors - Book Report/Review Example

Analysis of “Generals Die in Bed” Through the Eyes of Two Administrator: Academia-Research.com 2009-12-02, 20:03 The appalling low value set on the lives of common soldiers fighting World War I is chillingly dissected by a Canadian author, Charles Yale Harrison (1930), in his parody, “Generals Die In Beds.”. The not dissimilar views of two disparate but prominent book reviewers regarding the novel are set out utilizing a Mythic Question (Sam Keene and Anne Valley-Fox, 1973) to frame this Paper’s outline while analyzing a WWI painting “We Are Making A New World” (Paul Nash, 1918) against the lessons of the nonsensical war as highlighted in the parody. Having set the tone of this Paper, one work each of the prominent French philosopher, writer, and composer of the eighteenth-century Jean Jaques Rousseau and the renowned British naturalist of the nineteenth-century, Charles Robert Darwin, is also reviewed in the same light. Keywords: parody, Paper’s outline, Mythic Question, analysis, poem, Jean Jaques Rousseau, Charles Robert Darwin. Those who have seen the highly acclaimed award-winning TV Series made by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Blackadder (September-November 1989), starring comedians Rowan Atkinson, et al. will understand World War I in its true perspective. Rather than the Germans, who remain unseen, Blackadders adversary comes in the form of his superior, General Melchett who rallies his troops from a French château 35 miles behind the front, wining and dining on Champagne, Caviar and Cigars while his troops, rotting in damp trenches and existing on one distasteful looking meal, die of lack of medical care, sepsis, diarrhea and dysentery, a dozen to the day. Blackadders final line is poignant, just before leading his men into a suicidal final push at Flanders: “Well, I am afraid its time to go. Whatever your plans to avoid certain death were, I’m sure it was better than my plan to get out of this by pretending to be mad. I mean, who would have noticed another madman around here? Good luck, everyone.” (www.imdb.com, www.express.co.uk). Review Colleen Mondor, a reviewer for Booklist, Bookslut, Eclectica Magazine and the Voices of New Orleans, reviewed the parody in 2002 (www.eclectica.org) as follows. “Generals Die in Bed (Harrison, 1930), is almost unknown today. It was published in 1930 to rave reviews. ‘It 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’ ( John Dos Passos, 1930). The New York Evening Post called it ‘the best of the war books.’ Harrisons novel, based on his own service as a member of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, is graphic, intense, and very powerfully anti-war while not being overtly political. It is remarkable to read about a war that was plainly hell, and for the man who blindly fought it, for whatever side or country, the man on the other side was the enemy. The chief protagonist is his unnamed narrator, one of a motley group of youngsters gathered in Montreal who bond by simply sleeping in the same barracks. Over to France then, and the true horrors of war hit them hard. War is not just bullets and bayonets. ‘We are supposed to be resting,’ writes Harrison, ‘but rest is impossible; we are being eaten alive by lice. We cannot sleep for them. We sit and talk, and dig feverishly in our chests, under our arms, between our legs. We crush the vermin between our thumbnails and a tiny drop of blood spurts in ones face as they are crushed. It is months since we have been out of clothes. We talk of the last time we slept between sheets.’ (www. eclectica.com) ‘Camaraderie--esprit de corps--good fellowship--these are words for journalists to use, not for us. Here in the line they do not exist. We fight among ourselves, over food, over anything. It is this resolute determination to show how war degrades the humanity of all those caught up in its path that sets Generals Die in Bed apart from other war fiction. Yes, there are casualties from bombs and bullets. What is so terrible about the death of one of these boys is because we do not want to die--because we hang on so pitifully to life as it slips away. Our lives are stolen--taken from us unawares (ibid). Can a killing be different if on a street corner as opposed to a battlefield? Can we really live with ourselves more easily if the deaths are sanctioned by presidents and governments back home in our countries? Do we really believe that killing for country is worthier than killing for fear or revenge?” (ibid). And where were those who gave the orders, the strategists, the Generals? In the war room of Headquarters, safely situated far from the front, no doubt, poring casually over positions and totting up casualties. The narrator reveals his observation of the value of human life in the novel. Generals die in bed, while soldiers die in the trenches horrifically, infested with lice and surrounded by rats fattened on corpses. There are no rules, no expectations in war. The men inhabit a senseless world, trusting only the instinct to stay alive (www.powells.com). He first notes the Canadian soldiers never refer to the Germans as [their] enemy, showing they do not want to kill Germans no more than the Germans want to kill Canadians, ironic since they are both trained to do so. This is vividly seen in a raid when he must kill a German or be killed in the trench. (www.customessaymeister.com). The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities, RALPH, (www.ralphmag.org) a consortium of authors reviewing books, has this to say about Generals Die in Bed , “The First World War may seem distant and irrelevant today, but it is a timeless and important lesson. As the violent aftermath to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary in southeast Europe, six of the worlds great nation-states got involved in a rapidly escalating conflict that dragged on for more than four years, destroying some of the richest farmlands of Europe, reducing millions of the hapless poor and ignorant to beggars, lining the pockets of the large industrial complexes of Europe and America and others who manufactured arms and ammunition on a global scale, and killing, without compunction, millions of the finest upcoming youths of France, Germany, Russia, Austria, Italy, America and the British Empire. Almost seventy million troops were involved and a good fifteen percent of them lie buried in anonymity in that war-torn region. As ancient regimes fell, the very earth itself was enriched with the blood of these staunch, resolute, innocent and ignorant youths. This way, the very old and rich, who have always resented the young (sic), were able to annihilate an entire generation, the disastrous consequences of which became more than evident in a few years.” The experience of trench warfare takes on renewed vibrancy as readers identify with the plight of the youthful soldiers (www.ralphmag.org). And, most haunting, the casual murder of young German soldiers trying to surrender: ‘Bitte --- bitte (please --- please).’ Their voices are shrill. They are mostly youngsters. They throw themselves into the crater of a shell hole. They cower there. Some of our men walk to the lip of the hole and shoot into the huddled mass of Germans. Clasped hands are held up from out of the funnel-shaped grave. The hands shake eloquently asking for pity. There is none. Our men shoot into the crater. In a few seconds only a squirming mass is left. As I pass the hole I see the lips of a few moving’(ibid). The book speaks of the real obscenity of those on the front lines, being forced into daily acts of carnage against their equals, against their hearts, against themselves. Generals Die in Bed is one of the great documents of the new honesty” (ibid). Both reviewers agree on almost every relevant point. In fact, they do not differ at all, other than offer their perspectives in their unique styles. The soldier has been reduced to a lowly pawn, fit to only receive and obey all orders, in a game fought on sixty-four squares—the battlefield— by opponents secure in their luxurious Headquarters (the Generals). Your Mythic Journey ‘Once upon a time in the childhood of the race, people told stories, lived within a rich horizon of myth, punctuated their lives with rites of passage, celebrated the changing seasons with rituals, entertained themselves with tales about the antics of the gods, goddesses, foxes, and crows. But now we have come of age and outgrown such childhood superstitions’ (Keen, 1973). Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox discuss in ‘Your Mythic Journey’ (1973), our traverse through life on a premise that each life is a collation of stories and that each human being is a repository thereof. With age and maturity, each person realizes that his bibliography is a collection of trash and valuables and that the unwanted portions must be junked if he wishes to be recognized with due deference and dignity. Each individual has to dramatize his existence, combine his personal unfinished story or myth with relevant segments of his cultural and family myths to discover and create a personal myth that illuminates and completes his story. (Erasing the Silence, Moondance Ezine 1998). They list a number of Mythic Questions of which the question on family may be most relevant to this Paper: How close should I be to my mother, father, brother, sister, wife, husband, cousin, son, daughter, lover, or friend? When you think of your family for just a moment, there are entire scripts and stories.  There are stories about a family that wasn’t an isolated unit, but had friends, had nephews – a family in which some people kept the peace and some people made the noise.  Parents who sat together or at opposite sides of the table – each one of those positions indicates a different kind of script regarding a family. This is just another way of saying [that] family is probably the central unit in defining who we are – not in the family values sense that one must have a family, but in the reality sense – in all of our lives for good and for bad – and it is so complicated. But how does one define a family? The real challenge to defining family is to understand that two things have to hang together. Family is the only unit where attachment and messiness have to be held together. Attachment and messiness. (Kula 2003). This complex perspective can be molded to suit the environment of the novel, where one Platoon or Company can be called a family in a rather distant metaphor. The Artifact: WWI Painting “We Are Making A New World” Paul Nash (1889–1946), an Official War Artist during both the First and Second World Wars, is best suited to analysis using the Mythic Question and the novel. An alumnus of the Slade School of Art and later, a teacher at the Royal College of Art, he attempts to integrate his work into modern life, prompted by an avant-gardes’ desire to draw the attention of , converse with and stir the minds of audiences outside of the normal gallery context (http://biography.jrank.org/pages/6616/Paul-Nash). Moreover, he hoped that art, beauty and modern life could be reconciled. His water-color landscapes had a poetic character, which derived from a powerful sense of the personality of place. Their style seemed to be influenced by Cézanne but was completely individual (ibid). Of course, Nashs own work was characterized by the misery and melancholy of his own experiences during WW-I. Nashs greatest paintings were, therefore, mostly retrospective and figurative representations of specific landscapes - the battlefields of WW1. His direct and powerful pictures of the dreadful and sordid landscapes of the front, essentially just unkempt graveyards, created an everlasting impression. (http://biography.jrank.org/pages/6616/Paul-Nash) The battle around Ypres lasted as long as the war itself and is remembered for all the wrong reasons. It was an out and out killing field, with massive casualties on both sides. The blood-bath resulted from an incessant massacre in a marshy landscape where the wounded had no chance of recovery, stuck as they were in the mud, with medical aid a distant dream. This is depicted in three of his paintings, a sort of descriptive naturalism which bears witness to the extreme violence of the destruction (www.art-ww1.com). Quoting the website, one can add an academic review, “The Great War landscapes: not a soldier to be seen, abandoned lorries and guns, flooded trenches, a limp corpse among the shells and rifles, smoke and, in the distance a plane, either dropping bombs or falling to the ground, we cannot tell. On top of everything, it rains continually.” How can anyone survive in a horizon-less patch of land which has become a field of death (www.art-ww1.com). And where are the Generals? Sleeping peacefully in a world far removed from the stinking and wretched fields of death! The Authors: Jean Jaques Rousseau and Charles Robert Darwin A: Jean Jaques Rousseau: On the Origin of Inequality Among Men. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 –1778) was a prominent French philosopher, writer, and composer, whose political philosophy influenced the development of modern political and educational thought. He wrote his masterpiece, mentioned supra, in two parts in 1954, starting from the beginning of mankind itself. In Part One, he starts with the emergence of mankind as superior to animals, before going on to describe what his ideal country of residence would be. “I should have wished to be born in a country in which the interest of the Sovereign and that of the people must be single and identical; to the end that all the movements of the machine might tend always to the general happiness. And as this could not be the case, unless the Sovereign and the people were one and the same person, it follows that I should have wished to be born under a democratic government, wisely tempered” (Rousseau, 1754). This profound statement had a role to play in the French Revolution (1789-99). He then introduced materialism and showed how the seeds of inequality were sown. He also noted that there were two kinds of inequality, wherein the latter consisted of different privileges, which some men enjoyed at the expense of others; such as being richer, more privileged, more honored, more powerful or even in a position to demand and obtain obedience (ibid). In Part Two, he states that the first expansions of the human heart were the effects of a novel situation, which united husbands and wives, fathers and children, under one roof. The habit of living together soon gave rise to the finest feelings known to humanity, conjugal love and paternal affection. Every family became a little society, the more united because liberty and reciprocal attachment were the only bonds of its union (ibid). There were both poor and rich families. But those who had amassed wealth, in whichever form, liked the power they wielded over the not-so-fortunate. They established slavery to amass more wealth, leading to battles on a larger scale, with the poor— who had nothing to lose— wielding the weapons. Putting it in his own words: ‘But bodies politic, remaining thus in a state of nature among themselves, presently experienced the inconveniences which had obliged individuals to forsake it; for this state became still more fatal to these great bodies than it had been to the individuals of whom they were composed. Hence arose wars, battles, murders, and reprisals, which shock nature and outrage reason; together with all those horrible prejudices which class among the virtues the honor of shedding human blood’. But where were the rich men? In their resplendent chateaus, where else? B: Charles Robert Darwin: The Origin of Species. Charles Darwin began drafting his epic ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’ in 1842 and finally had it published rather hurriedly in 1859. He seemed to be influenced by ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ written in 1798 by Thomas Malthus, in what is known today as the ‘Malthusian Principle’. He refers to Malthus in his introduction (page vii). He was also deeply motivated by Sir Charles Lyells Principles of Geology (1830-1833), according to his tutor at Cambridge, John Stevens Henslow (1796-1861) as reported by Richard Milner, The Encyclopedia of Evolution, p.286. After reading ‘The Principles of Biology’ (Herbert Spencer, 1864), Darwin shortened the title of his book to ‘Origin of Species’ in 1859. In his book, Darwin stated that all living organisms in the world, human, animal or plant, continued to evolve with time. Under natural conditions, each species would absorb just that little bit extra that would make it better than its progenitor. Over eons, the end result could look and behave in a manner totally alien to its original version. Since all living organisms had evolved over billions of years, Darwin concluded that all living organisms had a common ancestor, or were part of a gargantuan family, a fact that has since been disproved. To put it in simpler words, a coconut will never be transformed into a banana, nor will a horse grow wings and fly like the mythical Pegasus. An important conclusion that he drew was that organisms unable to cope with the environment would die out, thus paralleling the theory of Survival of the Fittest, which has been approved universally. Over the centuries, human breeders have produced dramatic changes within domestic animal populations simply by selecting individuals to breed. They have been able to accentuate desirable traits, given the trait is already present in the creatures genetic code (www.allaboutscience.org). Simple examples are thoroughbred racehorses, where an outstanding horse is retired to stud and then mated with an equally outstanding mare. The foal is then sold for a fortune, as it is expected to inherit the best from its parents. Successful experiments have been carried out in the cases of milch cows to maximize milk output, sheep to increase the quantity and quality of wool, etc. Today, genome cloning is the order of the day and live sheep have been cloned asexually. Adapting this theory to this Paper, the concept of Survival of the Fittest can be shown to mean Survival of the Strongest, a euphemism for Survival of the Richest, which takes us back to where we started, i.e., the futility of war with teenagers facing off, scared of what lay ahead of them, and the untold and unnecessary damage suffered by the opposing sides. Generals Die in Bed (Harrison, 1930) was a roaring success soon after it was published. Rave reviews followed in the print media as it clearly demonstrated how stupid leaders of countries could be. Because of an assassination in the southeast corner of Europe, six of the worlds great nation-states got unnecessarily involved in a more than four year war, resulting in the inevitable destruction of man and material. The farmlands of Europe lay devastated, as were the poor and ignorant. Millions of the finest youngsters of the western world were killed, more by lack of basic logistic and medical backup than the enemy’s weapons. We saw how this feeling was reproduced in paintings. But no General was seen risking his life, not while he could play with lives of the wretched young and unsullied troops at his command. References Art of the 1st WW: http://www.art-ww1.com/gb/texte/052text.html#back. Blackadder, British Broadcasting Corporation TV Serial, aired 28 September to 02 November 1989; Atkinson. R., Laurie.H., Fry.S., Robinson.T. Darwin C. R., The Origin of Species, 1859. Dos Passos, J.R., American Novelist and Critic, 1930. Erasing the Silence, from Moondance Ezine: Celebrating Creative Women, http://www.moondance.org/1998/winter98/index.html Harrison, Charles Yale, 1930, Generals Die In Bed, Annick Press, ISBN 1554510740. Henslow.J.S., (1796-1861) Professor, Cambridge University, Tutor of Darwin.C.R. http://www.allaboutscience.org/origin-of- species.htm Hofstader.F., http://www.ralphmag.org/EP/world-war-one.html Keene, Sam and Valley-Fox, Anne, 1973, Mythic Questions from Your Mythic Journey. Kula.I., 2003, http://www.simple-wisdom.com/episode04_accepting_family.htm Lyell. C. Bart. Principles of Geology (1830-1833). Mondor. C., Reviewer Booklist, Bookslut, Eclectica Magazine & Voices of New Orleans, 2002, in www.eclectica.org/v10n4/mondor_harrison.html, accessed on 01 December 2002. Malthus.T., An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Milner.R., Anthropologist, The Encyclopedia of Evolution: Humanitys Search for Its Origins. Nash. P., WW-I painting “We Are Making A New World”, 1918. Nash.P., (1889–1946) Biography - http://biography.jrank.org/pages/6616/Paul-Nash-(-1889- %E2%80%93-1946-) .html#ixzz0YZ22VNNT accessed on 02 December 2009. Rousseau, J.J., On the Origin of Inequality Among Men, 1754; Translator Cole. G. D. H.(n.d.). Spencer.H., The Principles of Biology, 1864. The New-York Evening Post, established 1801, renamed New York Post. http://www.customessaymeister.com/customessays/Book%20Reports/3657.htm accessed on 01 December 2009. http://www.powells.com/biblio?show=9781550377309#synopses_and_reviews accessed on 01 December 2009. http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://www.rennart.co.uk/images/nashww1.jpg&imgref url=http://www.rennart.co.uk/nash.html&usg=__SymU1GVOT2vf2jByW2PXwR5iu0I=&h=222&w=283&sz=28&hl=en&start=5&um=1&tbnid=IglM8YHRiwNlKM:&tbnh=89&tbnw=114&prev=/images%3Fq%3DWWI%2Bpaintings%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DX%26um%3D1. accessed on 02 December 2009. http://www.express.uk, accessed on 02 December 2009. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096548/quotes, accessed on 02 December 2009. Read More