• Age: 17 to 18
• Grade: 11
• Reading age: 14 to 18

All war is hell. But for troops serving in World War I, it was the bloodiest trench warfare ever known. GENERALS DIE IN BED is a first-hand account of one young man catapulted from new recruit to walking wounded on the Western Front.

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 (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).

Charles Yale Harrison's profile page

“… a stark and poignant novel.”

Canadian Children's Book News, Summer/10