Why Do Generals Die In Bed

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Discuss how generals die in bed illustrates the powerlessness of the young soldiers In his novel, Generals die in bed, Charles Yale Harrison goes to great lengths to depict the frailty of the soldiers. The plot enforces the impotence of the young troopers, by classifying them at the bottom of the social hierarchy, which is imposed at war. Harrison delivers a graphic portaryal of the war, accompanied with the dehumanising impact inflicted upon the soldiers, which made them in to robots with no rights whatsoever. The weakness of the soldiers is again expressed, when they have continue to suffer since they possess no power to strip away the romanticised and glorified mentality from the civilians and those who profitted from the war. Generals…show more content…
In the trenches, the soldiers were made to endure discomforting conditions, whilst wrapped with the fear of being a victim of the monstrous artillery bombardments. They were subjected to such ghastly human sufferings, exposed to immense evil, callousness, that they were eventually completely robbed from their humanity. The encompassing terror of the war robbed the men from their mental and emotional composure, that they no longer had faith in their leaders nor the cause they were fighting for. With the thousands of orders being thrown at the soldiers constantly, they had no choice but to adhere by it, and eventually they had transformed in to soulless and will-less robots. They would blindly proceed with any commandments of the generals because they had been so mechanised that they did not contain the basic power of free speech, and to speak out against acts they knew were unethical and defied the international rules. As the general reads the report with a dispassionate tone, the soldiers and they question the authenticity in their minds of the hospital ship which that was “supposedly”sunk by the Germans. However, they continue to with the attack to seek avenge, because they are helpless in the face of the…show more content…
Most of the civilians rendered in the novel, do not understand the severity of the sufferings of the front line troops. Instead of attempting to sympathesise with the exhausting struggles endured by the soldiers on a daily basis, they promote a glorified notion of war, which opposes the traumatic realites of the hollow and meaningless war. Beyond the confines of the war site, even politicians and newspapers circulated false information about the conditions within the fighting forces, which the gullible citizens blindly accepted and continued to talk about heroism and glory, whilst the soldiers were living in “a hell that no god, however cruel, would fashion”. When the narrator encounters a man who believes the war “has brought out the most heroic qualities in the common people, positively noble qualities”. The narrator was so disenfranchised, that he thought it was useless to tell him “of Brownie, of how Karl died, of the snarling fighting among our own men over a crust of bread”, because he could dismantle conception which seemed to be embedded within those who did not physically participate in the war. Similarly, the soldiers expressed great distress and misery over the fact there were profitting of their conditions, whilst they were living in constant terror. However this time, they possessed no power nor authority to stop
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