A Comparison Of Generals Die In Bed And It Made You Think Of Home

Although both narratives, Generals Die in Bed and It Made You Think of Home, attempt to dispel the glamorous depiction of war, Generals Die in Bed better helps individuals understand WWI in that it focuses solely on the war rather than the narrator, gives a realistic, yet controversial, description of Canadian soldiers role in the war, whilst also continually highlighting the vanity of war. Barnes diary entries tend to err towards a more conservative outlook on the war, while the unnamed narrator of General’s Die in Bed addresses more controversial issues that were prevalent during WWI. Issues such as war crimes, false intel being fed to the troops from higher ups to keep them motivated, as well as the lack of patriotism among the troops are
Both narrators are initially optimistic and eager for deployment, however, this optimism shifts to a sense of dread and heavy suffering once they encounter the unsanitary trench conditions and the unnecessary loss of their close friends. The main difference between the narratives is that the unnamed narrative details an event that fits all too well with the propaganda and patriotic driven paradigm of WWI, while Barnes fails to explain this phenomena in its entirety. The unnamed narrator describes the German raids that go amiss and in order to properly motivate the troops to carry out another raid the Canadian General gives them a speech stating how the “barbaric” Germans sinked a hospital ship that was carrying “more than three hundred wounded Canadian Soldiers” (Harrison, 138). However, he later discovered this was a tall tale told by the General to get them to do his bidding since the actual shipped sinked by the German’s was carrying war materials. It is events like above that highlight the fruitlessness of the war and make the novel General’s Die in Bed a good source to use when trying to understand why WWI was such an unnecessary and disastrous event that was purely politics