Generals Die in Bed

The reception was lukewarm in Canada, however, because of scenes depicting Canadian soldiers looting the French town of Arras and shooting unarmed Germans (which amounted to a war crime).

Additionally, in one passage in the chapter entitled Vengeance, the narrator claims that the faces of the soldiers are "as red as the poppies of which the war-poets are writing about back home."

It was also noted by several parties that, contrary to the title's claim, more than 200 British generals of the First World War were killed, captured or wounded on the front lines.

Harrison denied the allegation in a 1930 interview with the Toronto Daily Star, praising Canadian soldiers and justifying his novel as an attempt to depict the war "as it really was."

[citation needed] After its initial success as part of the "war book boom" of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Generals Die in Bed was largely forgotten, until the Hamilton, Ontario publisher Potlach Publications reissued it in the 1970s.

In 2002, Toronto's Annick Press re-issued the original text of Generals Die in Bed packaged for young adults, and further editions by Penguin Books Australia and Red Fox in the UK followed.

Generals Die in Bed is referenced briefly in the short story "A Natural History of the Dead" by Ernest Hemingway, primarily as a satirical commentary on its title.