Paths of Glory

Table of Contents

 

 

PATHS OF GLORY

HUMPHREY COBB (1899–1944) was born in Siena, Italy, on September 5, 1899, to Alice Littell Cobb, a physician, and Arthur Murray Cobb, an artist. He attended boarding school in England during his childhood. Cobb was kicked out of an American high school and he never returned to graduate. At seventeen he decided to enlist in the Canadian army. After serving in the army for three years during World War I, he returned to the United States to work by turns in the stock trade, the merchant marine, publishing, advertising, and the Office of War Information (precursor of the OSS, the CIA predecessor) writing overseas propaganda. During his lifetime he wrote
Paths of Glory
(1935) and
None but the Brave
(1938) and was the lead screenwriter on the movie
San Quentin
(1937).

 

JAMES H. MEREDITH is an internationally respected scholar on the literature and films of twentieth-century wars. He is a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel. He was a graduate English professor at Colorado State University and now develops, teaches, and presents the writing-across-the-curriculum program to doctoral learners at Capella University. He is also the president of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society and is a contributing editor of
War, Literature, and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities.

 

DAVID SIMON, a longtime journalist, author, and television producer, was born in Washington, D.C. He was a reporter for the
Baltimore Sun
for thirteen years before leaving the paper after the publication of his first book,
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets,
which was later adapted as a television series. Simon is the creator and executive producer of the critically acclaimed HBO TV series
The Wire.

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First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1935
This edition with an introduction by James H. Meredith and a foreword by David Simon published in
Penguin Books 2010

 

Copyright Humphrey Cobb, 1935

Copyright renewed William Cobb and Alice Cobb, 1963
Introduction copyright © James H. Meredith, 2010
Foreword copyright © David Simon, 2010
All rights reserved

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING - IN - PUBLICATION DATA
Cobb, Humphrey, 1899–1944.
Paths of glory / [by] Humphrey Cobb ; introduction by James H. Meredith ; foreword by David Simon.
p. cm.—(Penguin classics)
Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN : 978-1-101-56500-1

1. World War, 1914–1918—Fiction. 2. Trials (Treason)—France—Fiction. 3. Mutiny—France—
History—20th century—Fiction. 4. Military discipline—France—History—20th century—Fiction.
5. France—Politics and government—1870–1940—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3505.O1385P38 2010
813'.52—dc22 2010013185

 

 

 

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Humphrey Cobb gave us our last, failed century in a single, basic narrative. He told us of men devoured by the very institutions they served, without recourse, and for purposes petty, mechanical, and abstract. Indeed, given how little mankind truly learned from the charnel house that was the twentieth century, Cobb may have given us a blueprint for human suffering that will carry us through the next hundred years as well.

To say that
Paths of Glory
is a novel ahead of its time is problematic, however. Cobb's careful representations of the state of humanity, the use of institutionalized terror, and the savagery of modern war making are all appropriate reflections on what he experienced as a young man in the trenches of World War I. His novel was right on time; it's the rest of us who have been late to grasp its implications.

An American who was an early volunteer for the Great War's western front with Canadian forces, Cobb comes to his story with a veteran's wary eye and with little of the flummery and sentimentality that accompanies so many war narratives. He rightly suspects even the most earnest antiwar literature of harboring the sustaining seeds of heroism and nationalism in its depictions of quotidian suffering:

“Where all these
Journey's End
s and
All Quiet
s fail utterly as anti-war propaganda, indeed where they become pro-war propaganda, is in the stoicism, the self-abnegation, the idealism and romantic nobility which they portray,” wrote Cobb in early 1933, only two years before the publication of his own masterwork. “How the actors hate war, etc., but Christ, how nobly they suffer! And a regiment marching down a street behind a good band— everybody knows what that does to your reasonableness and logic. The only available effective anti-war propaganda that I know is photographs of butchered bodies—the more horrible the better.”

Cobb's own words do not waste themselves on pathos or the stoic heroism of the everyman. No, he is about the practical facts, and
Paths of Glory
has its focus on the chain of command. The target is the army itself as an institution, an unwieldy and unyielding organism that lurches from one murderous horror to the next, guided only by whichever combination of ambitions and vanities are in play at any moment. No human presence is larger than the institution; none has agency enough to transcend it. Sudden, inevitable death is the great constant in
Paths of Glory,
its omnipresence mitigated only by random chance.

This is indeed a book for a world in which men fly airplanes into buildings and think of themselves as religious martyrs, in which beheadings and car bombings are grist for YouTube video making, in which the flick of a switch thousands of miles distant sends a missile into a village market or wedding party.

Despite all of our warm, humanist hyperbole, this is the fundamental outcome of the twentieth century. Mass exterminations and total wars have made a mockery of the Napoleonic Code and the Geneva conventions; venture capital, an international corporate culture, and modern automation have brought organized labor to its knees. And while the lucky and talented among us are, perhaps, worth more than ever, the average human soul has never been more expendable than it is right now.

Human beings, Cobb's work argues, are worth less every day.

This singular truth suffuses the experience of World War I and its aftermath, and it is this truth from which Cobb, writing in dry, crisp sentences, refuses to turn. The debacle of the Great War laid bare the fraud behind so many institutional ideals. Nationalism was a butcher; religion, ever more useless amid the unending horror. And the institutions of state to which one might appeal for a reprieve—the government, its diplomats, its ministers, its army commanders, its clergy—were all complicit in granting normalcy, even a certain inevitability, to the daily cavalcade of violent death.

In
Paths of Glory,
Cobb finds the proper allegory to drive this point home. He uses the true story of the Corporals of Souain, in which four corporals of the French 136th Regiment were executed at random
“pour encourager les autres”
following the failure of a March 1915 attack against a hill near Souain in Champagne. The senselessness of the action, coupled with the callow ambitions of those in command, is indeed ripe with portent for the century ahead—an epoch in which barbarity would fall as much on the civilian occupants of a Warsaw, a Dresden, or a Nagasaki as upon armed combatants. As the generals bicker over the number to be shot in order to cover their own failure, we can already hear the cold calculations a century hence, the arithmetic of terror that is in play every time a suicide bomber steps onto a Tel Aviv bus, or, for that matter, every time a helicopter fires a missile into a crowded Gaza street.

It is a century in which we calibrated our most powerful institutions against the very idea of innocence, and Cobb, reflecting on only the bloody beginning of that epoch, takes pains to portray the institution of the French army not as an unfeeling, unthinking monolith but as a living, functioning organism, ever greater than the sum of its parts, moving from certitude to certitude, expediency to expediency, and chewing up lives in the process.

It is a general's ambition. It is a colonel's sense of duty. It is a lieutenant's cowardice. And it is a sergeant's inability to refuse the most amoral order. It is all of these things, operating simultaneously, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in concert, each small part of the killing mechanism playing its role and no more. But in the end, the death of innocents is the fixed outcome.

To write his great tragedy, Cobb needed no archvillains, no great evils. As the machine guns and poison gas of the new century bring forward the possibilities of mass extermination, the story requires only ordinary ambitions and commonplace vanities in order for good men to die. And it is not so much a solitary and vile decision by any one scoundrel that condemns the innocent, but the absence of a decision by so many others. The inertia of the modern, layered bureaucracy is immutable. The institution demands blood, and then, by and large, the individuals who constitute that institution simply shrug, incapable of resistance or rebellion.

This is not to say that Cobb was ready to absolve from blame the architects of his war. In describing the Chateau L'Aigle, where his novel reaches its climax, the author dances a few half steps from the ordinary plotting to name names. Citing the mansion's history, the author is pointed in saying that von Kluck, John French, and Foch had stopped there, not to mention Joffre, who had “dined there, silently but with gusto, and then gone to bed and slept undisturbed by any nightmares of Verdun. Haig had sat his charger at the lodge gates and had taken the salute of the Canadian regiments on the way up to the Passchendaele butchery. . . .”