Paths of Glory (2 page)

And yet Cobb knew that what he had witnessed in the war was too diffuse, too nuanced, to rest solely on the Great Men of History. In his own writings, he expresses his own complicity and that of his fellow veterans in the savagery:

“I have often had the feeling that a man writing a personal war book was editing it into conformity with post-war fashion and post-war trend,” he wrote in 1933. “It is pathetic in a way because it expresses so clearly the feeling of shame at having, whether as a victim of deception or not, made a jingoistic ass of oneself, of having been awfully gullible. What I feel and have felt for some years is pride in my physical and mental stamina, shame in my mental blindness, in my ignorance.”

Nor does Cobb's outlook spare the bystanders to the Great War, the multitudes who were able to pick up their ordinary lives as if something extraordinary had not happened to humanity in the trenches of the western front:

“Saw some war pictures—movies taken at the time,” he wrote in 1933. “I was glad that several shots of dead and mangled bodies were shown. I went out of the theater inwardly very angry at war, and all the more so because I have been reading—saturated as they are with pettiness, lousiness, and bickerings—of the men who sent those other poor devils to that frightful butchery. But I went out of the theater right into the Broadway crowd, the pasty, unhealthy fishy eyed throng of pimps and chorus men and I wished they could all be mowed down by a fine clean rattling machine gun.”

An angry fellow, and rightly so, given what he had seen. But Cobb's contempt for what humanity had done to itself never reads white-hot on the pages of his novel. Indeed, it is in its restraint that
Paths of Glory
finds its clarity and, indeed, its passion.

No wonder that a fourteen-year-old Stanley Kubrick would read the book and remember it deeply enough to return to its story. No wonder that Kirk Douglas—an actor with most any part for his asking—would risk his own money to bring it to the screen.

It is no slight to Cobb's creation that Kubrick and his screenwriters managed to tease out even more political implication than the novel itself offers. It is the 1957 film version of
Paths of Glory
in which the lieutenant is compelled to face, in the last moments, the man he has sent to his death. And it is the film version that parses between the generals, with one turning on the other as the unlawful order to fire French artillery on French positions is revealed. These were nuances upon nuances—the gamesmanship of ambition and command brought to even greater heights by an auteur operating against the darker strain of the cold war.

Similarly, it was Kubrick who would use the character of Colonel Dax as the moral center of the tale, allowing Kirk Douglas his star turn, and making it possible for him to both lead the doomed charge against the German position and then defend his men passionately in the ensuing court-martial.

Tellingly, Cobb offers no such overarching hero in his original telling. No grand villains, no epic heroes; just the slow tyranny of a self-preserving, self-aggrandizing institution. When asked why he had made an antiwar film, Kubrick reportedly said he hadn't. He had made a political film, a film about authoritarian ignorance.

And of the few liberties that Kubrick took in adapting Cobb's masterwork to the screen, there is no arguing with his extraordinary final scene, in which dog-faced French soldiers first jeer and mock a captured German girl's song, only to see their cruelty dissipate into grief and empathy. Cobb did not write that moment, but every line in the film version of
Paths of Glory
tells us that Cobb would have recognized himself in those worn, sad faces. Indeed, he recognized all of us in those trenches, staring at the shards of our common future, measuring our thinning odds, and enduring, somehow, nonetheless.

DAVID SIMON

Humphrey Cobb's
Paths of Glory
came out in June 1935, six years after the publication of the great class of 1929 World War I novels that included
All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque and
A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway. Cobb was a veteran of World War I, but unlike the works of his contemporaries from that era,
Paths of Glory
has neither been taught routinely in courses nor been prominent in informed conversations about literature of that war. Stanley Kubrick's 1957 movie version of the novel, however, has become a classic. In fact, the movie, starring Kirk Douglas in one of his first major roles, may arguably be the best American antiwar film ever made and certainly one of the best before the great antiwar films came out following the Vietnam War era. No matter how one ranks the movie,
Paths of Glory
as a film is a classic, and now it may be time to reach the same conclusion about the book as well. Due to the fact that the war and the novel both took place in the early part of the last century and much of the context is either forgotten or not understood, the best way to reintroduce this potential classic is to provide the larger context and history of its publication.

On May 27, 1917, large portions of the French army mutinied along their sector of the western front. World War I scholar Martin Gilbert writes, in
The First World War: A Complete History,
that on that date:

Humphrey Cobb's
Paths of Glory
does not refer to this mutiny in particular; however, this event is a part of the book's historical and moral background. Although the French soldiers did not actually mutiny in
Paths of Glory,
they were unable to proceed in the face of overwhelmingly superior military resistance and, as a consequence, unable to take their objective; yet these soldiers were unjustly punished as if they had mutinied. This punishment forms the basis of the novel's injustice (in this particular fictional case, three men from the regiment are unfairly selected to face a firing squad to pay for the whole unit's “crime”). Quite simply, because of the profound ignorance of how to manage the war, the World War I military system was unjust to the common soldier and the cost of this mismanagement was extremely high. Martin Gilbert puts this cost into perspective by stating, “If each of the nine million military dead of the First World War were to have an individual page, the record of their deeds and suffering, their wartime hopes, their pre-war lives and love, would fill twenty thousand [enormous] books.”
²

Because the common French soldiers were particularly mismanaged, it is not coincidental that Cobb chose the French army in which to set this novel; the
poilu,
as the basic French soldier was called, remained restive practically throughout the war—and certainly for good reason. No such mutinies ever occurred within the English army, including the Canadians, or within the relatively green U.S. forces, who arrived en masse only in late 1917 and 1918, or within the German army, for that matter. On the western front, the French army was the only restive Allied force. But of course there were other armies that had their weak moments, too: the Russian army collapsed on the eastern front, and the Italian army had a decisively weak moment as well along their own front, especially during the great retreat from Caporetto, which formed the historical basis of Hemingway's masterpiece
A Farewell to Arms.
However, the western front is where Cobb served and is where most American readers centered their attention about that war. For these reasons, Cobb's decision to set his novel within the French army makes perfect sense.

However, Cobb was not alone in this choice. William Faulkner did it, too. It has always been an understanding that the greatest compliment to any writer is attribution. As such, Faulkner was impressed enough by Cobb's
Paths of Glory
to borrow the setting and situation for his own World War I novel,
A Fable
(1954). While this introduction is primarily about Cobb's novel, it would be very informative to examine how another author dealt with similar material. Faulkner emphasized the actual French mutinies more than Cobb did in his novel, and he turned the event into a Christian allegory, thereby forming the thematic basis of his novelistic fable. It seems to be this Christian allegory that has bothered both modern scholars and general readers alike, as this ancient genre has not been transferred into the contemporary era successfully. Despite this critical difficulty, Faulkner's
A Fable
does convey the moral dilemma that modern war, with its vast numbers of casualties and horrors, has created for the common soldier, the conscript who was ripped out of his normal civilian life to be made cannon fodder for the killing machine in the hands of the generals and political leaders who were in charge of the enormous military apparatus that World War I quickly morphed into. Yes, there is an inherent injustice about modern war toward the common soldier, who generally comes from the country's heartland, and while these soldiers had been responding to their nation's call to arms for generations, World War I proved to be different. In his novel, Faulkner describes these common men during World War I and where they came from:

So, while for generations these men had served their country in previous wars, something changed radically during World War I, especially in how these men were treated by those in charge of the modern bureaucracy. And both Faulkner and Cobb were correct in depicting the reaction of the common French soldier as a consequence.

World War I began in the summer of 1914, following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the throne of the Austrian Empire, in Sarajevo,
³
and ended with the November 11, 1918, armistice and the notorious Treaty of Versailles, which was signed on June 28, 1919.
⁴
While history moves toward the centennial anniversary of World War I, and with it a forthcoming revival of material about the war, little is generally known by the average reader about this conflict beyond trench warfare and the images of mud, barbed wire, and human suffering. Yet this war was far more complicated than that, especially as one particularizes the vast human suffering, which Cobb's
Paths of Glory
does so well. Joseph Stalin has been credited with saying that in the twentieth century, one death is a tragedy but a million deaths has become only a statistic. At its most basic level, this paraphrase conveys the bitterly dehumanizing effect of mass warfare. In normal life, very little is more personal than the act of dying; however, in modern warfare, particularly conflicts that occurred in the first half of the twentieth century, when armies numbered in the millions, death has become more of a management problem than anything else. While casualty rates have significantly fallen in recent conflicts, the bureaucratic bean-counting mentality inherent in large organizations (or corporations in civilian life) has become intrinsically pervasive. This mentality emerged for the common man during World War I when the various conflicting nationalities had to organize themselves to fight one another on a massive and global scale. The nineteenth-century Napoleonic Wars and American Civil War were preludes to what would come in the next century, and the dehumanizing reliance on the hierarchical management of large and complex organizations instead of direct human contact. In essence, World War I sealed mankind's tragic fate in that it manifested a sense of alienation in the depersonalized modern world. On a basic level, the common man was often led to death by men he barely knew. As large armies and organizations grew in number, it became increasingly impossible for the man at the top to know the common man or to even be known by him as well, and as a consequence, life-or-death decisions were made by those who had little or no direct human contact. While it certainly does not justify General Assolant's attitude, as the division commander and the man at the top of the hierarchy, it at least explains why he is so able to punish otherwise innocent men as a consequence of the regiment's failure to reach the unattainable objective of the Pimple.
⁵
Adding to the dehumanization was that for the first time in history, armies ended up not fighting each other face-to-face and standing up man-to-man, as they primarily had done in the past. Warfare in the trenches meant not only living and dying often in muddy squalor, but also fighting the enemy lying on one's belly in order to avoid getting killed by high-powered and accurate rifles and machine-gun fire and high-explosive artillery shells as well.

Although few people realize it now, World War I actually began much like the Napoleonic Wars, with mobile warfare, cavalry charges, and antiquated elaborate uniforms and military equipment, which led to enormous casualties in the face of modern machine guns and artillery. In fact, France suffered the largest overall percentage of casualties during the first few months of the war. The result of this large number of casualties so early in the conflict was that the embattled countries soon discovered that because their prewar troop strengths were so depleted, they had to start relying more on the citizenry, the common conscript, to keep fighting the war. After the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the two conflicting alliances that had divided Europe ignorantly stumbled toward the inevitable conflict, ultimately leading to the deaths of approximately nine million men.