Paths of Glory (3 page)

The diplomatic bungling that ensued began when Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria presented Serbia with demands that were so severe that no sovereign nation could fulfill them, although it desperately attempted to do so. As a consequence of Serbia's rejection of his demands, Joseph asked German emperor Wilhelm, an Austrian ally, for support. Russia, a diplomatic ally of Serbia, then countered Germany's implied intervention by mobilizing its vast citizen army, which unnerved the highly influential German army's high command. War was eventually declared on August 1, 1914.

Concerned about the superior size of the Russian mobilized army (although this army was poorly equipped and trained), the German army high command soon initiated the Schlieffen Plan, which called for a two-pronged invasion of France, an ally of Russia's since 1892,
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through Belgium and across the Alsace-Lorraine frontier. For Germany to avoid being caught in a two-front war between Russian and France, the basic strategy was to strike quickly—to take Paris before the French army could be mobilized for war. Germany subsequently invaded France through Belgium, where it soon met unexpected resistance that significantly slowed its invasion. In the meantime, Great Britain, which had previously formed an alliance with Belgium, intervened and fought a difficult battle at Mons and then began a delaying campaign to slow the Germans' seemingly inevitable advance toward Paris. For its part, France had thrown together its own armed resistance both along the Belgian border and in Alsace-Lorraine. And Russia had finally mobilized its army and was attempting to engage in the war as well on the eastern front. During this time, the large armies engaged in rather dramatic and sweeping combat that eventually led to the German invasion being halted at the first battle of the Marne, and what followed after that were the initial stages of trench warfare, a form of combat radically different from what had gone before. After being stopped on their drive toward Paris, the Germans, instead of retreating to their own country, which would have been the traditional thing to do, dug in on French and Belgian soil. And, to counter them, Britain and France dug in, too, forming the infamous western front. This stalemate is what is preeminently known about World War I. While death on the battlefield is always tragic, especially for the families of the fallen, it was the dehumanizing effects of trench warfare, men living like rats in mud trenches, bodies of the fallen piling up around the scarred battlefield, that dramatically changed the entire attitude of the modern world. Injustice is always an inherent consequence of a dehumanized world, especially when soldiers are continually asked to do much, much more than is humanly possible by generals who are detached from their own humanity.

As these two warring factions continued to face each other in their trenches over the next four years, heavy casualties started to mount in battles such as Verdun, which lies in France near the border with Germany. Verdun was a model for the battle in
Paths of Glory.
No single battle of World War I more fully exemplifies the futility and utter waste of humanity than does the one fought at Verdun. The historical significance of Verdun dates back to the Romans, who gave the city its original name, Virodunium.
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What made Verdun such an important location was the series of fortresses that surrounded the city and had shielded the French heartland from attack by the Germans for generations. As a consequence, Verdun had become a sacred place in “the hearts and minds of the French people,” who would defend the city at all costs.
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The Germans knew of its importance and decided to attack Verdun because they wanted to kill as many French combatants as they could. “In five months, more than twenty-three million shells were fired by the two contending armies at Verdun, on average more than a hundred shells a minute. Verdun itself remained in French hands, but the death toll there was 650,000 men.”
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The battle for Verdun began on February 21, 1916, and lasted for ten months.

For the most part, French soldiers had been poorly led early in the war, and they were needlessly slaughtered more often than not. Verdun was the most catastrophic battle of the war for the French, as well as for the Germans, if not the most catastrophic battle for all of historical time. While the historical aspects of Verdun do not actually coincide with the novel, that battle, more than anything else, is an emblem of the war's seemingly futile experience for the French soldier. In Verdun, Cobb found the crucial thematic foundation for his story and emblematic justification for the bitter injustice his novel so poignantly conveys.

Paths of Glory
was first published in 1935. Its title comes from Thomas Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” in the line “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
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While this eighteenth-century poem was written during a much more heroic age than the modern period, the idea in Gray's line reflects a less-than-heroic attitude toward dying for the sake of glory. However, in this twentieth-century World War I novel, Cobb's modern perspective is much, much more ironic and bitter. While Gray describes the individual's paths of glory leading to the death of one man, Cobb focuses on the hubristic paths of the generals' glory leading to the graves of millions of common soldiers, those who were just trying to do their job and survive, to go home and enjoy their ordinary lives. The countryside of Belgium and northern France is littered with military cemeteries and monuments to the dead. One could say that the modern context requires a whole new sense of mathematics that was not even contemplated in the eighteenth century, primarily because the calculus of war dramatically changed in the twentieth century. Despite all these crucial thematic underpinnings embedded in the title,
Paths of Glory
was not actually titled by Cobb, but came out of a publisher's promotional contest that attracted significant interest.
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The book initially stayed on the bestseller list for several weeks and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.
Paths of Glory
was also turned into a play by Sidney Howard. Despite this early boost, however, the novel did not sustain momentum, and sales subsequently declined. The novel was republished by Avon in 1973 and the University of Georgia Press in 1987.
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While Cobb's novel has been somewhat neglected over the years by academia, more recently, Kubrick's movie version has received a somewhat more scholarly examination, especially after the death of the filmmaker in 1999.

Cobb's novel was adapted into a film in 1957 by the great filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.
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Tim Dirks writes about this film that

To term this film antiwar, a commonly misused term, is not quite accurate because the film and the book do not necessarily criticize war in a pacifistic way as much as they deride the bureaucratic apparatus that is organized to fight modern war. More than any other feature, the movie goes to great and obvious lengths to contrast the elaborate living conditions of the generals, who reside in magnificent châteaus, with those of the common soldiers, who live in cramped and rustic trenches. However, those are not all of the differences between the book and movie. For his part, Kubrick “adds at least four scenes that were not in the novel, and which ameliorate Cobb's almost totally bitter picture of humanity.”
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One significant outcome of these changes is that the film depicts Colonel Dax in a much more heroic way. In the book, Dax equivocates in his support of his troops; in the movie, he does not. In Kubrick's hands, the moral focus is on the heroic actions of one man, Colonel Dax, fighting a corrupt and self-serving bureaucracy. In Cobb's version, there are no heroes. The difference between these two versions of Dax is that the movie forms a much more simplistic examination of bureaucratic moral corruption than is depicted in the novel. One could say that the movie version veers somewhat toward the Hollywood Western hero morality play, with Dax playing the tough-guy hero and Assolant the scar-faced villain. Although ultimately Dax fails to get his men out of harm's way, his motives have remained pure throughout, and, yes, he does manage to get the bad guy in the end. The novel, however, creates a more complex and yet bitter indictment of the military bureaucracy during war, possibly too complex and too bitter for film-going audiences in the mid-twentieth century.

The American war novel tradition began with Stephen Crane's
The Red Badge of Courage,
which was set during the Civil War. This tradition primarily depicts the plight of a common soldier in the face of modern combat, specifically involving not necessarily the first taste of combat as much as the initial comprehension of one's own mortality in war. While the protagonist in
The Red Badge of Courage,
Henry Fleming, runs like a rabbit during his first taste of combat, it is actually his encounter with a corpse that initiates his moral development as a character. The ultimate issue concerning the eventual moral development of the protagonist is whether to stay in the war and possibly die as a consequence or instead run away from the killing and save oneself. The protagonists in this phase of the American war tradition always choose to flee. Other representative novels, which include Joseph Heller's
Catch-22
and Tim O'Brien's
Going After Cacciato,
have their protagonist choose similar moral actions in the face of mortal danger.

Paths of Glory
does not fit neatly into the American war novel tradition, primarily because it is entirely about French soldiers in the French army, and the novel does not focus on the individual. None of the soldiers involved in the novel is American. Although the main protagonist in Hemingway's
A Farewell to Arms,
Frederic Henry, belongs to the Italian ambulance corps, the story itself is essentially American because he is an American. While Cobb did serve in the Canadian army, he was actually an American citizen, born in Italy to American parents, and spent most of his early life living in England. The point is that Cobb did not necessarily have French sensibilities. Yet all the men in Cobb's novel are French because they are a better fit for his moral tale within the context of World War I.
Paths of Glory
is more an emblematic moral tale than the highly personalized, realistic novel Hemingway wrote about World War I. Moreover, unlike Cobb's novel,
A Farewell to Arms
is a love story more than it is about the conditions of war. Cobb's novel is grounded in the idea that modern war is an ignominiously dangerous experience.

Despite all of these considerations, there is one very prominent aspect of
Paths of Glory
that does fit into this tradition, and it is the fact that the novel has a strong antiwar, or antimili-tary, strain in it. While other features of the American war novel tradition do not necessarily apply, this particular one is very important. Serious American war fiction never conveys a pro-war stance (while there is plenty of bad fiction that certainly does). And because the ultimate moral issue in the novels from the American war tradition concerns the survival of the individual, these novels always convey an antiwar message, because while war may be helpful for a nation's political survival, the experience is often harmful for the individual, especially the common soldiers, who are the ones doing the dying. Moreover, Cobb's novel does not focus specifically on the moral example of an individual, but rather on that of several individuals;
Paths of Glory
does not completely fulfill this aspect of the tradition. While
Paths of Glory
obviously conveys a moral message, it is representative of the effect of the war overall more than of the individualistic experience of one specific soldier, which is a major distinction.

In
Paths of Glory,
the moral focus is on the men, plural, who are in charge of the military bureaucracy rather than on the men who are sentenced to death. Didier, Langlois, and Férol are victims more than anything else. Instead, it is the men who have to make moral choices about the condemned who are under examination, the ones who are making the decisions and giving the orders. And the ones following the orders are the modern apparatchiks. Cobb points to General de Guerville, the army commander's chief of staff; General Assolant, the divisional commander; Colonel Dax, the commander of the 181st Regiment; and the lower-ranking leaders at the company level, Jonnart, Renouart, Roget, and Sancy. Except for Captain Renouart, who acts upon his Christian conscience and refuses to select a man, each one of these men responds within the narrow moral confines of a military bureaucracy. General de Guerville is the quintessential bureaucrat, who attempts to find a solution that serves everyone's needs, especially the command apparatus that runs the military, and Assolant is the perfect self-serving tyrant. Although Dax initially tries to defend his soldiers, in the end he acquiesces to the dictates of the bureaucracy when he realizes that if he continues to defy orders, he may be sticking his neck out a little too far. Yes, he could have done more, but in the end he does not. Jonnart is simply following orders unthinkingly, and leaves his selection literally up to the luck of the draw. Lieutenant Roget of course uses the situation to his own personal advantage by eliminating a potential adversary. Sancy deludes himself into thinking that he is doing the right thing, when in fact he is attempting to play God instead.