Paths of Glory (4 page)

1
Martin Gilbert,
The First World War: A Complete History
(New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 333–34.

2
Gilbert, xxi.

3
James H. Meredith,
Understanding the Literature of World War I: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004), 11.

4
Meredith, 165.

5
In the book the German fortification is called the Pimple; however, in the movie it is referred to as the Anthill.

6
Gilbert, 4.

7
Meredith, 63.

8
Meredith, 63.

9
Gilbert, 299-300.

10
Thomas Gray,
http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc
.

11
Stephen E. Tabachnick, Afterword to
Paths of Glory
(1935; repr., Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 237.

12
Tabachnick, 269.

13
Tim Dirks,
http://www.filmsite.org/path.html
.

14
Dirks.

15
Tabachnick, 303.

During the war, Cobb kept a war diary, starting it, as he says, on “the day I enlisted.”
¹⁶
He was eighteen at the time, in military age, but Cobb was actually seventeen, and he continued working on the original text “until a year or so after the war.”
¹⁷
Cobb later revised and annotated the diary at the age of thirty-four. The diary has remained unpublished since.

In the revised foreword to the diary, Cobb describes his manuscript: “It was written mostly in indelible pencil in a small leather covered diary bought with an eye to its fitting into the breast pocket of my tunic—the pocket over which all the medals were to dangle. It was against orders to keep a diary, so I went ahead and kept it.”
¹⁸
Cobb continues to describe the diary by stating that he has read it only twice. The first time was in 1919, when, as Cobb writes, he was “brooding that year over my lost status as a hero and, apparently, consoled myself by thumbing over the record of my gallantry.”
¹⁹
The second time he read the diary was fifteen years later. In doing so the second time, Cobb states that he “found that my memory, like the indelible pencil, was beginning to fade.”
²⁰
He goes on to say that it was then “time, therefore, to annotate those staccato, laconic lines. Time to unlock the cryptic references before I lost the combination. Time, too, to catch and peg down those fading memories, some of them at least, before they were gone forever.”
²¹

Cobb's revisions are revealing about the perils of World War I duty. He writes:

In this description of the World War I battlefield landscape, the ordinary events of life, moonlight and rain, for example, have transmogrified into nightmarish experiences, and the words of the quotidian have become surreal modifiers for extreme pain and suffering.

The pain and suffering of the war helps shape the language of modern literature. Frederic Henry, in Hemingway's
A Farewell to Arms,
states that “abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and dates.”
²³
In his foreword, Cobb indicates why this desire for linguistic concreteness is so important for a veteran: “Names of places and villages are noted down systematically. It was not only because they were the only thing which distinguished one pile of ruins from another, but also because I was always keenly interested in knowing what place I was in.”
²⁴
Interestingly, Cobb himself pays tribute to Hemingway's words in his foreword. The language of specificity that the World War I combatants used to describe their experiences separates them significantly from those who had not even been close to the battlefield, and the reason is quite simple. No one who went through the horrors that occurred around the city of Verdun could ever feel normal about those particular places again. Moreover, particularities are also a way to control the emotional experience, to remain focused on the thing itself instead; concreteness abreacts the trauma of war by putting a name to the feelings. Once you put name to something you have gone a long way psychologically toward controlling the memory of the experience. This linguistic abreaction and transformation in part formed the drive toward the specificity of language in modernism away from the more abstract nature of Victorian literature.
²⁵
Since World War I, the concrete language of war has increasingly become the language of normal life.

To put all of this into perspective: despite the best efforts of many high-minded individuals, war continues to be an inevitable part of the human condition. Until mankind truly figures out a way to live in peace, wars will continue to occur, and as long as there are wars, people are going to die unjustly. In order to fight wars, nations are going to have to manage large organizations, meaning that the few people at the top are going to continue to make tough decisions that will directly affect the lives of the many soldiers at the bottom. Cobb's
Paths of Glory,
therefore, serves as a cautionary tale about how bureaucracies tend to take on lives of their own outside the normal moral attitudes of civilized society. Even ordinary soldiers, who would never consider such actions in civilian life, are capable of very inhumane actions when put under the pressure of war. As mankind moves forward in the twenty-first century, Cobb's novel should continue to stand the test of time and remain relevant to an informed public.
Paths of Glory
will finally become the war classic that it truly deserves to be.

—JAMES H. MEREDITH

16
Humphrey Cobb, Foreword (an unpublished diary).

17
Cobb, I.

18
Cobb, I.

19
Cobb, II.

20
Cobb, II.

21
Cobb, II.

22
Cobb, IV.

23
Ernest Hemingway,
A Farewell to Arms
(New York: Scribners Paperback Fiction Edition, 1995 [1929]), 185.

24
Cobb, IV.

25
Meredith, 2.

Dirks, Tom. Review of
Paths of Glory.
http://www.filmsite.org/path.html
.

 

Faulkner, William.
A Fable.
New York: Vintage Books, 1978.

 

Gilbert, Martin.
The First World War: A Complete History.
New York: Henry Holt, 1994.

 

Meredith, James.
Understanding the Literature of World War I: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents.
Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004.

 

Tabachnick, Stephen E. Afterword,
Paths of Glory: A Novel by Humphrey Cobb.
1935. Reprint, Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1987.

The appendix to the Penguin Classics edition of
Paths of Glory
includes excerpts from the previously unpublished “Diary of Humphrey Cobb (October 1917–November 1918): Annotated by Him in 1933.” The text was provided by Annie Cobb and selected by James H. Meredith.

“They're marching pretty sloppy,” said the younger one.

“So would you, if you'd been through what they have,” the older one answered.

The two soldiers were standing, partly concealed, behind a roadside clump of trees. A light wind from the northeast brought a sound of distant gunfire which the older one recognized as the dying notes of the dawn bombardments. The attention of both men had become fixed on the body of troops which was approaching them down the road. It was a regiment of infantry, and, as it drew level with them, the uneven tramp of many feet that were not wholly in step grew louder and blotted out the sound of the distant artillery. The younger one began again:

“How d'you know they've been through anything?”

“There are several ways of telling,” said the older one, getting ready to do the telling with a pause which expressed at the same time his boredom with the obvious and his pleasure in an opportunity to exercise his didactic impulse. “It's not that they're dirty and need a shave. You don't need a war to get that way. No. But look at their faces. See that sort of greyish tint to their skin? That's not from sitting in a café on a Sunday afternoon. Then look at some of those jaws. See how the lower jaw looks sort of loose, how it seems to hang down a bit? That's a reaction. It shows they've been clenching them. Take a look at their eyes. They're open, but they have the look of not seeing much of anything. They've had it tough, all right. Their eyes are glazed. They're nearly all of them constipated, of course, but it isn't so much that as . . .”

“Now I know you're fooling me. Everybody always says the front line acts on you just the other way.”

“Is that so.”

“Yes, it is. Why, only the other day I went to the medical officer for a pill. He said, ‘You're going to join your regiment, aren't you?' I said, ‘Yes, sir,' and he said, ‘Well, here's your pill, but it's the last one you'll need till the war's over. The German artillerymen will keep your bowels open for you from now on.'”

“That doctor was a fool. And what's more, it's clear he's never been near the line or he wouldn't talk that way.”

“But everybody—”

“Yes, I know. But don't forget this—all the hot air in this army isn't stored only at the balloon sections.”

“What d'you mean?”

“I mean this. The Germans have got all our trench latrines registered. And we've got theirs, too. Now a soldier doesn't like to go to a place that's registered. What's more, he doesn't like to take his breeches down because when his breeches are down he can't jump or run. So what does he do? He bakes it. I've been out on this front for nearly two years and I haven't seen a case of diarrhoea yet. And the reason is that when men get scared they get tense and things inside them solidify. Functions stop. Secretions dry up. When you hear a shell coming straight at you, you hold everything, even your breath. You can't help it. That's why those fellows' faces look grey. Their skin is dry. So are their eyes, and from lack of sleep too. That's why they look glazed. For some reason their jaws seem to relax first. Every time a man comes out of the line something happens inside him like the mainspring busting in a watch. Besides, I happen to know those fellows have taken a terrible pounding up in the Souchez Valley.”

“You know a lot, don't you?”

“No, not so much. I just keep my ears and eyes open, that's all. But I do know for a fact that they've had it tough because that's my regiment and I met a sergeant down at railhead who'd been wounded up there and he told me about it.”

“What regiment is it?”

“I don't know that I ought to tell you. You ask so many questions you're probably a spy. That's the 181st Regiment of the line—or what's left of it.”

“Say, that's the regiment I'm ordered to join. Let's follow along. We'll save ourselves a fifteen-kilometre hike to Villers and back again. Come on, grab your stuff—”

“Hey there, wait a minute. There's no hurry. Let me handle this and we'll be all right.”

“Funny, I saw your numerals but somehow I didn't take it in. Excitement of going up to the front and all that, I suppose.... Say, my name is Duval. What's yours? Where are you coming from, anyway? Hospital?”

“No. First-Class Private Langlois. Late of Paradise, otherwise known as leave.”

The two men shook hands, looked each other quickly and deeply in the eye for the first time, then smiled as their glances disengaged. The regiment in horizon blue—at that distance the blue of a horizon upon which a storm is gathering—was already passing out of sight and merging into the poplars which lined the road. The sound of their tired, uneven tread had moved away with them too.

“Well, what'll we do?” said Duval.

“Somebody said that a good soldier is one who knows when to disobey. He was right, and I'm a good soldier. Now we're ordered to join our regiment at Villers. But they've apparently just come from there, so we'll save ourselves a thirty-kilometre hike for nothing. But we won't hot-foot it after them either. Got any money? All right. Then we'll go back down to that
bistro
we passed at the crossroads and have a couple of drinks and spend some time. They'll tell us there which way the regiment went and we'll start out so as to catch up with them in time for evening grub. Let's get going.”

They heaved their packs on, slung their rifles, and clambered over to the road. Turning to the left, they moved off in the wake of the regiment, taking their time and exchanging bits of information about themselves. Langlois learnt that his companion worked in a Belfort bank and lived with his parents in the suburbs. His class was just beginning to be sent to the front, and he had somehow got left behind by the detail ordered to the 181st. That was why he was alone. It was a complicated story of confused orders and Langlois didn't pay much attention to it. Duval, glancing involuntarily at Langlois's ribbons, said he hoped he would win a medal, wondered what the chances were of his getting a commission when he was a year or so older. Langlois told him the chances were good if you weighed them on the basis of time and officer casualties alone. He himself, he said, didn't want a commission. He had enough to think about looking after his own skin without worrying about a lot of other men too. He was an engineer, he told Duval, and added derisively that that was no doubt the reason for his being in the infantry. Duval pointed out that Joffre was an engineer, but Langlois only laughed.