Paths of Glory

by Humphrey Cobb

  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: And most of its [the French regiment’s] subsequent replacements had been drawn from this same district, so that most of these men were not only veterans of it in their time, and these male children already dedicated to it when their time should come, but all these people and kin, not only the actual old parents and kin of the doomed men, but fathers and mothers and sisters and wives and sweethearts whose sons and brothers and husbands and fathers and lovers might have been among the doomed men except for sheer chance and luck.

  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

  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.

  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 1892,6 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 resista
nce 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.7 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.8 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.”9 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.

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  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.”10 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.11 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 1987.12 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.

  THE MOVIE

  Cobb’s novel was adapted into a film in 1957 by the great filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.13 Tim Dirks writes about this film thatthe suicidal attack on an impregnable fortress named “Ant Hill” in the film (against an unseen German enemy) was inspired by and loosely based upon the six-month bloodbath in 1916 during the Battle of Verdun for Fort Douamont, a French stronghold eventually captured by the Germans. (The same battle was frequently referred to in Renoir’s The Grand Illusion [1937]). . . . Due to the film’s raw, controversially offensive and critical assessment of hypocritical French military and bureaucratic authorities who callously condemn and sacrifice three randomly chosen innocent men with execution (for cowardice) for their own fatal blunder, it suffered poor box-office returns, and was banned in France and Switzerland for almost twenty years (until the mid-1970s) following its release.14

  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.”15 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.

  PATHS OF GLORY AND THE AMERICAN WAR NOVEL TRADITION

  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 fir
st 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.