An officer, Colonel Dax, a lawyer in civilian life, bravely tries to defend the men at a court-martial, but they are found guilty and shot by a firing squad. The frustrated French command decided to pick four soldiers at random and execute them as a deterrent to future cowards. Each wave of French attackers was killed in overwhelming numbers. As the story moved along, whenever a commanding officer was berated by his superiors for lack of progress, he’d order flanking movements or over-the-top charges of the enemy, who sat waiting for them with machine guns. “Paths of Glory” follows a French regiment fighting in the trenches of the Western Front. They insisted that “character” and “spirit” would save the day, despite the callous stupidity of their campaigns and orders. Most of them seemed convinced in the dawning age of intense, newly-developed, high-power artillery and aircraft that they were still leading a 19th-century cavalry charge. And the high ludicrousness of the officers who conducted that war as if it were a social-class-riddled rugby match. I’m fascinated by the inglorious, mud-wallowing courage and humor of that war’s foot soldiers.

I don’t read a lot of war novels but I am an eager reader of first-person accounts of war, especially WWI trench warfare. Bombs falling nearby set him in high relief. The book’s cover showed a soldier who resembled Douglas standing on a battlefield, waving the men behind him to come ahead. I knew there was a movie of that name starring Kirk Douglas in all his indignant presence. I settled on a paperback novel called “Paths of Glory,” by Humphrey Cobb. I have a shelf of “maybes” set aside for such times, and I quickly pulled a few and looked them over. Two weeks ago, I was looking for a book to read, having just finished one and not wanting to face an evening without a successor.

Paths of glory book humphrey cobb