Paths of Glory by Irvin S. Cobb

Paths of Glory

 By Irvin S. Cobb
Aeterna, 2024 

Irvin S. Cobb

Not to be confused with the Humphrey Cobb novel of the same title later turned into a 1957 motion picture directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Kirk Douglas, this work was first published in 1915. This Paths of Glory is a revealing series of firsthand impressions of the opening weeks of the Great War in Belgium, Germany, and France written by Saturday Evening Post correspondent Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb (1876–1944). 

Cobb traveled by taxi, staff car, train, and horse-drawn carriage behind the battle fronts in the late summer and fall of 1914. Despite German suspicions, he was given remarkable access. He interviewed any number of German officers; Belgian, French, and English war prisoners; German, Belgian, and French civilians and medical personnel, as well as American diplomats and consular officials in Belgium. 

While he is careful not to accuse the Germans of committing atrocities against civilians, he does detail the destruction of life and property in reprisal for alleged Belgian armed civilian resistance, the legendary francs tireurs so feared by German soldiers. His depiction of the ruins of the Belgian university city of Louvain is particularly evocative. 

In  summary, Cobb describes Belgium as "That poor little rag doll, with its head crushed in  the wheeled tracks…" Not surprisingly, he finds many Belgian civilians to be morose, demoralized, and hungry. Some even  then were beginning to starve. 

. . . We were not in the town of Battice. We were where the town of Battice had been, where it stood six weeks ago. It was famous then for its fat, rich cheeses and its green damson plums. Now, and no doubt for years to come, it will be chiefly notable as having been the town where, it is said, Belgian civilians first fired on the German troops from roofs and windows, and where the Germans first inaugurated their ruthless system of reprisal on houses and people alike. Literally this town no longer existed. It was a scrap-heap, if you like, but not a town. Here had been a great trampling out of the grapes of wrath, and most sorrowful was the vintage that remained.

 

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In language that must have shocked contemporary American readers, Cobb reports on the almost unending parade of  blood-soaked wounded streaming back from the fighting front and the heroic efforts of exhausted German, Belgian, and French medical staff to cope with the carnage. He also visits and vividly describes the ruins of the Fort de Loncin and other defensive works destroyed by heavy-caliber German and Austrian siege guns, views the front from a German observation balloon, visits an artillery battery, and reports on German civilian attitudes toward the war. Even in the fall of 1914 Germans were publicly discussing the possible annexation of Belgium, as well as absolute German domination—political and economic—over the European continent.