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A review by suebarsby
Paths of Glory by Humphrey Cobb
5.0
(I'm sorry - I found this hard to write about without referring to the ending. Spoiler alert therefore)
Devastating. A WWI book I'd not heard of before my reading group chose it. Told with a lot of black humour, the story is based on a true story of an execution of French men after a failed attempt at taking 'the Pimple' a small patch of raised ground on the Western Front. The humour in the dialogue and authorial voice perhaps makes the ending harder to take, as you struggle to deal with the awfulness of what just happened.
The characters are well portrayed, the sense of place is excellent and the satirical authorial voice makes it very clear where Cobb's sympathies lie. The revisionist history of WWI that has started to take over the telling of the war had not yet reared its head when Cobb was writing and this is full of incompetent generals, unsympathetic commands and general stupidity.
Devastating. A WWI book I'd not heard of before my reading group chose it. Told with a lot of black humour, the story is based on a true story of an execution of French men after a failed attempt at taking 'the Pimple' a small patch of raised ground on the Western Front. The humour in the dialogue and authorial voice perhaps makes the ending harder to take, as you struggle to deal with the awfulness of what just happened.
The characters are well portrayed, the sense of place is excellent and the satirical authorial voice makes it very clear where Cobb's sympathies lie. The revisionist history of WWI that has started to take over the telling of the war had not yet reared its head when Cobb was writing and this is full of incompetent generals, unsympathetic commands and general stupidity.