I watched Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece “Paths of Glory” last weekend, prompted by all the World War I centenary tributes.
Set in the trenches near the end of the war, it’s a movie about a man who tries to maintain his integrity and his faith in humanity amid the stupidity, futility, cruelty and cynicism of war. It’s weirdly relevant today.
Kirk Douglas plays a French colonel named Dax who lives in the trenches and leads his men in battle. Far away in the palaces, pampered French generals order his exhausted men to take a nearly impregnable German position. One general hopes the assault will help him score political points. Another is promised a promotion. Something like 4,000 men are expected to die or be wounded for these objectives.
When the assault catastrophically fails, the generals look for scapegoats and decide to execute three enlisted men, more or less chosen at random, for alleged cowardice.
Dax is finally overcome with disgust and explodes at one of the generals: “You’re a degenerate, sadistic old man. You can go to hell!”
The general – cynical, crafty, bureaucratic, incapable of emotion – replies: “You’ve spoiled the keenness of your mind by wallowing in sentimentality. … You are an idealist, and I pity you. ... We are fighting a war, Dax, a war that we’ve got to win.”
When you are fighting a repulsive foe, the ends justify any means and serve as rationale for any selfishness.
Dax’s struggle is not to change the war or to save lives. That’s impossible. The war has won.
The struggle is simply to remain a human being, to maintain some contact with goodness in circumstances that are inhumane.
Disillusionment was the classic challenge for the generation that fought and watched that war. Before 1914, there was an assumed faith in progress, a general trust in the institutions of Western civilization. People in the educated classes, approached life with a gentlemanly, sporting spirit.
As Paul Fussell pointed out in “The Great War and Modern Memory,” the upper classes used genteel words in place of plain ones: slumber for sleep, the heavens for the sky, conquer for win, legion for army.
The war blew away that gentility and faith in progress. Ernest Hemingway captured the rising cynicism in “A Farewell to Arms.” His hero is embarrassed “by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression, in vain.” He had seen nothing sacred in the war, just meaningless slaughter.
European culture suffered a massive disillusion during the conflict. Cynicism breeds nihilism, an assumption that others’ motives are bad. It makes it hard to see any good that remains.
Fussell wrote that the war spread an adversarial mentality. The “versus habit” construes reality as us versus them – a mentality that spread through British society. It was the officers versus the men, and, when they got home, the students versus the dons. “Simple antithesis everywhere” is how Fussell captured the mentality. Along with it was what T.S. Eliot called a “dissociation of sensibility,” in which thoughts of tenderness and care are cut off from reason and calculation.
George Orwell wrote that he recognized the Great War mentality lingering even in the 1930s in his own left-wing circles – the same desire to sniff out those who departed from party orthodoxy, the same retelling of mostly false atrocity stories, the same war hysteria. As Christopher Isherwood put it, all the young people who were ashamed of never having fought in the war brought warlike simplicities to political life.
Some of the disillusioned drop out of public life, since it’s all meaningless. But others want to burn it all down because it’s all rotten. Moderation is taken for cowardice. Aggression is regarded as courage. No conciliatory word is permitted when a fighting word will do.
Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War, but there is the same loss of faith in progress, the reality of endless political trench warfare, the paranoid melodrama, the specter that we are all being dehumanized amid the fight.
At the end of the movie Dax returns to his barracks. His men have captured a pretty, innocent young German woman. She’s crying and terrified. They put her on stage, leer at her body and practically rape her with their eyes and catcalls.
Then they make her sing. She sings a sweet little folk song called “The Faithful Hussar.” The men begin to quiet, then hum along, and then – thinking of home, of sweetness and humanity itself – they fall to weeping over what they’ve lost.
David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times.
