Paths of Glory by Humphrey Cobb

Author:Humphrey Cobb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2011-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

The front-line trench was crowded, more crowded, so it seemed, than when it had been filled with the double congestion of the relief two nights earlier, crowded with men whose uniforms were slate-grey with moisture and whose thoughts were slate-grey with apprehension. They stood in the jumping-off positions quite silently and almost motionlessly, staring in front of them. Each man carried two extra packages of rifle ammunition and a small bag of bombs. Here and there a man would be fairly well loaded with what looked like satchels, giving him the appearance of a traveler waiting for a train. His satchels were explosive charges for use on the galleries and dugouts of the Pimple. He looked rather taller than the rest, but this was a deception caused by the dwarfing effect of the other men’s rifles, elongated as they were by the disproportionately long bayonet.

A cruel-looking thing, a bayonet, Langlois thought. And the cruelest-looking of all, the French one. Perhaps because it was the most slender, the purity of its lines the most perfect, its intrinsic proportions the nicest. Or, perhaps, because it had the reputation of making the wickedest wound, the quadrangular wound that was so difficult to heal. Langlois had never used his bayonet, and he never would unless he was caught with an empty magazine in front of an oncoming German. He asked the time of Lieutenant Bonnier who was standing right beside him.

“Zero minus twenty minutes,” the lieutenant said. He was in command of the company and he was feeling a slight nausea in the pit of his stomach.

Langlois looked at the men around him. Some of them were condemned to be dead within the half hour. Perhaps he was one of them. The thought passed through his head, a strangely impersonal one, as if it had not been a thought of his at all, but some story he was reading. He noted the unusual self-possession of these men but he had seen it before and accepted it as granted. The thought kept returning: this one, or this one, or that one, would actually, inevitably be dead in a few minutes. He tried, half-heartedly, to guess which. Then: a number of lives right there next to him, within touching distance, some of which he had been on intimate terms with, were rushing with incredible speed (yet a stationary one, too) towards their ends. No, the ends were rushing towards the lives. Thirty minutes more to live, and then the totally unknown, apotheosis. The idea had a force so poignant at that time and place that it suffocated and extinguished itself.

His mind, having been emptied of a thought the power of which it was no longer capable of bearing, reverted to the more commonplace and personal subject of his own flesh. There were three wounds that Langlois dreaded: in the eyes, in the genitals, and in the feet. When he thought about this, as he did now and then, in places of safety, it was the wounding of his genitals which he abhorred the most.

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