"One way to maintain discipline is to shoot a man now and then."

Rating: 9/10 (18 March 2012)

I would give this film a perfect ten rating except for a couple of points. During their initial conversation about taking the Anthill, General Mireau (George Macready) emphatically states that the safety of the men under his command is more important than sending them to certain death on an impossible suicide mission. Yet in virtually the very next scene he's shown making his rounds in the trenches determined to stiffen the men for the very same engagement he railed against earlier. He seemed to disregard an opportunity for a promotion while disagreeing with General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou), but the only thing that seems to make sense is that he changed his mind about that.
The other point has to do with the consequence of failing to take the Anthill. What was it? The bitter history of World War I was that the opposing French and German forces waged a virtually immobile war with dug in positions that resulted in the deaths of millions. So by not taking the Anthill, an impossibility demonstrated in the story, nothing changed to influence this battle or the larger War, except to serve as a cautionary tale about the consequences of disobeying orders.
There's one more thing. The premise of the picture began with that conversation between Broulard and Mireau. When all was said and done, General Broulard comes out unfazed and unaffected by the very circumstances he set in motion. Possibly the most damning indictment of military intelligence to ever be portrayed on film, though virtually all of that nuance is lost if I were to rely on the handful of reviews I read before setting down my own.
With all of that considered, "Paths of Glory" is a remarkable film illustrating the bitter irony of war when it's circumstantial victims boil down to real soldiers and not a faceless army. There's a considered ambiguity in the selection of three men to face a charge of cowardice based on relationships and circumstances that had gone before. Which makes Colonel Dax's (Kirk Douglas) choice of Lt. Roget (Wayne Morris) to command the firing squad a somewhat fitting decision in the midst of all the insanity otherwise.
There are reasons nations go to war, sometimes for noble reasons and sometimes not. Soldiers know their duty in the chain of command, but I don't know if I've ever heard it expressed any better about how a soldier faces his mortality under battle conditions than in this film. Recall the foxhole scene between the pair of soldiers who were otherwise not prominent in the picture. Discussing their possible fate, one offers the following insight - "I'm not afraid of dying tomorrow, only of getting killed."