ng down the long
grass beside him, crawled back on his hands and knees to the trench and
picked up his waiting rifle.

The dead gave dignity to what the other men were doing, and made it
noble, and, from another point of view, quite senseless. For their dying
had proved nothing. Men who could have been much better spared than
they, were still alive in the trenches, and for no reason but through
mere dumb chance. There was no selection of the unfittest; it seemed to
be ruled by unreasoning luck. A certain number of shells and bullets
passed through a certain area of space, and men of different bulks
blocked that space in different places. If a man happened to be standing
in the line of a bullet he was killed and passed into eternity, leaving a
wife and children, perhaps, to mourn him. "Father died," these children
will say, "doing his duty." As a matter of fact, father died because he
happened to stand up at the wrong moment, or because he turned to ask the
man on his right for a match, instead of leaning toward the left, and he
projected his bulk of two hundred pounds where a bullet, fired by a man
who did not know him and who had not aimed at him, happened to want the
right of way. One of the two had to give it, and as the bullet would
not, the soldier had his heart torn out. The man who sat next to me
happened to stoop to fill his cartridge-box just as the bullet that
wanted the space he had occupied passed over his bent shoulder; and so he
was not killed, but will live for sixty years, perhaps, and will do much
good or much evil. Another man in the same trench sat up to clean his
rifle, and had his arm in the air driving the cleaning rod down the
barrel, when a bullet passed through his lungs, and the gun fell across
his face, with the rod sticking in it, and he pitched forward on his
shoulder quite dead. If he had not cleaned his gun at that moment he
would probably be alive in Athens now, sitting in front of a cafe and
fighting the war over again. Viewed from that point, and leaving out the
fact that God ordered it all, the fortunes of the game of war seemed as
capricious as matching pennies, and as impersonal as the wheel at Monte
Carlo. In it the brave man did not win because he was brave, but because
he was lucky. A fool and a philosopher are equal at a game of dice. And
these men who threw dice with death were interesting to watch, because,
though they gambled for so great a stake, they did so unc