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 unconcernedly and without