Then He Brushed The
Crumbs From His Jacket And Took A Drink Out Of His Hot Canteen, And
Looking Again At The Sleeping Figures Pressing 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.
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