The front is
a cage in which we must await fearfully whatever may happen. We lie under the network of arching shells
and live in a suspense of uncertainty.
Over us Chance hovers. If a shot
comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither know nor can determine where it
will fall.
It is this
Chance that makes us indifferent. A few
months ago I was sitting in a dug-out playing skat; after a while I stood up
and went to visit some friends in another dug-out. On my return nothing more was to be seen of
the first one, it had been blown to pieces by a direct hit. I went back to the second and arrived just in
time to lend a hand digging it out. In
the interval it had been buried.
It is just as
much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been
hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be
smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hours’ bombardment
unscathed. No soldier outlives a
thousand chances. But every soldier
believes in Chance and trusts his luck.
- All
Quite on the Western Front (1928), by Erich Maria Remarque, chapter 6.
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