Fatalist.
“. . . . The fatalist is born not made. The growing strain of the game is not producing more fatalists if ducking under shell fire is a proof of an absence of fatalism. For many who never ducked are now ducking, whether from wisdom or war strain they are taking this instinctive precaution. But there is a hardihood that persists through it all—there is a grim fatalist who is not fatalist born but is made it by a sort of savage irritation with the grossly incalculable element in the mischance of death. He does not scorn to duck out of sheer pride—to show he has not the wind up, but because he has his back up. He can’t prevent the ‘whiz-bangs’ and the ‘five-nines’ but he can defy them. He invests them with a personality, a malignancy of personal enmity directed against himself, . . . and he defies them. As though he were to say, ‘If you are going to hit me, you swine, you will hit me, but you can’t stop me calling you bastard while you are doing it!’”
Fatalist.
Outside the Pill Box.
“. . . . Men of the Company that had been in occupation of the Pill Box awaiting in no very amiable frame of mind the completion of some detail of the relief . . . . I could not tell what they had to be discontented with in that happy land. Around them was all the pomp and pageantry of war—a landscape the like of which man has never gazed upon since early chaos brooded over all. For Westhoek and Flers—the Somme and the Salient—as they were when they were war areas and it was winter—were landscapes that betrayed to the observant all the material content of war. They were the finished product—the perfection towards which that vast Teutonised industry of war is working. Landscapes without colour as of an evil earth in the throes of its dissolution—an earth torn and mangled with its ghost half given up and hanging over-head like a palpable emanation, half agony, half guilt . . . .”
