Highlights

This is a hard philosophy. But then the soldiers' profession is a hard profession, in wartime. A lot of men like it, though, and even civilian soldiers have been known to stay on and make it their life's work. It has its excitements and compensations. One of them is that, since you have none yourself, you are relieved of any responsibility for a future. And everything tastes better.

It is absolutely true, for example, that when you think, when you know, you are going to die somewhere soon, every day has a special, bright, delicious poignant taste to it that normal days in normal times do not have. Another perversity of the human mechanism?

Some men like to live like that all the time.