And as
it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment, Hebrews 9:27
The third enemy [of
the scholar in war-time] is fear. War threatens with death and pain. No man—and
specially no Christian who remembers Gesthemane—need try to attain a stoic
indifference about these things, but we can guard against the illusions of the imagination.
We think of the streets of Warsaw and contrast the deaths there suffered with
an abstraction called Life. But there is no question of death or life for any
of us, only a question of this death or that—of a machine gun bullet now or a
cancer forty years later. What does war do to death? It certainly does not make
it more frequent; 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be
increased. It puts several deaths earlier, but I hardly suppose that that is
what we fear. Certainly when the moment comes, it will make little difference
how many years we have behind us. Does it increase our chances of a painful
death? I doubt it. As far as I can find out, what we call natural death is
usually preceded by suffering, and a battlefield is one of the very few places
where one has a reasonable prospect of dying with no pain at all. Does it
decrease our chances of dying at peace with God? I cannot believe it. If active
service does not persuade a man to prepare for death, what conceivable
concatenation of circumstances would? Yet war does do something to death. It
forces us to remember it. The only reason why the cancer at sixty or the
paralysis at seventy-five do not bother us is that we forget them.
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