While not in any way wishing to detract from the bravery of people who face danger in circumstances where they can hope to influence the outcome, it is quite another thing for people to find themselves in harm’s way in circumstances where the outcome depends purely, or primarily, on chance. How on earth did the soldiers of WW1 cope with this state of affairs?

Some of them didn’t, of course; the strain proved altogether too much, and their nerves gave way. For those who were able to remain calm in the face of danger when there was absolutely nothing they could do to protect themselves, they might rely, to use John Lucy’s words, on “the luck of soldiers”, but, as Erich Maria Remarque’s narrator says, “No soldier outlives a thousand chances”, and relying on luck might not always have been enough to steady the nerves.

It must have been beneficial (but not easy) if a man was able to accept the lack of control and surrender to it, thus absolving himself from the responsibility of even trying to avoid a seemingly imminent catastrophe which he was, in reality, powerless to avert, and it is not surprising that it is by no means uncommon to come across a fatalistic approach to life. In George Coppard’s book, as his unit moves up towards the Somme front line at the end of June 1916, he says “The parts which we each and severally were to play were in the hands of Fate”, and as the book draws to an end, when he is about to receive the wound that takes him out of the war for the final time, he says: “The finger of fate was beginning to point in my direction”; and, again, commenting on the fact that there happened to be men at hand to help him when he was wounded: “Fate was kind to me”.  Meanwhile Frank Richards says “Fate played a cruel trick with him” in relation to a Boer War veteran who was the only one of three men to survive an incident of carbon monoxide poisoning, albeit needing medical attention, only to be killed by a shell as soon as he returned to the front about two months later. John Lucy attributes the death of a man in his first action to “some curious trick of fate”, and, as his story draws to a close, he says that, although it was rumoured that his unit was to be sent to Amiens for a long rest, “Fate ruled otherwise”, and they were sent back to Cambrai instead; there he received the wound that took him out of the war for good.

In the BBC television comedy written by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, Blackadder goes Forth, a joke is made of the fact that Baldrick carries with him at all times a bullet on which he has written his name, reasoning that, as he can only be killed by ‘the’ bullet with his name on it, then, so long as he neutralises that bullet, he has nothing to worry about. The fallacy of his reasoning is so obvious that it makes us laugh, but the joke is predicated upon a type of fatalism which was real enough in WW1, and may well have had its origins in that war. Thus George Coppard says, “As most Tommies agreed, if it’s got your bloody number on it there’s nothing you can do about it.” He has also named one of his chapters, the one in which he describes being accidentally shot through the foot by his fellow machine gunner: “My number was on it”. In a similar vein Albert Clayton reflects, “It was commonly said by the old soldiers, some of whom had lived through from the dim past of 1914, that if your number was on a bullet, you’d get it, dodge it how you would. If the Fates had picked out a certain time and place for you to be killed, and a particular bullet to do the job, there was no avoiding your destiny. Until the hour struck, neither bomb nor shell could touch you, but at the appointed time that bullet would come round corners after you …”

Closely aligned with fatalism is the idea that, if everything is pre-ordained, it can be foreseen, and, sure enough, it is not uncommon for premonition to feature in WW1 narrative. For example, in Old Soldiers Never Die a signaller named Dann, seeing a giant rat, turns pale, and says that the rat will be nearby when he is killed; sure enough, Richards reports seeing the same giant rat when Dann meets his end. Was this a real phenomenon, or were so many men killed or wounded in that war that it was natural sometimes to think the worst, and, by the law of averages, if you thought the worst, sometimes you were going to be proved right? It is certainly the case that there are also instances in the literature of men who had ‘premonitions’ of disaster which did not come to fruition, for example, Sergeant-Major Williams in Long Before Daybreak, who declared, just as they were about to go over the top, “We shall never get out of this alive! Never! It’s the finish this time”, and whose face as he said it “took on a curious far away look as if he were already dead and seeing visions of those who had passed on”, but who re-appeared totally unscathed at the end of the engagement.  Elsewhere in the same book, preparing for another attack, Clayton says “the cards were cut” and refers to “the inexorable process of destiny”, then goes on to say: “Apprehension or foreboding in the face of an obvious danger is an understandable thing. Prescience … appears to me, on the other hand, to be a much more doubtful quantity.”