An extended account with footage of a dispatch first published on Glenn Loury’s page, below.
Again the waiting. This time in a bunker. This time in a trench. A forest. A field.
The moments before a battle are a vacuum in which each man's mind dwells on the possibilities of an action not yet taken place, a thinking subject to all the fancies of a feverish mind and the manipulations of high emotion. But when the action begins in earnest, and one is occupied with the dynamism of the moment, with navigating its ever changing paths, the panorama of rapid scenes flitting before one—what do these needless apprehensions avail? One is too preoccupied with living out an action to bother contemplating it. Need arises, one meets it. Simple. An obstacle, one hurdles it; a danger, one avoids it; an opportunity, one takes it. One does not control the pitch, but only the swing. Fate has many pitches.
It is quite difficult to do one's intellectual duty and examine analytically one's feelings and thoughts during such a time. One’s prevailing desire is to quell that dry feeling of apprehension, as much as one is able; to focus, in fact, on anything other than the facts before one— not to bring its sharpness into greater relief by focusing on its limitless unsightly aspects. People speak in cliched descriptions of a 'knot' of fear in the 'pit of the stomach'. It is a knot as well in the chest, a constriction in the parched throat, a tingling, numb elevation of the limbs. The breath is shallow, sharp, stuttered.
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