The Soldier

La Belle Dame sans Merci by Sir Frank Dicksee

At first, Chesterton's habitual reliance on the use of paradoxes to make a point (every point) was a bit off-putting but it has grown on me the more I read.

A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity...but Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life. - G.K. Chesterton