War & Peace Quote by Patrick MacGill

MacGill’s line strips “luck” of its comforting mystique and hands it back as something earned, rehearsed, and grimly practical. In a culture that likes its war stories clean - heroism on one side, fate on the other - he insists on a harsher arithmetic: the soldier who survives is often the one who has trained his body and nerves to make fewer fatal mistakes when everything is chaos.

The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it’s motivational, almost a field manual in sentence form: don’t wait for fortune; build competence until it looks like fortune. Underneath, it’s a journalist’s cold correction to civilian superstition. “Luck” becomes a euphemism outsiders use to make slaughter narratable, to pretend survival is random rather than structured by preparation, discipline, and the unequal distribution of experience. Calling skill “luck” also lets institutions off the hook: if outcomes are fate, nobody has to answer for bad planning, bad leadership, or inadequate training.

Context matters because MacGill wrote out of proximity to the machinery of modern war, where industrial-scale violence makes individual agency feel absurdly small. In that setting, the quote reads less like chest-thumping and more like a coping philosophy: when the world is trying to kill you by accident, the only control left is competence. It’s also a subtle indictment of romantic war-talk. The soldier’s “luck” isn’t magic; it’s muscle memory, judgment under fire, and the capacity to stay functional when fear is the default setting.