People like to wonder, and this is the kernel of science. – Ralph Waldo Emerson The story of two comrades who went to war and the near death experience of one of them During the Second World War, the Austrian poet and writer Karl Skala (1924–2006), went to Russia with his troops. He and his comrade, Hannes, caught under artillery fire, took refuge in a fox inn. Hannes got hit and died there. Skala, heavily wounded, experienced that they were both rising up high in the sky, and found themselves looking at the battlefield below. Feeling the weight of his …