Foreknowledge of death in wartime: A dangerous emotion or something more?

One other thing from Bungay: He recounts that one night a pilot visited another one recuperating in a hospital. The visitor said he would be killed. The next day, he was.

I’ve seen similar accounts of the foreknowledge of death in other books about war. I’ve also seen the converse — in the wonderful memoir With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, Eugene Sledge recalls that, while crossing an airfield under withering Japanese fire, he heard an inner voice reassure him that he would survive, and he did.

Part of this may be self-fulfilling, of course. And we never will know whether the Marine standing next to Sledge heard a similar message, but then got shot through the head. The rationalist will say that the foreboding is an emotion that, in itself, makes being killed more likely. The broader thinker might say that there are phenomena we don’t understand, and that just as some animals sense earthquakes, so people might, in ways that we don’t fathom, sense their impending deaths.

I wonder how these messages from beyond hit people with such certainty.