… it has never occurred to me in this war to seek out danger and death as I had done so often in earlier years – at that time death avoided me, not I it; but that is long past! Today I would greet it very sadly and very bitterly, not out of fear or anxiety about it – nothing is more soothing than the prospect of the stillness of death – but because I have half-finished work to be done that, when completed, will convey the entirety of my feeling. The whole purpose of my life lies hidden in my unpainted pictures. Aside from that, death is not frightening …

Franz Marc, writing to his mother in 1916 from the front, two weeks before his death.