Hindsight is lazy in this regard, Solzhenitsyn intimates, since it reduces complexity to a counterfeit clarity. He replaces hindsight with a multitude of characters thinking and acting in the moment, so that at the beginning of World War I, “the clock of fate was suspended over the whole of East Prussia, and its six-mile-long pendulum was ticking audibly as it swung from the German to the Russian side and back again.”[14]
