"Roughly speaking it is," says Kat, and prepares for a long speech; "but the root of the matter lies somewhere.
For instance, if you train a dog to eat potatoes and then afterwards put a piece of meat in front of him, he'll snap at it, it's his nature.
And if you give a man a little bit of authority he behaves just the same way, he snaps at it too.
The things are precisely the same. In himself man is essentially a beast, only he butters it over like a slice of bread with a little decorum.
The army is based on that; one man must always have power over the other.
The mischief is merely that each one has much too much power. A non-com, can torment a private, a lieutenant a non-com, a captain a lieutenant, until he goes mad.
And because they know they can, they all soon acquire the habit more or less.
Take a simple case: we are marching back from the parade-ground dog-tired.
Then comes the order to sing.
We sing spiritlessly, for it is all we can do to trudge along with our rifles.
At once the company is turned about and has to do another hour's drill as punishment.
On the march back the order to sing is given again, and once more we start.
Now what's the use of all that?
It's simply that the company commander's head has been turned by having so much power.
And nobody blames him. On the contrary, he is praised for being strict.
That, of course, is only a trifling instance, but it holds also in very different affairs.
Now I ask you: Let a man be whatever you like in peacetime, what occupation is there in which he can behave like that without getting a crack on the nose?
He can only do that in the army.
It goes to the heads of them all, you see.
And the more insignificant a man has been in civil life the worse it takes him."
"They say, of course, there must be discipline," ventures Kropp meditatively.
"True," growls Kat, "they always do.
And it may be so; still it oughtn't to become an abuse.
But you try to explain that to a black-smith or a labourer or a workman, you try to make that clear to a peasant—and that's what most of them are here. All he sees is that he has been put through the mill and sent to the front, but he knows well enough what he must do and what not.
It's simply amazing, I tell you, that the ordinary tommy sticks it all up here in the front-line.
Simply amazing!"
No one protests. Everyone knows that drill ceases only in the frontline and begins again a few miles behind, with all absurdities of saluting and parade.
It is an Iron law that the soldier must be employed under every circumstance.
Here Tjaden comes up with a flushed face.
He is so excited that he stutters.
Beaming with satisfaction he stammers out:
"Himmelstoss is on his way.
He's coming to the front!"
Tjaden has a special grudge against Himmelstoss, because of the way he educated him in the barracks.
Tjaden wets his bed, he does it at night in his sleep.
Himmelstoss maintained that it was sheer laziness and invented a method worthy of himself for curing Tjaden.
He hunted up another piss-a-bed, named Kindervater, from a neighbouring unit, and quartered him with Tjaden.
In the huts there were the usual bunks, one above the other in pairs, with mattresses of wire netting.
Himmelstoss put these two so that one occupied the upper and the other the lower bunk.
The man underneath of course had a vile time.
The next night they were changed over and the lower one put on top so that he could retaliate.
That was Himmelstoss's system of self-education.
The idea was not low but ill-conceived.
Unfortunately it accomplished nothing because the first assumption was wrong: it was not laziness in either of them.
Anyone who looked at their sallow skin could see that.
The matter ended in one of them always sleeping on the floor, where he frequently caught cold.
Meanwhile Haie sits down beside us.
He winks at me and rubs his paws thoughtfully.
We once spent the finest day of our army-life together—the day before we left for the front.
We had been allotted to one of the recently formed regiments, but were first to be sent back for equipment to the garrison, not to the reinforcement-depot, of course, but to another barracks.