The mail has come, and almost every man has a few letters and papers.
We stroll over to the meadow behind the billets.
Kropp has the round lid of a margarine tub under his arm.
On the right side of the meadow a large common latrine has been built, a roofed and durable construction.
But that is for recruits who as yet have not learned how to make the most of whatever comes their way.
We want something better.
Scattered about everywhere there are separate, individual boxes for the same purpose.
They are square, neat boxes with wooden sides all round, and have unimpeachably satisfactory seats.
On the sides are hand grips enabling one to shift them about.
We move three together in a ring and sit down comfortably.
And it will be two hours before we get up again.
I well remembered how embarrassed we were as recruits in barracks when we had to use the general latrine.
There were no doors and twenty men sat side by side as in a railway carriage, so that they could be reviewed all at one glance, for soldiers must always be under supervision.
Since then we have learned better than to be shy about such trifling immodesties.
In time things far worse than that came easy to us.
Here in the open air though, the business is entirely a pleasure.
I no longer understand why we should always have shied at these things before. They are, in fact, just as natural as eating and drinking.
We might perhaps have paid no particular attention to them had they not figured so large in our experience, nor been such novelties to our minds—to the old hands they had long been a mere matter of course.
The soldier is on friendlier terms than other men with his stomach and intestines.
Three-quarters of his vocabulary is derived from these regions, and they give an intimate flavour to expressions of his greatest joy as well as of his deepest indignation.
It is impossible to express oneself in any other way so clearly and pithily.
Our families and our teachers will be shocked when we go home, but here it is the universal language.
Enforced publicity has in our eyes restored the character of complete innocence to all these things.
More than that, they are so much a matter of course that their comfortable performance is fully as much enjoyed as the playing of a safe top running flush.
Not for nothing was the word "latrine-rumour" invented; these places are the regimental gossip-shops and common-rooms.
We feel ourselves for the time being better off than in any palatial white-tiled "convenience."
There it can only be hygienic; here it is beautiful.
These are wonderfully care-free hours. Over us is the blue sky.
On the horizon float the bright yellow, sunlit observation-balloons, and the many little white clouds of the anti-aircraft shells.
Often they rise in a sheaf as they follow after an airman.
We hear the muffled rumble of the front only as very distant thunder, bumble-bees droning by quite drown it.
Around us stretches the flowery meadow.
The grasses sway their tall spears; the white butterflies flutter around and float on the soft warm wind of the late summer. We read letters and newspapers and smoke. We take off our caps and lay them down beside us. The wind plays with our hair; it plays with our words and thoughts.
The three boxes stand in the midst of the glowing, red field-poppies.
We set the lid of the margarine tub on our knees and so have a good table for a game of skat.
Kropp has the cards with him.
After every misere ouverte we have a round of nap. One could sit like this for ever.
The notes of an accordion float across from the billets.
Often we lay aside the cards and look about us.
One of us will say:
"Well, boys. . . ." Or
"It was a near thing that time. . . ." And for a moment we fall silent.
There is in each of us a feeling of constraint. We are all sensible of it; it needs no words to communicate it.
It might easily have happened that we should not be sitting here on our boxes to-day; it came damn near to that.
And so everything is new and brave, red poppies and good food, cigarettes and summer breeze.
Kropp asks:
"Anyone seen Kemmerich lately?"
"He's up at St. Joseph's," I tell him.
Muller explains that he has a flesh wound in his thigh; a good blighty.
We decide to go and see him this afternoon.