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perhaps a poor witticism, but we were easily satisfied on that score--and it is at least a good description of this brutal, thoroughly unhealthy petit bourgeois who had been given a small share of the sweets of power.
    "What the hell is this, you -- company. You can't have done anything yesterday but dipped each other in -- . Wallowing in a dung heap, that's something for a herd of swine like you. I have looked at five men now, and they all resemble pimps born of syphilitic harlots and delivered with forceps. . ."
    It was not human speech but a stinking effusion. One of the brute's favorite expressions was "the French disease." He himself had the Prussian disease in an advanced degree, that pitiful urge to humiliate. It is a disease, and one not confined to penal battalions; it has permeated the whole German Army, where it is like a plague of boils. And in each boil you can be pretty sure of finding an NCO, a man who is something without being much.
    We are now given the regulation punishment drill, which lasts about three hours. The finale is a long ditch several feet deep and half-full of fermenting mud with a rather yellowish, greasy scum on the surface. We have to scrape it from our eyes each time the order "prone" sends us to the bottom. Then it is dinnertime. We march back to the barracks and gulp down our food as we are. Then we have to get busy, for we must be, spick and span once more when we fall in for afternoon drill in half an hour's time.
    We wash our uniforms and ourselves by the simple expedient of standing fully dressed under the shower. Our rifles and other equipment must first be washed, then carefully dried with a rag and finally oiled. The barrel has to be cleaned carefully. The normal soldier does his equipment thus thoroughly once, perhaps twice a week, if there has been an especially dirty exercise. We have to do it a couple of times a day.
    When we fall in after this, our uniforms, of course, are dripping wet, but that does not matter as long as they are clean.
----
    There was only one thing we feared as much as this ghastly Monday inspection and that was the room inspection every evening at 22.00 hours. It was incredible what the duty NCO could think of to make dead-tired men do after an exhausting day.
    Before the duty NCO came in each man must be lying in his bunk and naturally in the regulation position--on his back, arms along his sides on top of the blankets and feet bared for inspection. The room orderly was responsible for there being not so much as a speck of dust anywhere in the room, that all feet were as clean as those of a newborn babe and that everything in our lockers was placed and folded in accordance with the regulations. At the start of the inspection the room orderly had to report:
    "Herr Unteroffizier, room orderly recruit Brand reports all in order in Room 26, complement twelve men, eleven in their bunks. The room has been properly cleaned and aired and there is nothing to report."
    The duty NCO naturally did not pay any attention to that, but looked round. Woe betide the wretched room orderly if the duty NCO found the least smear, or a locker that was not fastened properly, or a pair of feet with a mere hint of a shadow.
    NCO Geerner--I believe he was a real mental case--used to howl like a dog. It sounded as though he were always just on the point of bursting into tears--and, in fact, it was not unusual for him to weep real tears of rage. When he was on duty we scrubbed and washed and tidied everything feverishly. I remember one unfortunate evening when Schnitzius was room orderly. Schnitzius was the room's scapegoat, good-natured as the day is long, but so hopelessly undertalented that he was the self-appointed victim of every one of his superiors from the Stabsfeldwebel down.
    Schnitzius was as nervous as the other eleven of us who lay there waiting for Geerner wondering what we had forgotten. We could hear Geerner in one of the other rooms. It sounded as though all the bunks