7 o’clock — march off to the drill ground. Setting up the mortar and taking it apart again, crawling, lying down, standing up. Exchanging the mortar for rifles, field exercises with the rifles. Return to the barracks, covered in muck, at 12 o’clock.

12 o’clock — fall in for chow. A few comrades got to talking among themselves. The NCO on duty didn’t like that, and made the whole company double back and forth to the vehicle sheds several times at the run. Getting our food takes only a quarter of an hour. Eating at top speed. Washing dishes, polishing boots, brushing down the uniform, sewing on a button, cleaning the belt and cartridge pouch, room duty, and bringing the mess kit, bread bag, canteen and drinking cup to a high shine. 

2 o’clock — fall in on the barracks square. Here we are taught how a soldier walks, turns, salutes, lies down, gets up, takes aim, and so on. As civilians, of course, we had long since known how to walk. 

6 o’clock — supper. Fall in for roll call with the things we had polished to a shine at midday. Fall out, clean boots and uniform. Because the singing on this morning’s march-out hadn’t gone well, an hour of singing from 8 to 9 in the evening. Room duty. Three more men join us, who of course also bring fresh muck into the room. So, room duty all over again. 

10 o’clock — end of the day. The NCO on duty comes, has himself reported to, and checks whether the room is clean and whether all the little sheep are lying in their beds. 

On the following day, for a change, we got up at 5 o’clock and did a 20-kilometre march. 

As for our quarters and equipment, things were in a fairly poor state. Back then I still cared enough about my comrades that I had all sorts of things sent from home — floor cloths, a scrubbing brush, enlarged photographs for decorating the walls, and so on. Today I would no longer do that. Nobody ever thanked anyone for it. 

At the start I already wrote that I had ended up in the infantry. Something close to the worst had befallen me, for I had landed in the horse-drawn infantry; what that would mean only became clear over the years that followed. 

I did not even properly know which end of a horse was which, and yet suddenly, on the 9th of June, I had to do a 24-hour stable watch. Stable duty is a very particular kind of service. With only a few breaks (two hours’ sleep at a time, in shifts, during the night), the men on stable watch have to keep an eye on the horses — around 100 of them — and above all keep carting the dung away with a wheelbarrow, since every horse has to have clean straw under it. Woe betide you if the duty officer turns up and the stable hasn’t been mucked out! On top of that, the reek of the stable. I was glad when the stable watch was over. For a whole day afterwards I smelled of horse. 

To make us immune to disease, we were continually inoculated and injected with every possible kind of medicine (typhoid, dysentery, smallpox, and so on). 

We were allowed to send home any dispensable belongings, our own laundry and so on, in the middle of June. It seemed things were now getting serious for us too, and it probably wouldn’t be much longer before we heard the first bullets whistling by. 

Every week we did a training march in the nearer or wider surroundings of Tabor. The marching distances increased from week to week. We started with 15 kilometres and eventually worked our way up to 45. At first the whole thing was more than unfamiliar to us, and on top of that we had been issued the most impossible excuse for boots, so blisters on the feet were nothing unusual. But in time we grew used to that too.