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Meanwhile the German plane has been shot down. It plummets, with a trail of smoke behind it like a comet. Kropp has lost a bottle of beer on it, and pays up with ill grace.

‘I’m sure Himmelstoss is quite a quiet chap as a postman,’ I say, once Kropp has got over his disappointment. ‘So how come he is such a bastard as a drill corporal?’

The question gets Kropp going again. ‘It isn’t just Himmelstoss, there are loads of them. As soon as they get a couple of stripes or a pip or two they turn into entirely different people and start behaving as if they chew iron bars for breakfast.’

‘So it’s the uniform that does that?’ I ask.

‘More or less,’ says Kat, and settles himself down to develop the point. ‘But the real reasons are a bit different. Look, if you train a dog so that it only eats potatoes, and then after a while you offer it a chunk of meat, it’ll still grab it because it’s in its nature. And if you offer a man a bit of power, the same thing happens; he’ll grab it. It’s instinctive, because when it comes down to it, a man is basically a beast, and it’s only later that a bit of decency gets smeared on top, the way you can spread dripping on your bread. The main thing about the army is that there is always somebody with the power to give orders to the rest. The bad thing is that they’ve all got far too much power: a corporal can harass a private, a lieutenant can harass an NCO or a captain can harass a lieutenant so badly that it can drive him mad. And because every one of them knows it, they all get used to the idea. Just take the simplest example: we’re on our way back from the parade-ground and we’re dog tired. Then comes the order to sing. Well, the singing isn’t too lively because we’re all happy if we can still carry our rifles without dropping them. And the next thing we know, the company is about-turned and we have an hour’s punishment drill. On the march back we get the order to sing again, and this time we sing. What’s the point of the whole thing? The man in command has got his way, because he’s got the power to do so. Nobody’s going to blame him – quite the reverse – he gets a reputation for being strict. And that’s just a trivial thing – there are plenty of other ways for them to mess you about. So I ask you: whatever a man is in civilian life, what sort of job could he possibly find where he could get away with that sort of behaviour without getting a punch on the nose for it? The only place he can do it is in the army. See what I mean – it always goes to their heads. And the less they had to say for themselves in civvy street[82], the more it goes to their heads now.’