The Negative Happiness of Camp Life

The meager pleasures of camp life provided a kind of negative happiness, freedom from suffering. Real positive pleasures, even small ones, were very few. One could envy a man who did not have to wade in deep, muddy clay on a steep slope emptying the tubs of a small field railway for 12 hours daily. And how we envied those of us who had the opportunity to get into a factory and work in a sheltered room. The scale of relative luck extends even further. Even among those detachments outside the camp there were some units which were considered worse than others.