ways of alerting an audience to the importance of unmasking human vanity than by confronting us with the activities which, for all our delusions of grandeur, are common to us all and which we may like to hide but can never eliminate. And there is thus no more immediate way to alert us to the absurd pretensions of those who would subordinate what human beings truly are to the language of their official systems than by juxtaposing the neat language of official prose to the messy realities of the human body. When, for example, the disgustingly drunk (and vomiting) Otto Katz mutters his prayers and giggles or the officious Lieutenant Dub gives a rousing military speech to the dirt on the road while lying in a cart because he has to throw up after too much drink (632) or Cadet Biegler shits his pants while dreaming of himself as a general in heaven confronting the Lord (498–499) or when the drunken cook Jurajda proclaims his faith in the harmony of the universe from the ditch he has fallen into (653), the satiric point is clear enough. Whatever the realities of life may be, they simply cannot be contained or defined by rhetorically pious formulations handed down from on high. One of the most amusingly ridiculous attempts of the military hierarchy to impose order is the emphasis on repeated enemas or the demand from a visiting general that the troops all shit on schedule—the victory over the Italians depends on that more than on anything else.
The novel makes clear that the need to shit is something that truly unites human beings, linking the Emperor, “whom they can’t let out of the rears [the latrine] in case he should shit up the whole of Schönbrunn [the royal palace],” to the officers and ordinary soldiers, even to the dying and the dead:
