A shower is so refreshing! A French couple enjoy the Hour of the Tub, the soldier perhaps home on leave.
L'Heure du TubRien de tel qu'une bonne douche,On est plus frais . . . quand on se couche!Nothing beats a good shower,One is fresher . . . when we go to bed!La Favorite 2520Reverse:Artige & Cie - Paris
"I pass over the joy of spending time once again in the midst of my loved ones, and the sadness of returning to duty. I was completely discouraged, broken in body and spirit, when I found myself once again at Les Islettes station, the morning of January 14 [1918].Sad and alone, under a gray sky in which a few snowflakes swirled, I made my way to the trenches.At the village of [Le] Neufour, where the company sergeant-majors were encamped, I hoisted my pack, my weapons, and all the gear with which a poilu was loaded down, and I headed off briskly because I had a dozen kilometers to cover, through the woods, along bad roads unknown to me, as the regiment had now taken up front-line positions near Vauquois."
Excerpt from the notebooks of French Infantry Corporal Louis Barthas. He had been in the 296th Regiment which had been implicated in the army mutinies of the spring and early summer. The regiment had been dissolved and its men assigned to other units, Barthas to a regiment from Breton. On December 23, 1917 they went into two weeks of rest, Barthas's sixth leave.Vauquois is 30 km west of Verdun in the Argonne; both Les Islettes and Le Neufour about 20 km from Vauquois. Barthas was from the south of France. Brackets in source.
Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918 by Louis Barthas, pp. 351–352, copyright © 2014 by Yale University, publisher: Yale University Press, publication date: 2014
1918-01-14, 1918, leave, Vauquois, l'heure du tub
