Another of the WW2 Donald Duck pictures, though there's no combat here, and not even Pete this time as his adversary (in a number of them he was, like The Vanishing Private and the Old Army Game). The elements here are gag-related, but it's all about some fundamentals for this Duck, and so director Jack King puts our beloved fowl into a series of increasingly frustrating scenarios. Of course he directed a ton of Donald Duck shorts, probably his forte at the studio, and this sounds like nothing new. But the genius here is to make it all pretty basic, and for things to actually start out kind of light compared to what's to come; Donald's just walking, going through the various elements of cold, heat, rain, scalding heat, dust... and then it's time to eat, but he can't until he makes up his tent. This struggle becomes fruitless - it's the middle of the night once he gets it - and then he can't sleep.
It's the battle of the elements, in other words, and that struggle of the soldier to have to keep it up. It's not even that this Duck is all that much of a light-sleeper (there's actually another cartoon, I forget the name, where a similar situation happens but in Donald's own home). The conflict and the great bounty of gags comes in just seeing how this duck can't find the moment to go to sleep - the other soldiers with their noisy feet on the drums or the snores that sound like cannon-fire certainly don't help - and that it's easily relatable. There's no clear villain here, only the problem of trying to live a decent day-to-day existence. That sounds trite or too simple, but the animators do fantastic work in bringing you on this Duck's side, keeping you there, and making it funny, moment to moment and beat to beat.
