V
"Gus" was the president of the Bedouin mess, and probably because of an early education at Heidelberg, he believed in starving the British aviator. At all events, while Gus was mess president we all starved with agonizing slowness, for Gus had but two ideas of what constituted a menu. Our meals consisted solely of "bully beef" and Brussels sprouts; this meal was varied occasionally by leaving out the sprouts. To every indignant complaint from long-suffering members of the officers' mess, Gus would answer with the incontrovertible statement that "humming-birds' tongues cannot be purchased with tuppence"; this incontrovertible statement always reduced the complaining member to frothings at the mouth and other signs of inexpressible rage. Nevertheless, under the starvation system of Gus's stewardship a large credit balance was established at the Société Générale, which enabled the succeeding mess president to replace the expert electrician, who by army wisdom had been converted into a poisonous cook, with a Frenchman, whose cooking was not cooking at all, but an art which filled the Bedouins with admiration and destroyed their waist lines. Six-course banquets, ending with a rare old yellow Chartreuse, became the order of the day, and whenever some seductive delicacy defied analysis we would ask Gus if it contained the tongue of the humming-bird.
But Gus, although a failure in always satisfying the epicurean tastes of the Bedouins, won fame by being the first to bomb Cologne.