“Then what’s the latest rumour?”
“Well, I shouldn’t put too much trust in it, old man,” Brown would answer guardedly, “but I saw Colonel Croft talking to one of the Unter-officers this morning.”
“Did you hear what they were saying?”
“No,” said Lieut. Brown. “You see, I can’t speak German, but by the way they were gesticulating and all that, I feel pretty certain it was about these parcels.”
And within two hours it was common knowledge throughout the camp that the Unter-officer of Block II had told Colonel Croft that there were two hundred parcels within the camp.
As the days passed, and no consignment arrived, conjecture exceeded every bound of possibility. It was asserted on the one hand that the parcels had been commandeered on the way by the German army, and on another that the parcels had actually arrived and were in the camp, but that the Commandant had refused to issue them till he had received instructions from Berlin. During these days there was no epithet with which the word Boche went uncoupled.
At last, however, the parcels did arrive; a large cart was perceived entering the gate laden with cardboard boxes, and a roseate mist enveloped the outlook of the Gefangener. The lean years were at an end, prosperity was in sight, and the flesh-pots of Egypt already steamed within the imagination. “Bread’s in the citadel, all’s well with the world.”
But one thing had been overlooked. A composition of milk and flour is not improved by the delays of a protracted journey through the metallic heats of a German summer. The bread was unbelievably mouldy.
Well, we tried to imagine that we enjoyed it, and it was certainly something to eat; we doctored it and applied every remedy that the ingenuity of the R.A.M.C. could devise; but there are limits beyond which redemption cannot pass. There are stains which only dissolution can annul, and the freshness of white bread once lost is as irrecoverable as virginity. Green it was, and green it remained. The taste of mould was there and baking would not remove it.
Perhaps there was some comfort in the assurances of the doctor that, after it had been soaked and heated, it could do no active harm: but it could not change the nature of the object. Sadly it was agreed that bread was a washout.