This, however, no one would believe, and the imparter of this rumour was told to secrete his information elsewhere.
Slowly the queue moved forward, and at last the claimant passed through the sacred portals that were watched over by guardian angels in the form of whiskered sentries with zigzagged bayonets; within the sacred place there were even more seraphim. Behind a long table stood four slovenly civilians, whose duty it was to open the parcels, and see that no sabres or revolvers were concealed beneath the apparent innocence of a tin of Maconochie’s beef dripping. At a far corner of the table was the high priest, the master of the ceremonies. He sat there “coldly sublime, intolerably just,” with a large book in which he entered every name.
Action proceeded on lines of Teutonic formality. The claimant for a parcel would first of all present himself before the high priest, and murmur the number of his parcel.
“Twenty-one.”
This the high priest would translate into German with a commendable rapidity.
“Ein und zwanzig.”
He would shout this over his shoulder to one of the many satellites whose work it was to produce the required parcel. The next few seconds would be anxious ones for the hungry Gefangener. He would watch the sentry move about among a store of boxes, moving one, displacing another. He would lift a parcel so small that it could assuredly contain nothing but boot polish, and a shiver would pass through the leanly expectant. But at last, after many vacillations and counter-marches, he would emerge triumphantly with a cardboard box bearing the large Red Cross of the Central London Committee.
But even then there was more to be done. Each parcel had to be carefully opened and its contents examined. No tins nor paper could be taken away. Packets of tea and cocoa had to be stripped of their covering and emptied into baskets, while the tinned foods were spirited away to the block cellar, where later in the day they were opened in the presence of a number of sentinels.
The reason for all this palaver we never quite managed to fathom. It was surely enough that the British Red Cross had pledged its word not to include for exportation tracts for the times, pulpit propaganda, or prismatic compasses. With delightful duplicity the German authorities laid the blame of this on to our Allies.
“You see,” they said, “we’re very sorry, but the French get so many things in their tins; poison for our herbs, and knives and files. We must take precautions. Of course many parcels are quite all right, but the French, you see....”