So much for tins; but even so, the toil was not complete. Supposing that you had emerged, weary but victorious, from the cellars, you had still only the cold and raw material for your meal; the urgent corollary was to get this cooked, and to do so it was necessary to fight for a place on the stoves. Holzminden at that time boasted three cooking stoves with surface space for thirty pots (including kettles) and a purely wood fuel supply. It was hardly to be wondered at—so great was the demand, and so slow the fire—that a great many did not get on the stoves more than once in the day. It is true that new and better stoves were being built opposite to B Kaserne, but they were not yet ready. For the moment it was a case of opportunism, watchfulness, forcefulness if necessary, and devil take the hindmost.
Sometimes the old German cook would take part of the overflow on to his own capacious stoves in the German cook-house and so ease the congestion. But he was in deadly terror all the time that he would be seen helping us from the Kommandantur, and he expected a substantial consideration (in kind) for the risk he took on our behalf. Such consideration it was not in the power of some of us to bestow.
We from the sorting camps were feeling the pinch about now, and were living, most of us, and apart from the German ration, on precarious charity. At Karlsruhe we had blown ourselves out on tomatoes and bread: at Heidelberg we had added relish to the bread, with an occasional pot of honey from their well-stocked canteen. But in the canteen at Holzminden there was nothing to eat beyond a very nauseous paste. Some of us were lucky and fell in with a well-stocked mess; the rest of us waited blankly for our relief parcels, eking out with a tin here and a tin there, frying bread in dripping, lucky if we could see a meal ahead. For the first time in our lives we knew hunger; not so fiercely as our successors in 1918 were to know it, but more fiercely perhaps than the veterans of 1914 and 1915, who, whatever their other tortures, had at least come as prisoners into a country where food was to be had for the purchasing.
Finally there was the question of fuel. It was October now, and the days in Brunswick were no longer balmy. Each of our rooms—scheduled to hold twelve—possessed a stove, but there was nothing to put in the stove. We saw woods on the horizon to three sides of us. The regulations, we understood, permitted us the daily ration of a German soldier in the field. But no wood was forthcoming, except what was brought for the consumption of our three cooking stoves. A dangerous minority endeavoured, as usual, to destroy the comfort of the community by stealing this cooking supply. The practice was sternly stopped. Then recourse was had to the stools in the dining rooms. These blazed well for a night or two, but were naturally not replaced, and we had all the fewer stools to sit upon. Finally those who preferred a blaze to a night’s rest sacrificed their bed boards. It was reckless jettison, but excusable. The Camp Commandant had broken faith with us over the fuel question if possible more flagrantly than over others, and the camp was justly incensed. One day a representative of the Dutch Legation in Berlin had been down to visit us. On the morning of his arrival the Commandant, scenting the trouble which might be expected on this as on other issues, had caused it to be proclaimed at morning appel that from that day fuel would be issued free (loud cheers!). We might have known. We never got a faggot free. The representative carried out his colourless inspection, and that evening we were as cold as before. The end of this particular campaign was that ultimately, and under the extreme pressure of the increasing cold, we paid for wood at the rate of 40 marks a cubic metre. The only people who got fuel free were those under detention in the cells.
Every now and again a waggon-load of briquettes used to come in under escort for discharge in the coal cellars of Kaserne B. On these occasions we used to help unloading the waggon—but not into the coal cellars. A crowd of officers with British warms and trench coats with capacious pockets suddenly appeared from nowhere, swarmed round the waggon and its disconcerted sentinel, and contrived to get a bit of their own back.
For rank exploitation, however, the food supply was facile princeps. We might forgive the Germans for the food they offered us; we could not forgive them either for the way they served it or for the price they made us pay for it.
In one of the cellars aforementioned our year’s potato supply was stored. This came in in October. Three English orderlies were on permanent fatigue in this cellar, peeling the daily potato ration for the camp. When the peeling was complete the potatoes were thrown into one of the two large coppers in the German cook-house (the other contained hot water) and were boiled up in relentless conjunction with the other ingredients billed for that particular day. It did not matter what they were; everything went into the hotch-potch, and, so long as it eventually boiled and was ladled out into big pails for despatch to the dining rooms, all was well. On Sundays there was an occasional lump of horse-flesh floating in the stew and some green vegetable which might fairly be classified as “a not too French French bean”; on one Sunday, as a variation, the skull of a cow complete except for skin and ears was found floating in the pot. On other days plain sauerkraut, or its equivalent nastiness. Occasionally there was some barley grain which, with many of us, did duty as porridge for our next morning’s breakfast.
Such was our bill of fare for the mid-day meal. Our breakfast was ersatz coffee: our supper was an attenuated version of our lunch. And for this we were mulcted monthly to the tune of 60 marks a head. No doubt this charge would have been exceeded, if it had been possible; but an agreement between the British and German Governments had fixed the sum of 60 marks as the limit which a subaltern prisoner-of-war might receive as pay whilst in captivity, and the Germans could not therefore legally charge any more. As it was, there was nothing left on which a subaltern might come and go for ordinary out-of-pocket expenses in the canteen or in camp subscriptions; and to meet these requirements he had to draw a cheque on his bankers which was discounted with a neutral agent by the Germans at a ruinous rate of exchange for himself and with a very comfortable margin of profit for everybody else concerned.
No one, of course, who could live on his own supply of tins thought of looking at the German food. It was too impossibly served. Messes would sometimes depute one of their members to make a dive into the soup tub and rescue some of the better looking potatoes wherewith to supplement the evening stew.
The poor quality of the diet was accepted as directly attributable to the beleaguered state of Germany. We knew that the sentries and the staff personnel were getting the same, and that probably the people in the town were faring little better. What we did resent was that we were not allowed to take over our ration in bulk and exercise control as to the manner of its cooking, and also that we were not allowed a rebate for what we did not require.