There was only one visible means of retaliation—scrupulously “drawing” the whole of the weekly ration of Boche bread and as scrupulously wasting it or burning it. That never failed to create a commotion, and it was made, before very long, a punishable offence.
Almost weekly the messing question figured prominently on the agenda for the senior officer’s conference with the Commandant. Weekly the same privileges were demanded—control of the raw supply, supervision in the kitchen, an equivalent return in money for what we did not require. Weekly the Commandant returned evasive and unsatisfactory replies, and shifted the onus of responsibility on to convenient and distant Hanover. To the end we were not quite sure that he might not, in this one instance, be really telling the truth. The messing system in the Hanover command might really conceivably be directed from a centralised control; but if so, how to reconcile our system with that at Clausthal in the same command, where rebate was allowed as a matter of course?
Later on, damning evidence was collected to prove that we were not getting more than two-thirds of our scheduled weight. As a sop we received the unheard-of concession of getting our potatoes in their jackets on two days in the week.
There is little doubt, in the retrospect, that our messing at Holzminden probably afforded the easiest field for exploitation, so little interest was taken, during most of the period, in the garbage which was offered us, and so regular and secure was the payment, a credit from our own unsuspecting Government debited automatically against us in our account before we had even the opportunity to turn it into Lager Geld, as the paper currency of the camp used to be called. It was hardly to be wondered at that the Supply branch of the German army should have been so venal; the opportunities for profiteering must have been unlimited.
Sometimes a Quartermaster-General used to come round on inspection and sniff the mess in the coppers and admire the stoves. With him in close attendance one probably saw the people who were really getting at us, the Verwaltung Leute (“Q” people) of the place. They were seedy, suspicious-looking folk, thin enough in spite of their obvious battening at our expense. The General himself was a fairly poor specimen of his class. He drove up to the camp from the station even in the finest weather in a closed carriage and behind one feeble nag. He was obviously zealously misinformed about everything, and our quarrel lay not with him, any more than we should have visited the sins of an over-astute quartermaster on the shoulders of some old dug-out at Corps H.Q.
Later on, in 1918, we heard how things had been done at Rastatt in Baden, where hundreds of British officers lay all day on their beds too weak to move for weeks on end. There too, where the stuff that we spurned would have been a banquet, the fault could be brought home to the criminal maladministration, venality, and neglect of the ghouls on the lower rungs of the verwaltung staff. We have seen the diaries—
“Thursday half ration, complained but no explanation. Friday a General came over to inspect. We were given a double ration for dinner. Saturday half ration again”: and so on.
But in their case it was deliberate cruelty as well as exploitation.