After the rum ration we receive some tea and sugar, lots of bully beef and biscuits. The bully beef is corned beef and has its origin, mysterious to us, in Chicago, Illinois, or so we believe. It is quite good. But you can get too much of a good thing once too often. So sometimes we eat it, and sometimes we use the unopened tins as bricks and line the trenches with them. Good solid bricks, too! We get soup powders and yet more soup powders. We get cheese that is not cream cheese, and we get a slice of raw bacon. Often we eat the bacon at once, sometimes we save it up to have a "good feed" at one time. One can plan one's own menu just as fancy dictates.
Then we get jam. The inevitable, haunting, horrific "plum and apple." This is made by Ticklers', Limited, of London, England, and after the tins are empty we use them to manufacture hand grenades. In those days our supply of hand bombs was like our supply of shells, problematic to say the least. After a time, back of the line, instruction schools were opened in bomb making and bomb throwing. One or two out of a platoon would go back and learn "how," and then instruct the rest of us to fill the tins with spent pieces of shrapnel, old scraps of iron, anything which came handy, insert the fuse, cotton and so forth, and thus form an effective weapon for close fighting.
We called those bombers "Ticklers' Artillery Brigade," and they tickled many a German with Ticklers' empty jam tins.
A stock of weak tea, some sugar, salt, some bully beef, biscuits crumbled down, the whole well stirred and brought to a boil, then thickened by several soup powders, is a recipe for a stew which, as the Irishman said, is "filling and feeding." Of its appearance I say nothing.
Regardless of any, we are the best fed troops in the field. While in the trenches the food may be rough and monotonous, but there is plenty of it, and it is of the best quality of its kind. No man need ever be hungry in the trenches. It is his own fault if he is.
We grouse at our rations, of course, and make jokes and laugh, but we never run short of supplies.
Behind the lines, when we go back for a rest and are in billets, we are supplied with well-cooked and comfortable meals. Three good squares a day. We have here our field kitchens and our regular cooks, and Mulligan (stew) is not the daily portion, but variations of roast beef, mutton and so forth.
It is good food, and I have heard men exclaim that it was better than anything they had had at home. After investigation I usually found that the men who dilated thus on the gastronomic delights of billets were married men!
The authorities are just as careful about sending up a soldier's letters, his parcels and small gifts from home, as they are about the food and clothing supplies. They recognize that Tommy Atkins naturally and rightly wants to keep in touch with the home folks, and every effort is made to get communications up on time. But war is war, and there are days and even weeks when no letters reach the front line. Those are the days that try the mettle of the men. We do not tell our thoughts to one another. The soldier of to-day is rough of exterior, rough of speech and rough of bearing, but underneath he has a heart of gold and a spirit of untold gentleness.
We play poker, and we play with the sky the limit. Why not? Active service allowance is thirty francs a month—five dollars. Why put on any limit? You may owe a man a hundred, or even two hundred dollars, but what's the difference?—a shell may put an end to you, him and the poker board any old minute. There is no knowing.