It was through no reflection on our cooking, however, but simply for the reduction of a steadily increasing embonpoint that one of our number undertook a voluntary five days’ fast. Besides being under ordinary conditions extremely good-natured by day, X had a mirthful habit of laughing in his sleep, the only case in a considerable experience of somnambulistic phenomena among soldiers during the war which I have yet encountered.
In the early hours of the final morning of his fast he indeed laughed, but in a minor key, just a ghost of a guffaw, with a very apparent and pathetic tendency to merge into a sob. That morning he finished his fast and his breakfast almost simultaneously. In order that he should break the glad tidings gently, so to speak, to his famished and clamant stomach, we had specially reserved for him a tin of rice and milk, very happily designated “Amity.” This was followed up later in the day by a handful of stewed prunes, and he was soon once more in his right mind, if not so essentially clothed upon. He had, in fact, dropped just about one stone in weight in these five days of fasting.
There was a suggestion that after the war some of us would be qualified to publish a cookery book: “Mrs. Beeton Beaten!”
TWICE WOUNDED
ORDERLY HANET—“LE PÈRE NOËL.”