This looks well on paper, but pot and plate make a difference in the proposition. Army cheese runs to rind rapidly, and a pound of beef is often easily bitten to the bone: sometimes, in fact, it is all bone and gristle, and the ravages of cooking minimise its bulk in a disheartening way. One and a half pound of bread is more than the third of a big loaf, but minus butter it makes a featureless repast. Breakfast and tea without butter and milk does not always make a dainty meal.
Even the distribution of rations leaves much to be desired; the fatigue party, well-intentioned and sympathetic though it be, often finds itself short of provisions. This may in many cases be due to unequal distribution; an ounce of beef too much to each of sixteen men leaves the seventeenth short of meat. This may easily happen, as the ration party has never any means of weighing the food: it is nearly always served out by guesswork. But sometimes the landladies help in the distribution by bringing out scales and weighing the provisions. One lady in our street always weighed the men's rations, and saw that those under her care got the exact allowance. Never would she take any more than her due, and never less. But a few days ago, when weighing sugar and tea, a blast of wind upset the scales, and a second allowance met with a similar fate. Sugar and tea littered the pavement, and finally the woman supplied her soldiers from the household stores. She now leaves the work of distribution in the hands of the ration party, and takes what is given to her without grumbling.
The soldiers' last meal is generally served out about five o'clock in the afternoon, sometimes earlier; and a stretch of fourteen hours intervenes between then and breakfast. About nine o'clock in the evening those who cannot afford to pay for extras feel their waist-belts slacken, and go supperless to bed. And tea is not a very substantial meal; the rations served out for the day have decreased in bulk, bread has wasted to microscopic proportions, and the cheese has diminished sadly in size. A regimental song, pent with soldierly woes, bitterly bemoans the drawbacks of Tommy's tea:
"Bread and cheese for breakfast,
For dinner Army stew,
But when it comes to tea-time
There's dough and rind for you,
So you and me
Won't wait for tea—
We're jolly big fools if we do."