“What was it like in the morning?” enquired Bertram, as Hall paused reminiscent, and chewed the cud of bitter memory.
“Have you seen a long-sodden boot-sole that is resolving itself into its original layers and laminæ?” asked Hall. “Where there should be one solid sole, you see a dozen, and the thing gapes, as it were, showing serried rows of teeth in the shape of rusty nails and little protuberances of leather and thread?”
“Yes,” smiled Bertram.
“That was my biscuit,” continued Hall. “At the corners it gasped and split. Between the layers little lumps and points stood up, where the original biscuit holes had been made when the dreadful thing was without form, and void, in the process of evolution from cement-like dough to brick-like biscuit. . . .”
“Could you eat it?” asked Bertram.
“Could you eat a boiled boot-sole?” was the reply. “The thing had turned from dry concrete to wet leather. . . . It had exchanged the extreme of brittle durability for that of pliant toughness. . . . Eat it!” and Hall laughed sardonically.
“What becomes of them all, then, if no one eats them?” asked Bertram.
“Oh—they have their uses, y’ know. Boxes of them make a jolly good breastwork. . . The Army Service Corps are provided with work—taking them by the ton from place to place and fetching them back again. . . . I reveted a trench with biscuits once. . . . Looked very neat. . . . Lonely soldiers, in lonely outposts, do GOD BLESS OUR HOME and other devices with them—and you can make really attractive little photo-frames for ‘midgets’ and miniature with them if you have a centre-bit and carving tools. . . The handy-men of the R.E. make awf’ly nice boxes of children’s toy-building-bricks with them, besides carved plaques and all sorts of little models. . . . I heard of a prisoner who made a complete steam-engine out of biscuits, but I never saw it myself. . . . Oh, yes, the Army would miss its biscuits—but I certainly never saw anybody eat one. . . .”
Nor did Bertram, throughout the campaign. And here again it occurred to his foolish civilian mind that if the thousands of pounds spent on wholly and utterly inedible dog-biscuit had been spent on the ordinary biscuits of civilisation and the grocer’s shop, sick and weary soldiers, working and suffering for their country in a terrible climate, might have had a sufficiency of food that they could have eaten with pleasure and digested with benefit, without costing their grateful country a penny more.
“Which would be the better,” asked Bertram of himself—“to send an army ten tons of ‘biscuit’ that it cannot eat, or one ton of real biscuit that it can eat and enjoy?”