The day dawned grey, cheerless and threatening over a landscape as grey, cheerless and threatening as the day. The silent, menacing jungle, the loathsome stench of the surrounding swamp, the heavy, louring sky, the moist, suffocating heat; the sense of lurking, threatening danger from savage man, beast and reptile, insect and microbe; the feeling of utter homelessness and rough discomfort, combined to oppress, discourage and disturb. . . .
Breakfast, eaten in silence in the Mess banda, consisted of porridge that required long and careful mastication by any who valued his digestion; pieces of meat of dull black surface and bright pink interior, also requiring long and careful mastication by all who were not too wearied by the porridge drill; and bread.
The bread was of interest—equally to the geologist, the zoologist, the physiologist, the chemist, and the merely curious. To the dispassionate eye, viewing it without prejudice or partiality, the loaf looked like an oblate spheroid of sandstone—say the Old Red Sandstone in which the curious may pick up a mammoth, aurochs, sabre-toothed tiger, or similar ornament of their little world and fleeting day—and to the passionate hand hacking with prejudice and partiality (for crumb, perhaps), it also felt like it. It was Army Bread, and quite probably made since the outbreak of the war. The geologist, wise in Eras—Paleolithic, Pliocene, Eocene, May-have-been—felt its challenge at once. To the zoologist there was immediate appeal when, by means of some sharp or heavy tool, the outer crust had been broken. For that interior was honey-combed with large, shiny-walled cells, and every cell was filled with a strange web-like kind of cocoon of finest filaments, now grey, now green, to which adhered tiny black specks. Were these, asked the zoologist, the eggs of insects, and, if so, of what insects? Were they laid before the loaf petrified, or after? If before, had the burning process in the kiln affected them? If after, how did the insect get inside? Or were they possibly of vegetable origin—something of a fungoid nature—or even on that strange borderland ’twixt animal and vegetable where roam the yeasty microbe and boisterous bacillus? Perhaps, after all, it was neither animal nor vegetable, but mineral? . . . So ponders the geologist who incurs Army Bread in the wilds of the earth.
The physiologist merely wonders once again at the marvels of the human organism, that man can swallow such things and live; while the chemist secretes a splinter or two, that he may make a qualitative and quantitative analysis of this new, compound, if haply he survive to return to his laboratory.
To the merely curious it is merely curious—until he essays to eat it—and then his utterance may not be merely precious. . . .
After this merry meal, Bertram approached the Colonel, saluted, and said:
“Colonel Frost, of the Hundred and Ninety-Ninth, ordered me to be sure to request you to return his nine cooking-pots at your very earliest convenience, sir, if you please.”
Colonel Rock smiled brightly upon Bertram.
“He always was a man who liked his little joke,” said he. . . . “Remind me to send him—”
“Yes, sir,” interrupted Bertram, involuntarily, so pleased was he to think that the Pots of Contention were to be returned after all.