THOUGHTS OF FOOD 



inside pastry. At least ten tins of sardines were to be 

 emptied on to a bed of pastry, and the whole then rolled 

 up and cooked, preparatory to its division into four 

 equal portions. I remember one day Marshall came 

 forward with a proposal for a thick roll of suet pudding 

 with plenty of jam all over it, and there arose quite a 

 heated argument as to whether he could fairly claim 

 this dish to be an invention, or whether it was not the 

 jam roll already known to the housewives of civilisation. 

 There was one point on which we were all agreed, and 

 that was that we did not want any jellies or things of 

 that sort at our future meals. The idea of eating such 

 elusive stuff as jelly had no appeal to us at all. 



On a typical day during this backward march we 

 would leave camp at about 6.40 a.m., and half an hour 

 later would have recovered our frost-bitten fingers, 

 while the moisture on our clothes, melted in the sleeping- 

 bags, would have begun to ablate, after having first 

 frozen hard. We would be beginning to march with 

 some degree of comfort, and one of us would remark, 

 " Well, boys, what are we going to have for breakfast 

 to-day? " We had just finished our breakfast as a 

 matter of fact, consisting of half a pannikin of semi-raw 

 horse-meat, one biscuit and a half and a pannikin of 

 tea, but the meal had not taken the keenness from our 

 appetites. We used to try to persuade ourselves that 

 our half -biscuit was not quite a half, and sometimes 

 we managed to get a httle bit more that way. The 

 question would receive our most serious and careful 

 consideration at once, and we would proceed to weave 

 from our hungry imaginations a tale of a day spent in 

 eating. " Now we are on board ship," one man would 

 say. " We wake up in a bunk, and the first thing we 

 do is to stretch out our hands to the side of the bunk 

 and get some chocolate, some Garibaldi biscuits and 



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