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Updated: May 12, 2025
Later on, the British, finding that by looting our cattle they could get fresh meat for nothing, were no longer forced to be content with bully-beef. They then, like ourselves, killed oxen and sheep; but, unlike us, were very wasteful with it. Often, in the camping places they had vacated, we found the remains of half-eaten oxen, sheep, pigs, and poultry.
If there were but four men to share in one tin of bully-beef or one pound of biscuits they counted themselves fortunate. Almost every man carried a "billy" slung on to the hook at the back of his tunic, a habit learnt from the Australians. This was generally made out of an empty fruit tin, with a piece of wire for a handle.
They gave away bully-beef and biscuits to those most in need, and, whenever possible, their tea and sugar rations also; it was painful to see the gratitude of the recipients. Except amongst the very wealthy both tea and sugar had been literally unknown for four years. But distress and suffering were not confined to Beyrout alone.
It is all very well to say a man will eat anything when he is hungry, but you can get so tired of bully-beef and biscuits and marmalade-jam that your stomach simply will not digest it. Machonochie's, which was a sort of canned Irish stew, wasn't bad, but there wasn't always more than enough of that to supply the quartermasters.
Mealie pap is cooked in a simple fashion, and occasionally boiling hot pots of it have fallen into the hands of the British. The British soldiers were not much better off than we were, for they were limited to bully-beef and "clinkers," though they frequently supplemented their larder by stores from Boer farms, such as fowls, pigs, &c., and had salt, sugar, and coffee in abundance.
At the beginning of the war higher education at G.H.Q. was somewhat neglected, and the company officer who desired to improve himself in the lethal arts had to be content with private study. Company officers went in for applied chemistry by making flares out of a test-tube full of water, delicately balanced in a bully-beef tin containing sodium.
We searched the convoy from end to end and found no trace; we even went so far as to search the men's clothing! and ultimately the old man had to go away without his sheep. Curiously enough, a leg of mutton appeared in the mess that night; and a very welcome change it was, too, from bully-beef.
There you were not called upon to think of anything; the less you thought, the better for your job; you just ate your bully-beef and drank your tea and cursed whizz-bangs and killed a rat or two, and thanked God you were alive. Now that he came to look at it in proper perspective, it wasn't at all a bad life. When had he been worried to death, as he was now?
One factor which contributed to, if indeed it was not as many of us believed the primary cause of, the prevalence of these diseases, was the unsuitability of bully-beef and hard biscuits as the basis of our diet under the weather and other conditions in which we were then living.
Every one was bustling about, packing the operating tent and equipment, operating table, instruments, bottles, pans, stretchers, "monkey-boxes," bandages, splints, cooking dixies, bully-beef crates, biscuit tins everything was being packed up and sorted out ready for moving. But where? No one knew. We were going to move... soon, very soon, it was rumoured.
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