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Updated: May 12, 2025
He had heard that men at the front lived on some solid horror called bully-beef dug out of tins, and some liquid horror called cocoa, also drunk out of tins; that men kept on their clothes, even their boots, for weeks at a time; that rats ran over them while they tried to sleep; that lice, hitherto associated in his mind with the most revolting type of tramp, out there made no distinction of persons.
Sacks of grain and bales of tibbin stood in huge pyramidal mounds; multitudinous rows of boxes containing bully-beef, condensed milk, dried fruit, biscuits, cocoa, and tea, seemed to stretch for miles. One walked down streets of bully-beef, as it were; loitered in squares bounded by biscuit-tins; dodged up alleys flanked by tea-chests and cases of "Ideal" milk.
The Argentine was lashing out at the others in the same old way. Tiny, the terrier, looked very weary and travel-stained after much forced marching, which she had loyally undergone to the last. Jacko had not turned a hair. Williams turned up with "Pussy" in a lather, having been hunting for me all round Pretoria. We ate bully-beef and biscuit together in the old style.
Every one of our men as he passed handed over his day's rations of bully-beef and biscuits to the starving people; I saw one woman hysterically trying to insert a piece of army biscuit into the mouth of the baby in her arms, and groups of little boys fighting for the food thrown to them.
They began as cave-dwellers and they end by occupying suburban villas the captain's dug-out has a roof of corrugated iron, a window, a book-shelf, a table, and even chairs, and his table manners have vastly improved. They have progressed from candles stuck in bully-beef tins to electric reading-lamps.
Mac Lindsay, the stock-whip expert and jack-of-all-trades, confessed to only one ambition in life to dress in a little red jacket and fez and lead him round on a chain! The report that he made a Ford car out of bully-beef tins has, I understand, been officially denied. Just a week before the Armistice we lost Colthart, the best quartermaster in the Army, and one of the best of fellows.
It was near here that our first man was killed later in the day. He was looking into one of these bivouacs, and was about to crawl out when a bullet went through his brain. It was a sniper's shot. We buried him in an old Turkish trench close by, and put a cross made of a wooden bully-beef crate over him. The sun now blazed upon us, and our rain-soaked clothes were steaming in the heat.
Just to see your chief wandering about more or less informally, finding things out for himself, watching you not on parade, but at your ordinary daily jobs; to know that he was not above getting out of his car to ask a question personally, or, during operations, to sit on a gun-limber digging his bully-beef out of a tin with a jack-knife, like any other man. These things went a mighty long way.
We started at a trot, two or three patrols galloping out in front, towards the high ground, while the regiment followed in mass a great square block of ungainly brown figures and little horses, hung all over with water-bottles, saddle-bags, picketing-gear, tins of bully-beef, all jolting and jangling together; the polish of peace gone; soldiers without glitter; horsemen without grace; but still a regiment of light cavalry in active operation against the enemy.
All day long high explosives used to sing and burst sometimes killing and wounding men, sometimes blowing up the bully-beef and biscuits, sometimes falling with a hiss and a column of white spray into the sea. It was here that the field-telegraph of the Royal Engineers became a tangled spider's web of wires and cross wires.
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