SOLDIERS' DIET

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 3, Issue 257, 13 January 1941, Page 3

SOLDIERS' DIET

TASTES LIKE CHICKEN WHEN BULLY BEEF SCORES (From the Official War Correspondent with the N.Z.E.F. in Egypt). With appetites waxing strong on exercise and open air, bully beef and biscuits have won new respect in the eyes of soldiers of the N.Z.E.F in the Middle East. The pack which the infantryman slings across his shoulders when he moves away from camp for a day or more almost invariably has o tin of meat and a packet of "hard tack" stowed away in it, while rare is the transport driver who cannot produce a quick meal from under liis - driving seat. If you heard them mentioned, as you sat before a hot dinner in a comfortable mess "bully and biscuits" would, have an uninspiring sound, but hunger lends them a touch of magic. You may be out with a battalion at exercises, waiting in the fading daylight and the growing dullness while 1 an advance party; goes ahead to select a bivouac area. You begin to think how long ago it was that the last meal halt was made, and you look hope fully into the dusk for the glow of flame that will mean that the cooks have at last set up their boilers. Then someone remembers his tin of bully, someone else produces the biscuits, and in two minutes a hefty sandwich slides off a bayonet into your hands. Cold chicken could hardly taste better. Scratch meals like this are a characteristic of army manoeuvres. Sometimes the "bush telegraph" passes back the news that the haU will 1)0 a fairly long one, and hot tea appears as if out of thin a;ir. There is always a primus stove about somewhere, or an ingenious heater that is simply a tin filled with petrol-soaked sand. Drivers are particularly resourceful when heating is needed—they can improve a tin of beans, for instance, by leaving it on the exhaust manifold of a truck engine for the last 20 minutes or so of the journey. Every soldier finds himself becoming quite adept at preparing meals with a minimum of facilities. Yet the army cook, who works miracles where the ordinary soldier only works wonders, could never be threatened with extinction. Your bully and biscuits may have saved the day on that bleak afternoon, but they become less than a memory when you take your place in the queue an hour later and see roast beef, potatoes, beans and gravy, brought out -from camp eight miles away and heated up on the spot, heaped into your mess tin.