ceries.
Meat included tinned and fresh meat and bacon. Bread included ordinary
bread, biscuits, and flour. The groceries were tea, sugar, jam (or
cheese), pepper and salt, with such alternatives and additions as tinned
milk, rice, prunes, curry powder, and raisins--which last were rarely
available. The 28th's experience was that, when supplies were available
and the weather permitted of them being landed, Argentine chilled beef
and baker's bread left little room for complaint. However, the two
factors mentioned did not always coincide and the Battalion, for days on
end, had to be content with substitutes. The tinned meat ("dog" or
"bully beef") was also from Argentine, and had already been dealt with
for "extract" besides being extremely salt in flavour. The only way to
make it palatable was to fry it up with bacon fat and chopped onions, or
boil it again and add rice and curry powder when procurable. Nevinson[O]
says that when the Anzac men threw over tins of meat to the Turks in
exchange for packets of cigarettes it was a cheap gift, and the enemy
returned the messages, "Bully beef non, envoyez milk." Now and again one
came across a treasure in the form of a stray tin of a Canadian brand,
or of "Maconochie" (a very substantial and nourishing stew), but looked
in vain for the well-known Australian and New Zealand products.

The bacon, mostly very fat, was known as "lance-corporal bacon," _i.e._,
with only one thin streak of lean running through it. This was issued
_ad nauseam_. One man expressed his feelings when he said that he would
never be able to look a pig in the face again.

There are no biscuits like the army issue. To those whose dentition was
not perfect the masticating of them was tedious and painful. Some men
made graters out of biscuit tin lids and grated the article to a powder,
afterwards making a kind of porridge with it. Others discarded them as
food and carved them into frames for photographs, or cigarette pictures,
or contrived other mementos of a disagreeable period. Fresh vegetables
were rarely seen. Now and again an enterprising individual would return
from the beach with a cabbage, or a few potatoes, which he had purchased
from one of the Navy or looted from some unsuspecting person who had
them in charge. So far as can be remembered, not one single issue of
potatoes was made to the Battalion during the whole of its stay on the
Peninsula. Onions, however, were plentiful and of first-rate quality.