For use under heavy fire or other conditions which made it impossible to serve the men with hot food from the rolling kitchens, the trench ration, consisting of tinned meat, hard bread, and soluble coffee, together with salt and sugar, was designed. The food was packed in hermetically sealed, gas-proof, camouflaged iron containers, each of which held twenty-five rations, each ration in turn consisting of enough food to maintain a soldier for one day, sustaining his full strength and vigor. The food used in the trench ration was the very best that money could buy. Indeed, it became a matter of pride with the employees of the great plants where the trench rations were prepared to use exceptional care in selecting the ingredients for them, for it was realized what good food meant to the tired and mud-caked men who were holding the Frontier of Freedom. The office force of one of the big packing-houses learned from a shipping-clerk that the interstices between the tins in the packing-cases were being filled with excelsior, so they took up a collection, to which every one from president to office-boy contributed, and used the money to fill those interstices with tobacco and cigarettes. When the officers of the Subsistence Division heard of this they thought so well of the idea that orders were issued that the empty space in all trench-ration containers should be filled with tobacco thereafter. Scores of such incidents, trivial enough in themselves, showed how the hearts and thoughts of the nation were with the boys who were fighting overseas.