“Has he signalled anything?” “No, but he’s coming awful slow. There can’t be anything for him.” And sadly Evans would re-enter the room from which he had set forth with such gay hopes. “One for you, Turner; and you’ve clicked, Smith, two for you; and Piggett, you’ve got one. Nothing for the rest.” “Nothing?” echoed the rest. “No,” Evans would grunt, and for him, as for the other unfortunates, the remainder of the day had lost all savour and romance. For the lucky, however, the excitement of the morning had only just begun, and a mere name on the parcel list served but as a preliminary excitant. The real zest of dissipation was still in store. Behind the barred doors of the “Ausgabe” lay all the innumerable varieties of an assignation. There might be cigarettes, clothing perhaps, a cycle parcel from Thurloe Place, or, and this was in parenthesis, a mouldy loaf from Copenhagen. First of all, there was the queue, the inevitable prelude to every form of punishment and amusement; and in this queue conjecture ran wild on the probable percentage of bread parcels in the camp. “Well, I was standing by the gate yesterday,” one fellow was saying, “and I saw a load of parcels come in, and damn me if every one wasn’t a Thurloe Place.” “Ah,” but the pessimist would break in, “that was the second load, you saw. I watched all three come in, and believe me, in the first and last loads there was nothing but bread.” This, however, no one would believe, and the imparter of this rumour was told to secrete his information elsewhere. Slowly the queue moved forward, and at last the claimant passed through the sacred portals that were watched over by guardian angels in the form of whiskered sentries with zigzagged bayonets; within the sacred place there were even more seraphim. Behind a long table stood four slovenly civilians, whose duty it was to open the parcels, and see that no sabres or revolvers were concealed beneath the apparent innocence of a tin of Maconochie’s beef dripping. At a far corner of the table was the high priest, the master of the ceremonies. He sat there “coldly sublime, intolerably just,” with a large book in which he entered every name. Action proceeded on lines of Teutonic formality. The claimant for a parcel would first of all present himself before the high priest, and murmur the number of his parcel. “Twenty-one.” This the high priest would translate into German with a commendable rapidity. “Ein und zwanzig.”