But little weaknesses beget great irritations in that life, and the intimate problems of communal feeding were enough to search out all our weaknesses. We knew that some of us, though courageous, were greedy; that others, though not greedy, were querulous about their food and had a nasty habit of 'sticking out for their rights': indeed, I think I developed this habit myself. We had had trouble about parcels. Parcels in theory were thrown into the common stock of the mess: but Egerton and Burnett never had parcels, and were by no means the most delicate eaters of other people's dainties. Harry and Hewett reserved some portion of each parcel, a cake or a slab of chocolate, which they ate furtively in their dug-outs, or shared with each other in the dusk; Burnett ostentatiously endowed the mess with his entire stock, but afterwards at every meal hinted sombrely at the rapacity of those who had devoured it. Harry and Hewett each made contributions to the mess; but Harry objected to the excessive consumption of this food by Burnett, and Hewett, who gave ungrudgingly to the rest of us, had a similar reservation--never expressed--as against Egerton. So all this matter of food set in motion a number of antagonisms seldom or never articulate, but painfully perceptible at every meal. The parcel question, I think, was one of the things which embittered the quarrel between Harry and Burnett. A parcel from home to schoolboys and soldiers and prisoners and sailors, and all homesick exiles, is the most powerful emblem of sentiment and affection. A man would willingly preserve its treasures for himself to gloat over alone, in no mere fleshly indulgence, but as a concrete expression of affection from the home for which he longs. This is not nonsense. He likes to undo the strings in the grubby hole which is his present home, and secretly become sentimental over the little fond packages and queer, loving thoughts which have composed it. And though in a generous impulse he may say to his companions, 'Come, and eat this cake,' and see it in a moment disappear, it is hard for him not to think, 'My sister (or wife, or mother) made this _for me_; they thought it would give _me_ pleasure for many days. Already it is gone--would they not be hurt if they knew?' He feels that he has betrayed the tenderness of his home; and though the giving of pleasure to companions he likes may overcome this feeling, the compulsory squandering of such precious pleasure on a man he despises calls up the worst bitterness of his heart. So was it between Harry and Burnett. If, by the way, it be suggested that Burnett was entitled to feel the same sentimental jealousy about _his_ parcels, I answer that Burnett's parcels came on his own order from the soulless hand of Fortnum and Mason.