But even the destruction of our food would have been tolerable if we could have got at it with reasonable ease; unfortunately the inadequacy of the arrangements extended to the cellars where the tin rooms were located. At the beginning of things there was one tin room for the requirements of the whole camp. The tins were brought down from the parcel room in wheelbarrows and piled on racks in the tin room; there was no British supervision; there were no lockers or partitions, and the German staff could not read or understand English. It was hardly to be wondered at, therefore, that before a week was out the room was in complete confusion, accentuated each day as the intake exceeded the offtake. To get your tins opened you had to take your turn in a queue. To be the first man in this queue it was necessary, as a rule, to put in an appearance about half-past seven in the morning. The last applicant was usually served just before evening roll-call. All day the queue crawled. It was a case of queue-crawling or missing a day, English tins or German rations, and the inner man won. The head of the queue was at the tin room door. The rest of it coiled along the damp passage which traversed the cellar floor, it sat and read on the steps of the staircase that led down to the passage, often it overflowed right into and out of the doorway of the Kaserne. It was a mournful dispirited queue in those days. The Germans took five or ten minutes to serve each man and it was even odds that your tins wouldn’t be there. And if you were very unlucky you might have an accident with your tray on the return journey, upset your plates, and have to begin all over again. So much for tins; but even so, the toil was not complete. Supposing that you had emerged, weary but victorious, from the cellars, you had still only the cold and raw material for your meal; the urgent corollary was to get this cooked, and to do so it was necessary to fight for a place on the stoves. Holzminden at that time boasted three cooking stoves with surface space for thirty pots (including kettles) and a purely wood fuel supply. It was hardly to be wondered at—so great was the demand, and so slow the fire—that a great many did not get on the stoves more than once in the day. It is true that new and better stoves were being built opposite to B Kaserne, but they were not yet ready. For the moment it was a case of opportunism, watchfulness, forcefulness if necessary, and devil take the hindmost. Sometimes the old German cook would take part of the overflow on to his own capacious stoves in the German cook-house and so ease the congestion. But he was in deadly terror all the time that he would be seen helping us from the Kommandantur, and he expected a substantial consideration (in kind) for the risk he took on our behalf. Such consideration it was not in the power of some of us to bestow.