Christmas Day at Bad Orb

Our first day in Bad Orb was Christmas. They knew we were coining and gave us a whole day's food at one time. It was tea, soup, and bread. Each morning we had either ersatz [substitute] tea, or coffee. The tea was awful and the coffee was little better. If you would like to try the coffee, take six acorns and bum them. Boil them in a pint of water for twenty minutes. Serve while luke-warm.

For dinner we usually had a thin soup. Some of the soups were made from carrots, cabbage or potatoes. The best was like a stew. We got "the stew" on Thursday and Sunday. Sometimes it had a bite or two of meat in it. One day some of the men said they saw two horses pulling a wagon to the kitchen. A third horse was in the wagon with hoofs pointing toward the heavens. The next day they saw four hoofs in the comer of the kitchen and we had a little meat in our stew. Horse meat was not too bad—in fact, we all hoped for more of it. Some of the fellows could tell you what cat meat tastes like.

The worst soup was called "green hornet" or "green death." It was made out of everything that was green. It had old cabbage, kohlrabi tops and such like in it. (Kohlrabi is a beet used to feed the cows and very bitter.) There were little pine needles in the soup and they bothered me more than anything else. We had to bite them in two, or they would gag us as they went down. Each man's bowl of soup had an ample supply of little white worms which were about three-fourths of an inch long. I picked them out the first time, then I realized that they were boiled and the meat was unrationed, so I just ate them with the soup. In fact, it was impossible to eat the soup without the worms, and I found that worms won't kill a man. The "green hornet" made a lot of the men sick just to smell it. Some got dysentery, but others were not affected.