I never did like soup, but I’ll say this much in favor of it: I have never enjoyed a meal in my life like I enjoyed that soup. We had two nice tin pans in which to serve our soup. We put the pot on the stove to keep it warm while I proceeded to dish it out, spoonful by spoonful, the liquid coming first; then we divided the remaining vegetables—two dilapidated looking spuds and three little samples of hard, gritty, grimy meat. I gave Davis one piece and I took the other, then we matched three times to see who would get the other piece. We matched, and the first time I won; the next flip Davis won. Believe me, small and insignificant as that piece of meat was, I was too hungry to lose it, so I got cold feet.
“Davis,” I suggested, “this is damned foolishness. We’ll cut that meat in two pieces. I’m scared I’m going to lose.”
As Davis was cutting it this hard, gritty, grimy, little piece of meat slipped and fell into a pail of water which we had just lifted off the stove. Like two South Sea Islanders diving for coins thrown by the generous tourist from shipboard, we rescued the meat by diving into the water with both hands, making a beautiful splash all over the floor. Davis showed himself to be a religious sort of a guy, for he suggested that since we had been so lucky in escaping with our lives that we make a burnt offering of this meat. I didn’t know whether he was joking or not about the burnt offering, so I took no chance on his not being serious and told him we had already made one burnt offering that day in burning up that airplane. Without further argument we sliced the meat into two pieces and each had his portion.
I had eaten about half of my bread and was still so hungry that I could have eaten puckery persimmons with considerable relish when I realized that if we intended trying to escape that night we had best lay off mincing that bread, for we would certainly need it the next day. We talked it over, then viewed it from every angle, but since we were in occupied French territory we decided that I could speak enough French, and with Davis’s pathetic eyes we could sure win enough favor with the “froggies” to get by, although they probably had barely enough to eat themselves.