Helen Peacocke visits Adlestrop to reflect on the food in the trenches

I gently eased the cork out of my bottle of Taittinger Prestige Rose as the train pulled away from the platform and on towards Gloucester-shire. Because it is a quality champagne, it made that glorious plop as the cork released itself from the bottle. Everyone in the carriage cheered, some looking enviously at our picnic basket which also contained cucumber sandwiches, cherries and strawberries. This was no normal train journey.

My friends Sylvia Vetta, Nicola Russell and I, were on our way to Adlestrop on a centenary celebration trip organised by the Cotswold Line Promotion Group. The group had arranged for Great Western to travel to the very spot where the Adlestrop station once stood and where poet Edward Thomas witnessed the train stopping “unwontedly” near the boundary between Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire on June 24 1914. That moment was to inspire Thomas to write Adlestrop, one of the country’s favourite poems.

As the train ground to a halt at the spot where the station had once stood, all went silent and Thomas’s poem was read out over the loud speaker. A champagne moment indeed.

Little did Thomas know at the time that while he was observing a bare platform he and his fellow travellers — indeed the whole country — were journeying through a world heading rapidly towards war. Not for him and other young men baskets of champagne and strawberries. He was to be sent to the Western Front where a repetitive diet of bully beef, brown stew, potato pie and duff pudding awaited. Their rations at the front included: bread, meat (tinned) cheese, dried or fresh vegetables, butter and biscuits that were so hard they had to be broken and soaked for a couple of days before being cooked up to form a pulp. This pulp was sometimes flavoured with condensed milk to make it palatable but, even, so it probably tasted really wretched as water used on the front line was stored in petrol canisters and so carried with it a faint aroma of petrol, which affected everything it came into contact with.

The food was seldom hot if it came from a field kitchen, so the men often cooked it themselves in a pot into which virtually everything was thrown and boiled up into a stew. Yes, there were vegetables, in fact they sometimes grew their own behind the lines, or added nettles to the pot, but as they only had one pot it doubled as a kettle when brewing up a hot drink. Pots were wiped clean with pieces of bread or old rags. There must have come a time when everything tasted the same if cooked in the trench, but soldiers could not be fussy. Meals consisted of beef sludge created from corned beef and was usually eaten standing up to their thighs in mud and in close proximity to rotting bodies which gave off an unimaginable stench. Yet hunger is a strange thing, the need to eat being such fierce force that food was consumed. Nothing was wasted.

Because of what those brave soldiers ate and endured when food was scarce and conditions in which it was consumed were so wretched, we the travellers from the 2ist century are able to dine from a picnic basket stuffed with strawberries, cherries, cucumber sandwiches and Taittinger’s pink champagne. We have, therefore, much to thank them for.