Except for the name on
the outside of the tin, the two commodities cannot be told apart. No
doubt the imitator has likewise made a fortune. If so, both fortunes
have been amassed from a foible to whose blatant uselessness and
wastefulness even a Bond Street jeweller or a de-luxe hotel chef would
be ashamed to give countenance.
One member of the hut's company, more fastidious than his fellows,
objected to expectorating on to his Soldier's Friend. Rather than do so
he would tramp the fifty yards to our wash-place and obtain a couple of
drops of water from the tap. (The same man thought nothing of keeping a
half-consumed ham, some decaying fruit, and an opened pot of Bovril all
wrapped in his spare clothes in his box under his bed. That is by the
way. I am here concerned not with human nature, but with buttons.) Plain
water, however, was voted less effective than the more popular liquid.
The scientifically minded had a notion that human spittle contained some
acid which Nature had evolved specially to assist the action of
Soldier's Friend. I am bound to say that I was of the anti-plain-water
party myself.
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