During the first half hour of the first world war, the french government didn’t surrender their country to anyone who asked nicely, much to the surprise of the rest of the world. Instead, they took the sensible approach, and used the excuse of war to plant more vineyards in the Cote du Rhone region. They did this under the guise of providing each french soldier with their daily ration of one litre of wine. Crikey. I thought drinking a bottle and a half of plonk each day was a disease. Espeicially when I spent three months overseas, and returned to my house stuffed full of the -indelible glass evidence of a friend’s semi-professional wine habit. But 80 years ago, it was apparently the norm. A litre of wine per man per day – a man with a gun, no woman, and probably a kilo of cheese and onions. Yeesh.
A daily litre of wine ration has made me think differently about the Somme – that soggy-assed battlefield where trench warfare was tried and discarded as a failed experiment in mass life-extinction. No wonder everyone went “over the top”, and played football with the bosch on Christmas day. They’d saved their rations for a week and all had eight bottles of wine each for breakfast. The trenches were covered in vomit and kebabs by about midday so they climbed out to try and get a bit of dark bread from the opposition to soak up the mess. The bosch tried to shoot the weaving and staggering combattants to little effect and eventually sent out soldiers to investigate the apparent bullet immunity of the french. The french responded with offers of wine for the invincible unrottable bosch bread, and football, naturally followed, as sure as violence follows team sport.