My girlfriend recalls reading a long time ago in a “book of facts” that there was a battle in which the soldiers had to fight with bread and cheese because they ran out of ammunition. Being mistrustful of most “books of facts” especially after reading Cecil’s column for so long, I searched for a long while, but could not come across any thing like it. I did come across a battle in which the greek armed themselves with bread and of a practice for a town in which they threw bread and cheese off of chuch belltowers, but nothing about said battle. She seems to think it involved the french, and that I can believe, based on the hardness of their bread, but I have been unsucessful in my research.
I just know that as soon as I post this there will be some one come along telling us, “Yes, according to the Encyclopedia of Great Food Fights, this actually happened during the Thirty Years War.”
BUT!!! You know Ava, I gotta think that you were right in being mistrustful of this bit of trivia. It seems unlikely that both sides would run out of ammo at exactly the same time and not be able to find any thing better than bread and cheese. In that situation your first thought might be that they’d fall back on things like rocks, swords, kicking and gouging, you know, the more time tested, traditional forms of meyhem rather than jump right to the soft food group.
Sounds like somethng that Paul Harvey would have on his show.
Sounds like a Dave Barry column about military food throughout history.
He was explaining that the “real” reason Hard tack was invented was not for the soldiers to eat, but for the soldiers to throw at the enemy if they ran out of ammunition.
I have some cheese in the fridge right now which, considering the green, moldy, growth and the smell, could surely be used as a bioterrorist weapon of mass destruction. If the UN inspectors now in Irak found it they would have the CIA send one of those drones to destroy my kitchen.
I did a search on google on “Bread and Cheese Battle” and turned up a site about a state park around Baltimore. It seems that during the war of 1812 an American unit, after tangling with some British, retreated across “Bread and Cheese” creek. The whole thing, it turns out was real important in our defense of Fort McHenry.
B- So that any woman who may appear in my life may have the satisfaction of throwing it away and feel she has made a vast improvement in my life. I would not want to deny her that satisfaction, would I?
C- I really don’t know. Every time I look at it and I think I need to throw it away and I’ll do it as soon as I get a round tuit. But nobody gives me a round tuit so. . . .
The best I can do is this from an Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader:
The source is given as Significa by Irving Wallace, David Wallechinsky, and Amy Wallace. Which, of course, sounds like a “book of facts”. I can’t find an internet source to verify this.
Yes, she did mention the part about it being shot from canons, but I thought that was a bit fanciful to put in. She didn’t read “Uncle John’s” so it came from another source. Ah well.
