Tent Heaters

The winter was cold, bitterly cold. There had been an issue of tent heaters, British tent heaters that operated on kerosene and they had a circular wick. One of the disasters that could occur with these was if the kerosene dwindled down and the wick started to burn, the whole inside of the bunker would be coated with soot, and it was oily soot. Some genius determined that if you took an ammunition box, a metal ammunition box, and you put a mess tin full of sand inside it and you took shell casings and made a chimney, or the boxes that the shells came in, they’re circular that artillery shells came in, you could make a chimney. So you cut a whole in the rear of the ammunition box, you ran a chimney up through the roof and outside you put a jerry can of naphtha and you stripped the wire out of a telegraph line. Now you had a hose. And you hooked the hose to the jerry can, ran it down, and you had naphtha drip into the sand in the mess tin and you regulated it with a jack knife and piece of wood and as you closed the knife on a piece of wood and pinched your hose you could regulate the flow of naphtha. They were marvellous. That’s how we heated the inside of these bunkers and they were brutally cold. It was brutally cold outside. The bad news was when you came in off a patrol, you could see all the smoke coming up from each of the bunkers so you knew exactly where every bunker was. But that was how people kept warm in the bunkers in the winter.