Shaw's People: Victoria to Churchill

Shaw's People: Victoria to Churchill

Shaw's People: Victoria to Churchill
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996

p. 19

...December 1899....the war (South African War) was going badly....For Christmas 1899 the Queen had sought a symbolic present to send to her troops in the field as something special from her. Soon, ships were bringing every soldier in the field a flat tin box of chocolates with the Queen´s head embossed on the lid. Every soldier in South Africa and in transports on the high seas was to receive such a box, bound in red and white ribbon. Some soldiers would not touch a morsel, determined to take the sacred gifts home. More than one box was reputed to have stopped a bullet....Shaw´s Arms and the Man, later musicalized by Oscar Straus as The Chocolate Soldier, includes an early scene in which Captain Bluntschli confides that where other troops have kept their cartridges, he had secreted supplies more valuable to a soldier--chocolate.