Concentrated Mink Juice

Around the end of the First World War, one of France's heroes bluffed his way into a job with a public health initiative funded by the Rockefeller Institute. He and his colleagues went from village to village, astounding Breton peasants with the idea that digging the well next to the cemetery might cause inconvenience. Untrained and unsupervised, the public health workers would dole out lectures, pamphlets, and a documentary film with numerous unscheduled breaks, and the raw-boned ex-soldier, tricked out in a US army uniform, would deliver impromptu harangues to terrify the bumpkins into boiling their water. He was once approached by a village priest who was concerned that the well might have been contaminated by its proximity to the graveyard, and who had brought a sample for inspection: "This isn't water you're drinking, Father, it's concentrated meat juice," was the delighted response.

The war hero was the future Dr Destouches, subsequently Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who one war later was imprisoned in Copenhagen and would no doubt have been gratified at the continuing payback for Denmark's recent mink massacre. Thousands of potential victims of the non-synthetic fur trade were slaughtered in a pandemic-related panic, and the bodies disposed of with a foresight that would do credit to the less intellectually distinguished variety of church-ridden peasants. Thanks to light soil, internal gases and crypto-British levels of planning, the results have been rather more poetic than pretty.