The banquet lasted all night.
Sidney had said they would drink, but each person only got a small cup, gone before they could even taste it.
Even that was a privilege reserved for senior officers.
Alcohol was a luxury to begin with, especially here in the Sea of the Moon.
Sidney and Michel had come to risk their lives. Neither had thought to bring any alcohol, and Sidney had secretly drunk the only few bottles all by himself.
The liquor in their cups now tasted weaker than seawater. For all they knew, it might actually have been watered down with seawater.
Fortunately, they had managed to get some alcohol in the end.
The soldiers secretly brewed their own. They put leftover military rations and murky drinking water into the same canteen, then left it beside the furnace in the steam engine room, using its warmth to ferment the mixture.
But most soldiers had to march out before the fermentation was complete. The liquor they brewed themselves often ended up going to someone else, but they did not much care.
After leaving their own liquor there, they would randomly pick a bottle someone else had finished brewing. Most soldiers would die on the battlefield. They would never drink their own liquor, but there was always liquor to drink.
They scrawled their names and the date on slips of paper and stuck them to the bottles.
When they took a bottle, they peeled off its label and stuck it to their steel helmet.
Each time they returned from the battlefield, they drank themselves into a stupor beside the furnace, peeled off a new slip, and set out for battle again with slips bearing names and dates pasted over their helmets, until they sank into the Deep Sea.
Some regarded it as a