Ensuring troops abroad were fed in the face of domestic food shortages as a result of poor harvests and U-Boat attacks on ships bringing supplies to Britain was an almost overwhelming task for the Army Service Corps.

Add in rocketing number of troops whom the corps - responsible for the supply of rations - had to provide for, and it is no wonder there are stories of soldiers going over the top having not eaten for days.

At the start of war in August 1914, the British Army numbered 125,000. Hundreds of thousands of reservists, Territorials and volunteers immediately joined up. The Your Country Needs You poster campaign encouraged more than one million more to enlist by January 1915. A total of 2,675,149 volunteered, and conscription, introduced in March 1916, raised another 2.5 million men.

By 1918, more than five million men and women were in British uniform. Most were young, still growing, and hungry. The situation was especially dire in the trenches. At the start of the war soldiers received 10oz of meat and 8oz of vegetables a day.

But by 1916 meat rations were down to 6oz a day. The meat had started as fresh beef, mutton or lamb, but as the war progressed tinned meat such as bully beef was given for the men to prepare ­themselves.

It was loved and loathed, but mostly loathed because it was central to a dispiritingly monotonous diet.

According to Andrew Robertshaw's Feeding Tommy, it became so boring for the troops that much of it went to waste, resulting in the decision to cut the daily meat ration. He says when British soldiers traded bully beef with the French, they described it as "singe", or monkey.

The shortage of flour meant bread, a home comfort the troops loved, was replaced by a version made from dried turnips, and by hard tack biscuits that were hated because they were so difficult to bite into - especially if, like many men, you suffered from sore teeth and gum boils because of the nutrient-deficient diet.

A letter sent by a Private Braid from France in April 1915, quoted in Derek Young's Scottish Voices from the Great War, said the troops had "one ounce of bread, equal to a slice per day and the rest biscuits, which require a mash-hammer to break them, and of course the bully beef. If it was not for ourselves we would be starving. We go into the old farms for potatoes and boil them with the bully".

Four months later, Braid was a good deal angrier. "We are being treated like dogs … we complained to the company officer about the shortage of bread and he is making enquiries ... another issue is the currants, raisins and dates that are being issued to us instead of jam.

"What are they doing with the currants etc that people so kindly send us as comforts? They are giving them to us as rations and doing us out of some jam."

In the later years of the war, hot food cooked by army cooks was sent out to the trenches packed in straw to keep warm but everything, including tea, was prepared in the same containers so it was said that ­eventually everything tasted the same. Soups and stews had to be carried through communication trenches and, by the time it reached the front line, it would have spilled and be cold.

Field kitchens were established to combat this, but they were often unable to get close enough and when the cooks could not source vegetables they used weeds and nettles instead.

Robertshaw suggests rations given to British soldiers were "at best a disaster and at worst a war crime".

Only a small percentage of British Great War fatalities were attributed to the poor diet but it meant men were left to fight with gum disease, stomach ulcers and scurvy.