I found it quite vivid, in its dry way (if that isn't to paradoxical)
The people who first visited the highly organised French trading centre, with its stalls and known prices found coffee extract - relatively cheap among the tea-drinking English - commanding a fancy price in biscuits or cigarettes, and some enterprising people made small fortunes that way. (Incidentally we found out later that much of the coffee went "over the wire" and sold for phenomenal prices at black market cafes in Munich: some of the French prisoners were said to have made substantial sums in Marks.