I entered our mess-room, which was large, light, and boasted a boarded floor; it was a splendid summer-room, though it would have been very cold in winter. There I found a pile of literature awaiting me; operation orders for to-morrow, giving the hour at which each company was to leave Morlancourt, and which company of the Manchesters it was to relieve, and when, and where, and the route to be taken; there were two typed documents “for your information and retention, please,” one relating to prevention of fly-trouble in billets, the other giving a new code of signals and marked “Secret” on the top, and lastly there was _Comic Cuts_. Leaving the rest, I hastily skimmed through the latter, which contained detailed information of operations carried out, and intelligence gathered on the corps front during the last few days. At first these were intensely interesting, but after seven months they began to pall, and I grew expert at skimming through them rapidly. Then Jim Potter came in, and _Comic Cuts_ faded into insignificance. “Here, Owen,” said I, and threw them over to him. Captain and Quartermaster Jim Potter was the Father of the battalion. He had been in the battalion sixteen years, and had come out with them in 1914; twice the battalion had been decimated, new officers had come and disappeared, commanding officers had become brigadiers and new ones taken their place, but “Old Jim” remained, calm, unaltered, steady as a rock, good-natured, and an utter pessimist. I first introduced him in Chapter I, when I spent the night in his billet prior to my first advent into the trenches. I was a little perturbed then by his pessimism. Now I should have been very alarmed if he had suddenly burst into a fit of optimism. “Well, Jim,” we said, “how are things going? When’s the war going to end?” “Oh! not so very long now.” We gaped at this unexpected reply. “Because,” he added, “you know, Bill, it’s the unexpected that always happens in this war. Hullo! You’ve got some pretty pictures, I see.” We had been decorating the walls with the few unwarlike pictures that were still to be found in the illustrated papers. “Not a bad place, Blighty,” he resumed, gazing at a picture entitled “Home, Sweet Home!” There had been a little dispute as to whether it should go up, owing to its sentimental nature. At last “The Warwicks will like it,” we had said, and up it had gone. The Warwicks had our billet, when we were “in.” “Tell us about your leave,” we said, and Jim began a series of delightful sarcastic jerks about the way people in England seemed to be getting now a faint glimmering conception that somewhere there was a war on.