Mess premises may be divided into two classes, the first being found in cases where the battery position is in a locality where the inhabitants are still in occupation of their houses, and consisting of some room in an _estaminet_ or farmhouse, the second being improvised in a ruin or dug-out. Both are capable of providing both trouble and comfort, in both a stern resolution to take things cheerfully as they come results wonderfully quickly in the discovery that one is getting on very well considering. I have a vivid picture in my memory of a mess of the first type, once the public room of an _estaminet_, now given over for our use. A few chairs and a table furnished it, its doors opened upon a courtyard of extraordinary capabilities in the way of mud, wherein stood the battery car, a horse or two, and several fowls, one or more of which items one invariably fell over in the dark. Next to the mess-room was the kitchen, of whose stove we had the use, and wherein perpetually _madame_ and the two mess servants bickered for space for their culinary operations. And yet perhaps we were even more comfortable in a home that we made for ourselves in an abandoned miner's cottage. We glazed the windows, repaired the shell-holes in the roof, stole doors and a stove, and made the place thoroughly weatherproof and comfortable. And then, the furnishing and decoration! No newly-engaged couple, who, if we may believe the posters, spend their hours of bliss in arguing whether they shall confide their savings to Messrs. Deal & Glue or to the Houndsditch Furnishing Co., ever furnished with such a zest as did we. Abandoned villages lay all around us, ours was the freedom to loot as we would. The only trouble was that we were by no means the first comers--"our wants had all been felt, our errors made before"--and it required diligent search to find anything of any use. Our wheeler mended a broken table, two triumphant servants struggled in with a gigantic sideboard, the roofless and abandoned church was raided for cane-seated chairs, we descended like vultures upon a rival mess when the battery that owned it, being ordered to another position, abandoned it. Growing ambitious, we refused to be contented with mere use, our cultivated taste demanded ornament, decoration of the bare walls, and our craving was gratified. Out of every house we took the marvellous examples of the photographer's art that we found there, wonderful enlargements of the owner, his wife, his children, in their Sunday best, and hung them indiscriminately, the more prepossessing "on the line," the rest grouped with artistic abandon. Should their exiled owners ever return to them, what delight will be theirs to find those two old enemies Monsieur Malbranque and Madame Rietz hanging lovingly side by side, or that stern old maid, Mademoiselle Dalbine, surrounded by a group of miscellaneous children! What litigation may not ensue when Madame