It was the end of July. The summer itself had been largely disappointing - damp and not particularly warm, it hardly gave one hope for the coming autumn. Jamie was huddled into a chair in the Officers' Mess bent over a newspaper and under a lamp; despite the hour (rather late) he hadn't so much as a button out of place, not wanting to give any ground to the weather until he absolutely had to. These weren't the sort of nights that made one want to loosen one's collar. He'd fortified himself with a whiskey and hot water; there wasn't much else he could do.

And then, the paper was engaging - better than engaging. In his anticipation he might well have pored over it for the better part of the night if he hadn't had to be up at the usual, vaguely uncivilized hour. The news coming out of the east was enough to make him genuinely hopeful, even excited - he'd been walking around half-whistling (figuratively speaking, of course) for a couple of days already, and with each passing night it seemed they were moving closer and closer to a promise of real action. He hadn't seen any of that since he'd first cut his teeth, back in the Transvaal. The very real prospect that they might soon stop pussyfooting around with the Germans was, of course, even better - enough to put any man who put quite as much stock in king and county as did Jamie in a positively buoyant frame of mind.

It was only when he realized that his drink had gone entirely lukewarm and that he'd run out of items about anything other than Ireland (not his favored subject, these days; not at all) that he came up for air, resting the paper on his knee and throwing a disapproving look at his glass. He ought to retire, of course, but the effort seemed hardly worth it.