by Madame’s own hands to yield their peculiar virtues, rue for liver, calamint for cholera, plantain for the kidneys, fennel for indigestion, elderberry for sore throat, and dandelion for affections of the blood.  Then I was shown the oak presses full of linen white as snow and laid up in lavender.  This inventory being concluded, I was presented with a key of the front door to mark my admission into the freedom of the house, and invited to take a glass of Burgundy while Sykes was unpacking my kit upstairs.

Madame, it seemed, was a widow of eighty-five years of age, without issue, and if her eyes were dim and her natural force abated, her teeth, as she proudly told me, were her own.  She obviously belonged to that rentier class who spend the evening of their days in the quiet town which serves as G.H.Q.—­a town which has a kind of faded gentility, and which, behind its inscrutable house-fronts, conceals a good deal of quiet opulence in the matter of old china, silver, and oak.  In her youth Madame had kept a pension and had had English demoiselles among her charges.  She had never been to England but she had heard of “Hyde Park.”  Did I know it?  She received my assurance with obvious gratification as though it established a personal intimacy between us.  “Avez-vous tue des Allemands?” My negative answer left her disappointed but hopeful.

“La guerre, quand finira-t-elle?” interjected the bonne, who, I afterwards found, had a husband at the war.  Those interrogatories were to become very familiar to me.  Every evening, when I returned from my visits to Divisional and Brigade Headquarters, mistress and servant always put me through the same catechism: 

“Avez-vous tue des Allemands?”

“La guerre, quand finira-t-elle?”

The immense seriousness, not to say solicitude, with which these inquiries were addressed to me eventually led me into the most enterprising mendacities.  I killed a German every day, greatly to Madame’s satisfaction, and my total bag when I came away was sufficiently remarkable to be worth a place in an official communique.  I think it gave Madame a feeling of security, and I hoped Jeanne might consider that it appreciably accelerated the end of the war.  But “Guillaume,” as she always called him, was the principal object of Madame’s aversion, and she never mentioned the name of the All-Highest without a lethal gesture as she drew her tremulous hand across her throat and uttered the menacing words:  “Couper la gorge.”  She often uttered these maledictions to Sykes in the kitchen, as she watched him making the toast for my breakfast, and I have no doubt that the “Oui, Madame,” with which he invariably assented, gave her great satisfaction.  Doubtless it made her feel that the heart of the British Army was sound.  Sykes used to study furtively a small book called French, and how to speak it, but he was very chary of speaking it, and seemed to prefer a deaf-and-dumb language of his own.  But