hands extended on her knees in just that attitude of quiet waiting which one associates with the well-known engraving in which Death is figured as the coming of a friend.  But when she was on her feet she moved about with a kind of aimless activity, opening drawers and shutting them and reopening them and speaking to herself the while, until Jeanne, catching my puzzled expression, would whisper loudly in my ear with a tolerant smile, “Elle est tres VIEILLE.”  Jeanne had acquired a habit of raising her voice, owing to Madame’s deafness, which resulted in her whispers partaking of the phonetic quality of those stage asides which, by a curious convention, while audible at the very back of the dress circle, are quite inaudible to the other characters on the stage.  Whether Madame ever overheard these auricular confidences I know not.  If she did, I doubt if she regarded them, for she was under the illusion, common to very old people who live in the society of a younger generation and were mature adults when their companions were merely adolescent, that Jeanne, who had entered her service as a child, had never grown up.  If Madame seemed “tres vieille” to Jeanne, it was indisputable that Jeanne continued “tres jeune” to Madame.  She was, indeed, firmly convinced that she was looking after Jeanne, whereas in truth it was Jeanne who looked after her.  For Jeanne was at least thirty-five, with a husband at the war, in virtue of whom she enjoyed a separation allowance of one franc a day, and a boy for whom she received ten sous.  Her husband, a pompier, got nothing.  It never occurred to her to regard this provision as inadequate.  And she was as capable as she was contented, and sang at her work.

It was often difficult to believe that this quiet backwater was within an hour or two of the trenches.  G.H.Q. was indeed situated well back behind “the Front,” which, however precise the maps in the newspapers may affect to make it, is, like the Equator of our school-books, a more or less “imaginary line drawn across the earth’s surface.”  Imaginary because if a line be, as we were taught with painful reiteration, length without breadth, then “the Front” is not a line at all, much less a straight line in the sense of the shortest distance between two points.  It is not straight, for it curves and sags and has its salients and re-entrant angles; and it is not a line, for it has breadth as well as length.  Broadly speaking, the Front extends back to the H.Q. of the armies (to say nothing of the H.Q. of corps, divisions, and brigades), and thence to G.H.Q. itself, which may be regarded as being “the Back of the Front,” to vary a classical expression of Punch.  The Front is, indeed, to be visualised not as a straight line but as a fully opened fan, the periphery of which is the fire-trenches, the ribs the lines of communication, and the knob or knuckle is General Headquarters.  When we extend our Front southwards and take over the French trenches we just expand our fan a little more.  When we come to make a general advance all along the periphery, the whole fan will be thrust forward, and the knuckle with it, for the relative distances of General Headquarters, and minor Headquarters, from this periphery and from one another are a more or less constant quantity, being determined by such fixed considerations as the range of modern guns and the mobility of transport.