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 wil