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.

From G.H.Q., the brain of the Army, the volitional centre of the whole
organism, radiate the sensory and motor nerves by which impressions at
the Front are registered and plans for action transmitted. It is the
home of the Staff, not of the Armies, and contains more "brass hats"
than all the other Headquarters put together. Beyond the "details" in
the barracks it contains few of the rank and file, and its big square
betrays little of the crowded animation of the towns nearer the fighting