The lines of communication one can expect to be trailed with interest. There the strings are being pulled--though that is a pitiable figure. It is more than a rehearsal for the soul-shaking drama enacting on the Front; but it is as full of interest as orchestral rehearsal is more interesting than the performance _coram publico_. Rehearsal in orchestra shows the final performance in the making: here you see the Somme Battle in the making. A French town that is within seven miles of the guns, and is also the Headquarters of the ----th Army, unites the ordered busyness of the base with the fevered activity of the second line. It slumbers not nor sleeps. The stream and the screech and roar of trains is intense and incessant. There is no more appreciable interval between troop-trains, supply-trains, ammunition-trains, rumbling through than there is between the decipherable belchings of the guns over the north-east ridge. The buzz of 'planes is as unintermittent as either. The Army Headquarters in the Hôtel de Ville is as strident a centre by night as by day. "The sea is in the broad, the narrow, streets, ebbing and flowing." These words recur by suggestion with a peculiar insistence. It is the flood military; and to this peaceful pastoral town it is as foreign and as ubiquitous as an encroaching sea. The Hôtel de Ville is the centre of a wide area of civil buildings commandeered for its purposes by Headquarters. This sometime produce-store is now "Reports Office"; that hotel is "Signals"; a private _maison_ adjoining is for "Despatch-Riders." All civilian and pedestrian traffic stands aside for the horde of despatch-riders and their motor-cycles. The cars of the Staff whirl through the crowded streets with a licence which takes account of nothing but their objective. Mounted officers are trooping day and night. More significant than all this is the unending stream of motor-ambulances. They transport from the dressing stations behind the line to the colony of casualty clearing-stations here; they transfer from them to the ambulance-trains; and what these cannot take they pant away with gently to the nearest base. You may stand on the upreared Citadelle ramparts any night and watch these long processions of pain throbbing quietly down the sloping road from ---- into the town. And simultaneously you will see another column climbing the road to ---- at the other side. The head lights make a long concurrent brilliance, like the ray of a searchlight.