A very creditable performance was given of Bernard Shaw’s one-act play, “How He Lied to Her Husband”; Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” abridged to one act, was essayed with great earnestness. The French players gave us some very adroit performances, particularly of such comedies as Labiche’s “J’invite le Colonel.”
One day there arrived in camp Lieut. Martin, late of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, a little Irishman with a big brogue, a fund of humour and of its concomitant, good humour, and a budget of news of literary import, as that W. B. Yeats was married, and that G. B. S. had taken his place at the theatre.
It was suggested to Martin that we might stage one of the Irish plays. He had had copies of a number of these in his valise when he was captured, but, of course, these were lost. He was able ultimately, however, to write out from memory Lady Gregory’s “The Rising of the Moon,” and for my guidance he gave me a little paper model of the staging as designed originally, I imagine, by Jack Yeats. For the performance the German authorities lent us a huge beer barrel—entirely empty. The cast was an all-Irish one, Lieut.-Colonel Lord Farnham playing the part of Sergeant of the R.I.C., Lieut. Martin playing the supposed ballad-singer.
A week later, when Martin departed for another camp, he slipped into my hand a scrap of paper bearing a scrap of philosophy from “The Rising of the Moon”: “’Tis a quare world, and ’tis little any mother knows when she sees her child creepin’ on the floor what’ll happen to it, or who’ll be who in the end.”
Well, I hope that I may yet chance across the humoursome little Irishman once more before the final—setting of the sun!
“The Homeland”
While we were thus making effort to entertain ourselves within the camp, outside in the Fest Theatre in Carlsruhe there was a performance, for the benefit of the Eighth War Loan, of “The Homeland,” a war vision by Leo Sternburg. A translation of this appeared in the Continental Times, a ridiculous and half-illiterate propaganda sheet which we could receive thrice weekly at a cost of 2.70 marks per month.
The scene is the battlefield. Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, moves amid the dead men that lie about. The dawn is coming up the skies. Soldiers of the Medical Corps carry stretchers to and fro. Occasionally the mutter of the distant battle rolls over the scene.
The Wandering Jew laments that he has been unable to find extinction even in this welter of the world war. A dying soldier greets him as a messenger from the Homeland: