[Illustration: A QUESTION OF TASTE.

_The Wife._ "You Must Get Yourself a Straw 'at, George. A bowler
don't seem to go with a camembert."]

* * * * *

AT THE PLAY.

"French Leave."

The Mandarins of the Theatre, who are no wiser than other mandarins (on
the contrary), have been long repeating the formula that the public
won't look at a War play. If I'm not mistaken it will for many moons be
looking at Captain Reginald Berkeley's _French Leave_. He
labels it a "light comedy." That's an understatement. It is, as a matter
of fact, a very skilful, uproarious and plausible farce, almost too
successful in that you can't hear one-third of the jokes because of the
laughter at the other two-thirds (and a little because of the indistinct
articulation of one or two of the players). Of course when I say
"plausible" I don't exactly mean that any Brigade Headquarters was run
on the sketchy lines of _General Archibald Root's_, or that the gallant
author or anybody else who was in the beastly thing ever thought of the
Great War as a devastating joke, but rather that if it be true, as has
been rumoured, that not all generals were miracles of wisdom and
forbearance; that British subalterns and privates sometimes put on the
mask of humour; that _Venus_ did wander, as the observatories punctually
reported she did occasionally wander, into the orbit of _Mars_--then
_French Leave_ is a piece of artistically justifiable selection. Its
absurdity seems the most natural thing in the world and its machinery