was established, such novices, accompanied by damsels (called
flappers) often as innocent as themselves, crowded the theatres
to the doors. It was hardly possible at first to find stuff crude
enough to nurse them on. The best music-hall comedians ransacked
their memories for the oldest quips and the most childish antics
to avoid carrying the military spectators out of their depth. I
believe that this was a mistake as far as the novices were
concerned. Shakespeare, or the dramatized histories of George
Barnwell, Maria Martin, or the Demon Barber of Fleet Street,
would probably have been quite popular with them. But the novices
were only a minority after all. The cultivated soldier, who in
time of peace would look at nothing theatrical except the most
advanced postIbsen plays in the most artistic settings, found
himself, to his own astonishment, thirsting for silly jokes,
dances, and brainlessly sensuous exhibitions of pretty girls. The
author of some of the most grimly serious plays of our time told
me that after enduring the trenches for months without a glimpse
of the female of his species, it gave him an entirely innocent
but delightful pleasure merely to see a flapper. The reaction
from the battle-field produced a condition of hyperaesthesia in
which all the theatrical values were altered. Trivial things
gained intensity and stale things novelty. The actor, instead of
having to coax his audiences out of the boredom which had driven
them to the theatre in an ill humor to seek some sort of
distraction, had only to exploit the bliss of smiling men who
were no longer under fire and under military discipline, but
actually clean and comfortable and in a mood to be pleased with
anything and everything that a bevy of pretty girls and a funny
man, or even a bevy of girls pretending to be pretty and a man
pretending to be funny, could do for them.