side him laughing and wiping her eyes.

As you get closer to war you more frequently run across such things. The
fighting men kill ruthlessly, because that, they think, is the way to
get their business over. But for the most part they kill without hate.
For that, in its noisier and more acrid forms you must go back to the
men who are not fighting, to the overdriven and underexercised
journalists, sizzling and thundering in their swivel-chairs.

The dimly lit hall under the grand stand was already crowded as we were
led to our seats on a rostrum facing the stage with the commandant and
one of his officers. There was a red draw curtain, footlights made with
candles and biscuit tins, and so strung on a wire that at a pull,
between the acts, they could be turned on the spectators. A programme
had been printed on the camp mimeograph, the camp orchestra was tuning
up, and a special overture had been composed by a young gentleman with
the beautiful name of "Quentin Morvaren."

You will doubtless recall Mr. Shaw's comedy, and the characteristic
"realistic" fun he has with his Romans and Christian martyrs, and the
lion who, remembering the mild-mannered Androcles, who had once pulled a
sliver from his foot, danced out of the arena with him instead of eating
him. And you can imagine the peculiarly piquant eloquence given to the
dialogue between Mr. Shaw's meek but witty Christians and their
might-is-right Roman captors, spoken by British prisoners in the spring
of 1915, in a German prison camp before a German commandant sitting up
like a statue with his hands on his sword!

The Roman captain was a writer, the centurion a manufacturer, Androcles
a teacher of some sort, the call-boy for the fights in the arena a
cabin-boy from a British merchant ship, and the tender-hearted lion some
genius from the "halls." Even after months of this sodden camp it was
possible to find a youth to play Lavinia, with so pretty a face, such a
velvet voice, such a pensive womanliness that the flat-capped, ribald
young cockneys in the front row blushed with embarrassment. A professor
of archaeology, or something, said that he had never seen more accurate
reproductions of armor, though this was made but of gilded and silvered
cardboard--in short, if Mr. Shaw's fun was ever better brought out by
professional players, they must have been very good indeed.

It was an island within an island that night, there under the Ruhleben
grand stand--English