May 19.
'A play with the title "See the Coriquering Hero Comes" is now running in one of the London treaties and is attracting much attention on account of the unconventional way in which the subject is treated. The "hero" is a normal British youth, healthy, care-free and possessed of quite the average amount of courage and bonhomie, He is vent to the war and becomes a typical' soldier. Brave to the point of rashness but cool and clear-headed, he is a credit to his regiment. But the war breaks him and the last scene shows him captured by the Germans and crawling before his captors berging abjectly for his life. This scene has aroused severe criticism. "It is not possible," say the objectors, "that a man of this calibre could descend to such a depth of humiliation." Manhood seems to be degraded in this presentation of its weakness and puisillaninity, Spectators differ according to their idiosyncrasies in appraising the value of the play and. the credibility of the hero's collapse and several correspondents have endeavoured to throw light on the problem by recounting experiences of their own, One writer tells how, as a young officer, he was sent to France and, at a base hospital, on the way up to the line, was introduced to a certain major who had performed prodigies of valour before he was incapacitated by severe wound. Lying on his back the veteran looked thought-folly at the eager young men who crowded round his cot to hear the advice that his experience might suggest. "Take care of yourselves, boys," he sai "Remember that every man has his breaking-point." "They were Grafted into the Ypres salient of evil memory and were told of a certain non-commissioned officer who had had to take command in the maral lapses that now and then thrust themselves on public attention. It is to be noted that in all these cases it is not so much the intensity of the strain as its persistence that saps the moral fibre. If the tooth would cease aching, if the ship would stop rolling, if the wicked would cease from troubling and let the weary be at rest, the collapse would be avoided; but there is no respite.. "To-morrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day" till endurance gives place to despair and the end comes. seeking a cure for this weariness the first requisite is to realize that the real trouble the smallest part of our afitiction. It is the foreboding of what may happen: that hangs like a black cloud over the mental horizon. The soldier, al-realy referred to, faced real danger with heroic courage, but broke down in the comparative safety of the trenches. He was overcome with apprehension, not by terror. Had he been abie to get away from his trouble, for however brief a period, he would have seen it in its real perspective. The cure for pessimism is recreation—the re-creation of mental balance. There was true philosophy in the story of the melancholy king who was tald to sleep for one night in the shirt of a happy man and, perhaps, even truer philosophy in the sequel that the happy man when found had no shirt to lend to his majesty. Carlyle said, "No man who has ever wholly laughed can be altogether, irreclaimably, bad." Laugh and grow fat! but how shall we laugh while the clouds hang over us? Well, it is better to be on the turf than under it, Let us get out into God's fresh air. Away to the fields and the flowers, the hills and the sea and we shall see that nature laughs at our puny troubles. If we can once laugh with"her, we have escaped the breaking-point. a desperate skirmish a few days previously when all the office were placed hors de combat. This man had behaved with a Berserker disregard of his life that won for him the astonished
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.