IVEntertainment in Exile

OUR ORCHESTRA.

Man cannot live by bread alone—nor may he, even with a supplementary basin of soup! Immediately after dinner on the Saturday evening of my arrival in Carlsruhe, a steady stream of officers set in towards thesalon d’appel. Being still without chart or compass as regards the camp, I also drifted in this direction, and found that at the far end of the hall a stage was erected, and that acosmopolitan audience was already gathered in the expectant dusk of the auditorium. A few rows of forms from the court served as dress circle and stalls; later arrivals brought their own chairs or stools from the dormitories; standing in the background, the orderlies, obviously washed of their week’s labours in the kitchen or the camp, were the gods, and from their Olympus gave occasional encouragement, or passed comment and criticism upon the performance.

On this particular evening, together with various musical and vocal efforts, there was a very capable representation by a cast of French officers, of Max Maurey’s comedy in one act, “Asile de Nuit.” Prior to the enactment, and for the benefit of those in the audience who might be innocent of French, a British officer gave out themotifin English.

As I sat contentedly in my place—the burden of the wearinesses of the last weeks fallen from my shoulders—it was borne in upon me that much of the success of a play is in the eager and receptive mood of the audience; also that in the naïve freshnessof an amateur performance is a charm which has too frequently perished in the more finished production of the professional actor. At all events, in “Asile de Nuit”—the “Night Refuge”—I found indeed refuge for the night!

Monsieur the Superintendent of an—uncharitable—institution, is pompous, proud, and overbearing, particularly to his unwelcome clients. It is just on the closing hour of nine, and he is preparing to depart for the business of his favourite café, when one of these waifs blows in. Monsieur storms at the tramp for the lateness of the hour, for the ludicrousness of his name, for anything and everything, and ultimately, after passing him over to a brow-beaten assistant for the condign punishment of a bath, goes off himself for a beer.

He returns almost immediately, quite chapfallen. He has learned that the Superintendent of another “Refuge” has been dismissed for failing to entertain an angel unawares in the person of a disguised journalist. He is persuaded that the piece of ragged illiteracy which he himself isharbouring is a pen also charged and pointed for his undoing. Consequently the amazed vagrant is overwhelmed with clothing from the Superintendent’s own wardrobe, cigars from his private cabinet; he is even finally permitted to escape the last indignity of ablution!

A CARLSRUHE CONCERT PROGRAMME.

Into the service of the theatre I immediately found myself intrigued and impressed, in the somewhat composite character of scene-painter, scene-shifter, poster-artist,actor, prompter, “noises-off,” and playwright. My first essay in this latter capacity was entitled “A Chelsea Christmas Eve,” the scene being a studio, embellished with sundry artistic audacities—nudes and nocturnes, post-impressionisms and cubisms—and from the cardboard window of which was a view of the Thames, including the Tower Bridge!—there entirely for economical reasons, and not geographic.

“A CHELSEA CHRISTMAS EVE,” AS PLAYED AT CARLSRUHE LAGER

So pleasant, nevertheless, was this little make-believe interior that we rarely entered for a rehearsal without discovering and disturbing sundry reading animals who had crept into it as a quiet and congenial environment, and who frequently and regretfully suggested that it would be desirable as a permanency. During the performance the on-coming of a monstrous and realistic pie, built—not baked—in a wash-hand basin, filled with boiling water, and covered with a richly-coloured cardboard crust, was nearly provocative of an assault upon the stage by a hungry and overwrought audience!

Another dramatic effort, devised for the bringing on to the stage of my good friends—andthe good friends of all the camp—Bertolotti, Calvi the pianist, and Lazarri the sweet singer, was “An Italian Vignette.” The scenery, which was painted on paper readily reversible, so that one could very literally have “a prison and a palace” on each side, I evolved from pleasant if somewhat untrustworthy recollection of a fortnight’s stay in Venice many years ago.

There is a glorious city in the sea.

The sea is in the broad, the narrow streets—and that after such sort as proved somewhat disconcerting to the two Venetians present in camp. Owing to the circumscriptions of the stage the scene was more suggestive than realistic, the gondola, instead of entering from below the Ponte dei Sospiri, swimming in a canal running parallel with the Bridge of—Sighs—but of no dimensions!

As regards dresses, it was possible to hire through “Hans,” the German orderly, one evening dress suit, one blue ditto, one odd pair of quite unmentionable “unmentionables,” and one Homburg hat. To prevent effort at escape these garments had to be returned to the authorities immediatelyafter each performance. Nothing in anywise approximating to a garb mediæval being obtainable, each man—and “woman”—must dress the part to the best of possibilities.

Clelia (Lieut. Smith), for example, of whom I, as Marco, was supposed to be enamoured, trusted to hide his identity—particularly as disclosed by his feet—in a few yards of chintz, rather unhappily of identical pattern with the stage curtain! A cardigan jacket, frilled and ruffled with an edging of white linen torn from a frayed pocket handkerchief, made a quite presentable doublet for me. Toulon, the French orderly’sbéret, turned up at the corners, and bearing red plumes, held in place by a shining tin pipe-top, served as headgear. The lid of a boric ointment box suspended from my black lanyard formed a distinguished-looking decoration of merit; the tasselled cord of a dressing-gown made an admirable sword-belt.

An Italian military mantle completed my costume. A mandolin—an instrument of torture to be dreaded above all others, but which musically was mute in the piece, andpictorially represented a guitar—was borrowed from an orderly.

In passages where “A Venetian Vignette” did not awe the audience it at least amused it. Owing to an eleventh-hour timidity on the part of two of our Italians I had to touch the light guitar and raise my voice in apparent song, while off, Lieut. Calvi, with piano muted with newspapers, and Lieut. Lazarri, with distended larynx, supplied the actualities, and this with such success that the many new-comers among the audience, knowing neither Joseph nor Lazarri, were deceived, and I received a very ill-deserved ovation for Toselli’s “Serenade.”

SCENE FROM “A VENETIAN VIGNETTE”

The Portuguese Captain Teixeira, who had wonderful imitative faculties, so that twice I have seen him hypnotize young birds to within a few inches of his hand, as a nightingale “off,” “trilled with all the passion of all the love songs that have been sung since the world began”—an interpolation made by the dramatist in his dialogue to permit of an effect so original! “Noises off” tolled the bell—the great kitchen poker—which was intended to warn thelovers of the fleet passage of the hour, just about five minutes behind time, making his thus tardy entry on the principle that nothing be lost.

Lieut. H., who had taken part in bull-fighting in Southern America, gave me thecoup de grâcein his own fashion, between the shoulder blades, and, judging by the force, with a momentary forgetting of the fact that he was only in Southern Germany. With a “Mio Dio! Io sono morto!” for the sake of local colouring, I and the curtain fell almost simultaneously.

“The Secret: A Shudder in 3 Scenes,” was probably most memorable from the secret fact that it secured me a few inches of forbidden candle, which I used in surreptitious reading after “lights out” for some nights after. “The Brigand: a Musical Absurdity,” written by a versatile Roman Catholic padre, was apparently sufficiently realistic to procure me the first visit next morning from an officer in the audience who had lost his watch! Unrehearsed effects in this performance were the igniting of the cardboard brazier by the toppling over ofthe candle set within to illuminate it; the rolling across the stage of an empty and otherwise rather suspicious looking bottle, and the violent antipathies evidenced by “Bobby,” a French officer’s adopted fox-terrier, which I had to keep at bay with my double-barrelled cardboard blunderbuss.

A CARLSRUHE PLAY-BILL.

Emerging from the hall within a few minutes of roll-call and with our faces masked by the vigorous colourations of our brigandage“under the greenwood tree,” we discovered to our dismay that the water supply had been cut off. For days afterwards my knees had a brownness unknown to them since I discarded the Black Watch kilt.

POSTER FOR A FRENCH PLAY.

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 greatearnestness. 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!

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 theContinental 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 deadmen 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:

Give me your hand—that hand from home. They have not left me to die alone in a strange land. They have sent me greetings.

Ahasuerus: No, no!

Soldier: Your hand——

Ahasuerus: You have it. It is well. The most homeless of men stands before thee—he is as homeless as thou.

Soldier: As I! I who die for home—I homeless!

Ahasuerus: Thou art in error. The homeland would not die forthee.

The Wandering Jew goes on to speak of apathy among the people, and reminds the soldier that “not only arms win victories to-day. The war of all men against all men has been unloosed. War against the womanand the child. War against fields and forests and farm and house. Peaceful labour turns to battle. The metal of the church bells fights. The seed fights as it falls into the furrow. Money marches in ranks.... But ... men eat and sleep and wax fat. They hear of the death of millions, and say: ‘Yes, yes.’ Gods that descend before their very eyes, and the wonders of a heroism half divine, no longer move their senses—no sacrifice can stir them out of their daily rut. They have but one care to trouble them—it is that you might return greater than when you set forth.”

Soldier(emphatically, to the men of the Medical Corps): Away! away! I would die of life and not of death.... Let me lie down beside mine enemy, he that hath endured what I have endured, he, as a comrade that understands me.

Ahasuerus: Come, thou mayst deem thyself blest in that thou diest so that thou mayst not behold a race of lesser men. Ye have grown beyond human compass in the fires of your time, your heads would strike the ceilings in your little chambers.

Ultimately, however, new troops enter, and one of these gives reassurance to the dying man.

Second Soldier: Property hath converted itself into armies, and the joy of riches means only the capacity to give.... Coffers and chests fly open. Countesses bring their silver, the legacy of famous ancestors, the old maid-servant her hoarded wage. The widow gives up her golden chain, the last love gift of her dead mate; the merchant his gains, and the old peasants the walnut tree in whose shadow they played as children.... The whole land becomes a mighty armoury ... they hammer, hammer, hammer, day and night.

Dying Soldier: Do you not hear the thunder of Wieland’s hammer? The ringing armour of the Valkyries? Do you not hear the hoof-beats of their stallions?

Second Soldier: Yea, rivers and fields, mountains and woods dream anew their German dreams.... Silently the women offer up their beauty ... the park of roses becomes the potato patch. The savant is his own servant. The mother can no longermother her child. Work puts out the torch of love ... but all bear this ... they bear it for the sake of the blood which flowed for their sake.

Soldier: I die ... I die happy.

[He dies.]

Ahasuerus: O Fate! This moment outweighs all my two thousand years of torment. I am reconciled with my sorrow, in that the centuries have spared me to behold the mighty heroism of this people.

[Curtain.]

ONE OF OUR ORCHESTRA.

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