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.
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