The stage, as well as literature, has found many ways in which it can serve the army.  One theatre is giving all the money taken in at the door to the Red Cross; all of them admit men in uniform free, or at half price, and a long list of actors have gone to the front.  Among them are several who are well known in America.  Robert Lorraine has received an officer’s commission in the Royal Flying Corps, and Guy Standing in the navy.  The former is reported among the wounded.  Gerald du Maurier has organized a reserve battalion of actors, artists, and musicians.

There is not a day passes that the most prominent members of the theatrical world are not giving their services free to benefit performances in aid of Belgian refugees, Red Cross societies, or to some one of the funds under royal patronage.  Whether their talent is to act or dance, they are using it to help along the army.  Seymour Hicks and Edward Knoblauch in one week wrote a play called “England Expects,” which was an appeal in dramatic form for recruits, and each night the play was produced recruits crowded over the footlights.

The old sergeants are needed to drill the new material and cannot be spared for recruiting.  And so members of Parliament and members of the cabinet travel all over the United Kingdom—­and certainly these days it is united—­on that service.  Even the prime minister and the first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill, work overtime in addressing public meetings and making stirring appeals to the young men.  And wherever you go you see the young men by the thousands marching, drilling, going through setting-up exercises.  The public parks, golf-links, even private parks like Bedford Square, are filled with them, and in Green Park, facing the long beds of geraniums, are lines of cavalry horses and the khaki tents of the troopers.

Every one is helping.  Each day the King and Queen and Princess Mary review troops or visit the wounded in some hospital; and the day before sailing, while passing Buckingham Palace, I watched the young Prince of Wales change the guard.  In a businesslike manner he was listening to the sentries repeat their orders; and in turn a young sergeant, also in a most businesslike manner, was in whispers coaching the boy officer in the proper manner to guard the home of his royal parents.  Since then the young prince has gone to the front and is fighting for his country.  And the King is in France with his soldiers.

As the song says, all the heroes do not go to war, and the warriors at the front are not the only ones this war has turned out-of-doors.  The number of Englishwomen who have left their homes that the Red Cross may have the use of them for the wounded would fill a long roll of honor.  Some give an entire house, like Mrs. Waldorf Astor, who has loaned to the wounded Cliveden, one of the best-known and most beautiful places on the Thames.  Others can give only a room.  But all over England the convalescents have been billeted in private houses and made nobly welcome.