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fun and high spirits and satire,-and day before yesterday's newspaper. There are others who will contend that Barrie is the man who has brought literature back to the stage. Charm he certainly has, whimsy and pleasantness, but one who has watched the waning of Pinero and Wilde and Shaw may well be afraid that Barrie, too, is all but through his little day. Some think the one success of the short life of Houghton a great play, but "Hindle Wakes" has none too firm a place on the stage. And what, we may well ask, will be the rating tomorrow of these men as writers. Surely not one of them ranks with the greater novelists and poets of our day, with Hardy or Conrad, with Yeats or Masefield. Fine spirit that Galsworthy is he is not a great playwright. The pity is that the old saying is nearly true: those plays that are literature have not succeeded upon the stage and those plays that have succeeded upon the stage are not literature. The plays of Synge are literature, and they have had a limited success upon the stage, but they are not frequently played. In the same category is the "Nan" of Masefield; no other of his plays approaches "Nan" as literature or drama.

The plays in verse of our time have even less vitality on the stage than those in prose. "Becket" all but passed with Irving; "Paolo and Francesca" and "Herod" and "Nero" gave us high hopes for the future; but only Yeats has had any considerable success with drama in verse since these experiments in blank verse of Stephen Philips have flared out: and again I have to say it, even "The Land of Heart's Desire" and "The Countess Kathleen" and "Deirdre" had but a restricted appeal,

I am not arguing as to whether the failure of plays that are literature to hold a place upon the stage is the fault of playwright or audience. I am just recording that failure. The plays of Dunsany belong to literature. Just now they have a place upon the stage. Whatever their fate they put their author among this honorable company I have mentioned. By his art of the stage he is of them: by qualities that are all his own he stands apart from all. He writes in prose, but his writing has about it the lift of poetry, so we think often of the

poet in him. We think less often of that, however, than of the dramatist, for unquestionably the sheer drama of his plays moves us more than any other quality in them. We are very thankful for this, for, somehow, the gods have very seldom given dramatic power to playwrights whose writing belongs to literature. We are thankful to Dunsany, too, for the aloofness of his plays from the moil and toil of today. We are thankful that they are so seldom concerned with such poor sinners as most of us are, that he deals with abstractions, with ideas. We would not want most of our writers to be so little interested in the "common human," but we are glad one of them is. We are glad to be relieved for a while of the obsession of sex and social problems. We are glad of his invitation in "The Book of Wonder":

"Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any way weary of Cities; come with me: and those that tire of all of the world we know: for we have new worlds here."

We have new worlds here in the plays, as well as in the tales of Dunsany.

RECLAIMING THE MAIMED IN WAR

BY R. TAIT MCKENZIE

Professor of Physical Education and Physical Therapy, and Director of the Department of Physical Education

I trust you will pardon me if the remarks to be made this afternoon are thrown into the form of a narrative of personal experience. No matter how wide one's outlook may be, it is impossible to grasp the significance and the extent of the efforts that have been given to winning this great war, and as those fields of endeavor which have been beyond one's range of observation must always remain in the realm of hearsay and opinion, I have thought it better to confine myself to that which I have seen.

In the early part of the war, shortly after the great armies were gathered together throughout England in 1914, and the task of giving them physical training in the training camps was undertaken on a large scale, it was found that a great many men were unfit to take this training through physical defects which were remediable. Some men had slight defects which escaped the scrutiny of the medical officer, but others were found to be almost entirely unfit for military duty. The British Government had made very liberal provisions for the families of enlisted men, with the result that many much married unfits were glad of the opportunity to enlist, and succeeded in getting in, in spite of the examiner.

A little later, when the wounded began to come back, the large general hospitals became so overcrowded that the men could not be properly cared for. The overcrowding reached such an extent that the commanding officer of a hospital was not so much occupied with curing his patients as with getting the beds empty to accommodate the ever-increasing tide of wounded coming from the front. Under these conditions, it becomes necessary to resort to all sorts of makeshift hospitals. Country

homes with local doctors were pressed into service, with the lady of the house a chief cook and her friends as improvised nurses, taking care of the patients as best they might. Conditions thus became deplorable, and the men sometimes got out of hand and would not submit to discipline or to the long course of treatment essential to their restoration. Many disabilities which originally were remediable became permanent, and it finally became evident that these men must be got back under discipline in order to carry out the necessary treatment.

Sir Alfred Keogh, D.G.M.S., finally decided to organize camps for convalescents under a system whereby each camp would care for about four thousand men and would be commanded by an officer from the front who would keep the men under military discipline; but instead of the strict military training of a mobilization camp, suitable remedial exercises were given, their treatment consisting of physiotherapy in all its forms. Where it was possible, the men were entirely restored and returned to the front, and where it was found that they would never be fit for full active service, they were placed in sedentary work on the lines of communication in various parts of the British Isles, or in civil life.

In all, there were sixteen such camps, each later having a capacity of five thousand men, though they were not at all times up to full strength.

At the period of the war, when the voluntary system of enlistment had reached its limit, five million men had volunteered and the quality began to run low. The regulations for entering the service had to be reduced to meet the actual conditions. As a result of this lowering of the standard for height and weight, they had the so-called "bantam" regiments, and it was not until conscription came in that the quality of the man power again rose.

Among the reconstruction centers was the one at Heaton Park, near Manchester, where the men were lodged in huts, arranged about a central administration building. The administration building was originally an art gallery, and the camp was originally designed for Manchester regiments. It was

refitted to provide physiotherapy, electricity, massage, hydrotherapy, and progressive physical exercises.

The disabled men were divided into four groups, as follows: Class A Those who were fit for active service,

Class B-Those who were fit for service on the lines of communi

cation,

Class C-Those fit for home work only, and

Class D-Those who were still under treatment, and still

unclassified.

Some of these men were over military age and all were badly wounded or incapacitated, so that they furnished a very difficult administrative problem.

There were attached to the camp, a corps of forty masseuses. We had also masseurs-men who had been blinded in active service and were later trained at St. Dunstan's under Sir Arthur Pearson. The work these people did was above praise and it is due largely to their efficient services that the excellent results attained were made possible. It was necessary to improvise facilities for the application of hydrotherapy, and for this purpose we took an ordinary "mess hut" and built an engine house for heating the water. The hut was divided into rooms, fitted up with douches and baths. The neutral bath, at a temperature of about 93° was more used than any other. This was a large tub or tank provided with a seat to accommodate twelve men at one time. The water was kept constantly at a temperature of 93°. It was used chiefly for cases of shell shock with rapid pulse and heart action. It was found to be of the greatest benefit for such cases. After the men had been in the bath for twenty or thirty minutes they were taken out, wrapped in blankets, and rested in bed. A bath of this kind was given every other day, and on the alternate days the men were taken for a slow walk, using a walking stick and resting when they felt like it. This was found to be an excellent treatment for "nervous" cases, those suffering with tremors, hallucinations, and the various neuroses familiar to those engaged in war work. For painful wounds of the limbs, the best results were obtained from the arm and leg baths, called by the French

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