Watchfires - A Play in Four Acts #246263

Miss Mygatt's play, Watchfires, teaches the most needed lesson of the day, that humanity knows no national lines, and that all those who suffer the cruelties of war, suffer alike and together.<br><br>One of the noblest scholars the great University of Paris ever sent to America, Robert Pelissier, Professor of French at Stanford, was among the thousands of young men destroyed in the attack on the Somme. His last letter to America said: "The soldiers in the ranks do not hate each other. They say, 'Les Boches, ce sont des hommes comme nous." (The Prussians, they are men like us.) It is not the soldier that keeps alive the fear, the lies, the hate, that surround every war like an atmosphere of pestilence, - war which starts with the men who make money by it, and is joyously pushed on by those who welcome it as a backfire against democracy. It is a unique form of crime so adjusted that those only suffer who are innocent.<br><br>Meantime, those left behind, since they can do nothing to check the dreaded foe, wait in fear and hate and ignorance. In Norman Hall's poem, the London soldier "is glad to get back in the trenches again where there is more of human feeling."<br><br>The number slain in the present war, killed, starved, wounded, mutilated, uncared for, is said to approach forty million.