Adramatic Critic, at whose feet the world sits every Sunday has lately announced the imminence of the great War Drama. The Napoleonic Wars waited for Hardy. Does this generation need a great war play to focus its war emotions, or to revive its war experiences? The best in this kind are but shadows : in our memories, in letters, in biographies we have reality. It is true that the unifying force may only be personal or egoistic, and that either of these may lack both greatness and permanence. But where the background is eternity, and the protagonist is man’s spirit, the interest can be neither petty nor ephemeral. There must be drama. The letters of Peter Dominic Dupouey were published last year by the Nouvelle Revue Francaise. The writer was a lapsed Catholic, who left the Church in the search of freedom and returned to it by natural reaction and the influence of a Catholic wife. The letters are addressed to her, and introduced by André Gide, a literary friend. In the Introduction, Gide quotes largely from Henri Ghéon, another friend, who is perhaps something over-literary and impressionable for English taste. But between them, they give the necessary background.

Dupouey had the advantage over many of us in that the war did not cut across either his profession or his values. As a naval lieutenant, he could only find it a test and a realisation. In the immediate event, he was dissatisfied with blockade and transport service in the Mediterranean, and, when opportunity offered, he volunteered for the Yser.