I wish to express my gratitude for certain good offices which Augustus
secured for me in January, 1917. I had been invited to visit the theatre
of war in Flanders by the Commander-in-Chief: an invitation which was,
under the circumstances, a summons to duty. Thus I had occasion to
spend some days in procuring the necessary passport and other official
facilities for my journey. It happened just then that the Stage Society
gave a performance of this little play. It opened the heart of
every official to me. I have always been treated with distinguished
consideration in my contracts with bureaucracy during the war; but on
this occasion I found myself persona grata in the highest degree. There
was only one word when the formalities were disposed of; and that
was "We are up against Augustus all day." The showing-up of Augustus
scandalized one or two innocent and patriotic critics who regarded the
prowess of the British army as inextricably bound up with Highcastle
prestige. But our Government departments knew better: their problem was
how to win the war with Augustus on their backs, well-meaning, brave,
patriotic, but obstructively fussy, self-important, imbecile, and
disastrous.
Save for the satisfaction of being able to laugh at Augustus in the
theatre, nothing, as far as I know, came of my dramatic reduction of him
to absurdity. Generals, admirals, Prime Ministers and Controllers, not
to mention Emperors, Kaisers and Tsars, were scrapped remorselessly at
home and abroad, for their sins or services, as the case might be. But
Augustus stood like the Eddystone in a storm, and stands so to this day.
He gave us his word that he was indispensable and we took it.
Augustus Does His Bit was performed for the first time at the Court
Theatre in London by the Stage Society on the 21st January, 1917,
with Lalla Vandervelde as The Lady, F. B.J. Sharp as Lord Augustus
Highcastle, and Charles Rock as Horatio Floyd Beamish.