The After Dinner Hour:

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 17945, 24 November 1932, Page 9

The After Dinner Hour:

LONDON, Sept. 25. SUPPOSE some of the (lead who fell ' in the Great War should rise again iml live once more, what would happen in the world? This is the tremendous theme of a new war play that has just been pioJuced in London —a play lull of bitterness, satire and dramatic sincerity. It is from the pen of a German writer, Herr Hans Chlumberg, and is called the ‘ 1 Miracle of Verdun." It tolls imaginatively what occurred when six German and six French soldiers left their common grave in the great bloodstained salient and went again among the living. In scene after scene the audience is shown the reactions in homes and cabinets and countries. The soldiers, tired, cold and bedraggled, just as they wore when they died, are received at first with an hysterical outburst of enthusiasm. Every mother thinks that now her own boy will be restored alive again by a miracle. Hut then doubt creeps in. The returned men find their wives married again, their occupations gone. Twenty-six years in the grave make a vast difference. At last it dawns on the world "Suppose the whole 13,000,000 dead were to rise again ‘l We could not provide food or find work for sudh a multitude. ' ’ The British, French and German Prime Ministers are shown receiving the news hr bed —the very night after they had been delivering eloquent Armistice Day speeches. In their bewilderment they wash their hands- of the affair. The Church, appealed, to for help, excommunicates the dead in consternation, declaring that miracles do not happen to-day. The economists explain that such a wholesale resurrection as threatens, will wreck the machinery of production and distribution all over the earth. In the last scene we find,that;it is all the vision of a German soldier who had stayed behind with an old French sergeant, Hie caretaker of the war cemetery. The critics praised the play lriglih. They said there was a touch ot superb imagination and high purpose in it, inspired by a passionate haticd ot war.

“Miracle of Verdun.” Play Thrills Audiences. London Continues to Grow. Shaw Play’s Reception