During the actual period of the war many of the creative and interpretative artists of the theater were engaged either directly in army work or in one of its auxiliary branches. It is amusing to recall that the present writer met Schuyler Ladd serving as Mess Sergeant for a Base Hospital in France, Alexander Wollcott, late dramatic critic of the New York _Times_, attached to the _Stars and Stripes_ in Paris, and Douglas Stuart, the London producer, in an English hospital at Etretat, the while he himself was serving as an enlisted man on the staff of the same hospital. These are minor instances, but when they have been multiplied several hundred times one begins to see how closely the actor, the critic, and the producer were involved in the struggle. Again the problem of providing proper entertainment for the troops was, and still is, a serious one. In the great number of cases it seems highly probable that the entertainment along such lines done by the men themselves was far more effective than that provided by outside organizations. More than once, however, it appeared to the writer that here was a field especially suited to the _Portmanteau Theater_ and to its repertory. The question of transportation, always a crucial point with such a venture, was no more difficult than that presented by many companies already in the field, and doing immensely inferior work. My return to America put me in possession of the facts of the matter, and without desiring in any way to cast blame, much less to indict, or to emphasize unduly a relatively unimportant point, it seems only fitting that there should be included in this record the reasons for what has seemed to many of us a lost opportunity. They are at least much more brief than the apologia which precedes them.