An understanding was reached whereby I agreed to reduce the number of new productions to be furnished for the next season, in order that their expenses might be minimized. In consideration of this a certain amount was refunded. At that moment it was a help; but not a sufficient help to reduce my losses to less than $60,000. As a matter of fact, the agreement was beneficial to both sides. In my case, it temporarily eased the burden of meeting a heavy weekly payroll at a time when there were practically no receipts; as for Ballet Theatre, it substantially reduced their investment in new productions. The continuing war presented additional problems. Personnel changes were frequent on the male side of the company owing to the war-time draft. There was an increasing demand for ballet; but a new uninformed, uninitiated public was not in the market for ballet companies, but for ballets--works about which they had somehow heard. I had two companies, Ballet Theatre and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and I presented them, one after the other, at the Metropolitan Opera House. In my opinion, many of the problems could have been solved by a merger of the two groups, had such a thing been possible, thus preserving, I believe, the best properties and qualities of each of them. During the spring of 1942, two new works were presented: Tudor’s _Pillar of Fire_, on which he had been working for a long time, and Fokine’s _Russian Soldier_. The latter was done at a time when we were all thrilled by the tremendous effort the Russians were making in their battles, their heroic battles, against the Nazi invader. In discussing the idea with Fokine, himself Russian to the core, we emphasized the symbolic intent of the tragedy, that of the simple Russian peasant who sacrifices his life for his homeland. Although we of course did not realize it at the time, this was to be the last work Fokine was to complete in his long list of balletic creations. _Russian Soldier_ had some of the best settings and costumes ever designed by the Russian painter, Mstislav Doboujinsky. For music, Fokine utilized the orchestral suite devised by Serge Prokofieff from his score for the satirical film, _Lieutenant Kije_, which was extremely effective as music, but with which I was never entirely happy, since Prokofieff, the musical satirist, had packed it with his own very personal brand of satire for the satiric film for which the music was originally composed. At the same time, I doubt that any substantial portion of the audience knew the source of the music and detected the satire; the great majority found the work a moving experience. Aside from being perhaps Tudor’s most important contribution to ballet, _Pillar of Fire_--with its settings and costumes by Jo Mielziner, his first contribution as a noted American designer to the ballet stage--served to raise Nora Kaye from the rank and file of the original company to an important position as a new type of dramatic _ballerina_.